6 - Making Global and Local

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.