Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- List of Figures
- Abbreviations
- Preface
- Part I Development in the Global Information Economy
- Part II Software and the Celtic Tiger
- 4 “Location Nation”: Remaking Society for Foreign Investment
- 5 Indigenous Innovation and the Developmental Network State
- 6 Making Global and Local
- 7 The Class Politics of the Global Region
- Part III The Politics of the Developmental Network State
- A Appendix A: Methodology of the Study
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Making Global and Local
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- List of Figures
- Abbreviations
- Preface
- Part I Development in the Global Information Economy
- Part II Software and the Celtic Tiger
- 4 “Location Nation”: Remaking Society for Foreign Investment
- 5 Indigenous Innovation and the Developmental Network State
- 6 Making Global and Local
- 7 The Class Politics of the Global Region
- Part III The Politics of the Developmental Network State
- A Appendix A: Methodology of the Study
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
THE “GLOCALIZATION” OF SOFTWARE FIRMS
In an era of Global Post-Fordism, capital accumulation is increasingly organized through processes of “glocalization” (Brenner, 1998, 1999). By the late 1990s, a number of leading indigenous software firms were quickly becoming a major motor of regional industry growth, spawning a high proportion of the many new software start-ups (HotOrigin, 2001). However, this was not a triumph of the local over the global but rather a deepening of both local and global embeddedness of firms and the industry. This chapter examines the variety of ways in which Irish software firms became integrated into global business networks, labor markets, and finance. This process is also mediated by state agencies and the “indigenous innovation” alliance. “Development” of the Irish software industry has not meant the creation of a local industry protected from the perils of global integration but rather of an industry that has pursued ever deeper but gradually more rewarding global connections, going beyond subsidiaries and subsuppliers to technology- and business-development alliances.
This process of globalization was sustained by a simultaneous process of localization through the development of a dense associational life within Irish high-tech industry. Integration into capital markets promised to transform corporate governance, but the stock-market collapse of 2001– 02 left corporate governance in Irish software in an uncertain position, as the pendulum swung away from the large firms back toward regional dynamics of growth.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Politics of High Tech GrowthDevelopmental Network States in the Global Economy, pp. 111 - 126Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004