Bwog lecture hopper Emma Jacobs took some time out of midterms this week to focus on the macroscopic. Her report follows.

Saskia Sassen, U. Chicago professor, sociologist and general wonder-academic, spoke in Fayerweather on Wednesday on one of Columbia's favorite topics: globalization.

Sassen began by talking about her newest work, which posits that the major theories on this topic are too extreme (our own Stiglitz and Baghwati are a good example). On one end, people are saying the nation-state is doing fine, nothing has changed. On the other, theorists argue it's collapsing. Sassen sees her own theory as a midpoint between the too, looking at where the functions of nations are being taken apart, and where new "assemblages" are being put back together from the pieces.

The world is changing, but it's not just flattening out, Tom Friedman-style. Sassen points out that what's happening on a global scale is growing up within countries. For example, major construction firms have established a set of standards to deal with the governments they're building within, rules they derive from existing laws of nation-states. Closer to home, an American civil suit was filed against nine multinationals about human rights abuses they were involved with overseas. Bringing all those pieces together creates something new.

There's something happening globally, but it expresses itself differently locally, something she says came out of her research on global cities (yeah, she came up with that too). Even as we conduct so much business virtually, we need financial capitals for sociological reasons, so the global market can penetrate local peculiarities. Overseas acquisitions aren't just mergers, they're a foot in the door of a national market.

Previewing Stiglitz's Next Best-Seller

Last Tuesday night's World Leaders Forum kickoff event was billed as "a discussion with distinguished panelists" on the subject of globalization. It ended up more like the first leg of a book tour for University Professor and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, who monopolized the event, discussing his forthcoming manifesto, Making Globalization Work. No one seemed to mind.