Since the mid-1970s the world is experiencing a new wave of what has since been termed globalization; resulting in complex redistributions of human activities over different spatial scales. Although at first sight a replay of the earlier phases of globalization there are significant differences, technologically, economically, politically, socially as well as culturally and in the way that the processes are understood.

Building forth upon - as well as slightly amending - Neil Brenner's concept of ‘variegated neoliberalization' (Brenner et al., 2007), the research programme of the thematic group starts from the empirical observation that what we are confronted with is a set of differentiated articulations of globalization at multiple scales, that are best seen as the effects of the strategic engagements of many different agents, motivated by different goals, interests and preferences: variegated globalizations.

In this sense, the research programme presented here clearly seeks to distance itself thematically from the more ideological and popular media uses of the globalization concept. In these approaches, globalization tends to be presented as a unilinear causal process resulting in the gradual erosion of local and national characteristics, moving toward the much heralded ‘end of geography' (O'Brien, 1992) and ‘death of distance' (Cairncross, 1998), and pronouncements of the ‘end of the nation state' (Ohmea, 1995; Strange, 1996) and ‘institutional convergence' (Crouch and Streeck, 1997). In fact, using a more sober empirical perspective on the real worlds of globalization presents us with a process of change that is much messier, ambivalent, halting, contradictory, and very important, open than is usually portrayed by its main cheerleaders.

Given our strong empirical inclination, it stands to reason that the emphasis in our research is on the role of agents in bringing about these partly unexpected, unintended, and contingent structural changes. A first characteristic of our research then is what could be called a critical empirical investigation of grand theoretical claims. A second hallmark of our approach is its multi-scalar orientation. While much comparative research in the social sciences implicitly or explicitly privileges one scale or the other - be it the local, the national, the regional or the global - our aim is to investigate which scales matter where, without privileging one over the other. A third characteristic of our approach is the explicit recognition that history and institutions matter. Despite our focus on agents, we are highly cognizant of the fact that agents act within a social, cultural, economic and political context that is not of their own making. Finally, we explicitly endorse interdisciplinary research. Given the often bewildering complexity of our research object - the variegated multi-scalar manifestations of cultural, political and economic globalization - we have to use all academic resources available - in terms of data sources, analytical techniques as well as theoretical perspectives - and hence have to combine the spatial, the social and the historical sciences.

In short: this research which emerged from the merger of two disciplinary defined theme groups (the first centred on economic geography the second on political and cultural geography) investigates how economic, political and cultural actors engage strategically with globalizations. It does so with a special attention for the geographical dimensions of such engagements, dealing explicitly with the geographically differentiated impact of globalization processes, with geographically mediated opportunities and constraints (distance/proximity, boundary making through inclusion/exclusion, location, cluster, institutional context, etc) shaping the actors' (perceptions of) risks and resources, and the employment of geographically differentiated strategies (territoriality, network governance, scale jumping etc).

Three research themes form the core of the programme, each operating within distinct but increasingly overlapping fields of multidisciplinary study:

a) Changing Geographies of Urban Economies
Core questions:
How can are urban economies inserted in regional, national and global networks? Which opportunities for new businesses arise in urban economies?
How is competitiveness reproduced within urban economies?
How can we explain local cultures of consumption and how are they related to spatial patterns of production?

b) Comparative Financial Geography
Core questions:
What are the spatial causes and effects of the ongoing geographical and functional reallocation and redistribution of financial markets, banks and products?
How do these reallocations and redistributions articulate themselves in the hierarchical linkages between different financial centres?
How does this fit within wider geopolitical and governance transformations?

c) Cultural Political Geographies of Globalizations
Core questions:
Which new political institutions are constructed through the strategic engagements with globalizations of political, cultural and economic actors organized in different places and at different scales in various trans-local and multilevel networks?
What is the changing role of territorial political institutions (states) in these multi-scalar strategic coalitions?
How do they sustain and transform existing local, and national cultural, and political communities, and shape new ones?
What is the changing role of geopolitics and how can this be critically understood?

Our research draws on a range of methodologies driven by the problematics of the research questions; combining policy analysis and analysis of political processes, with content analysis of texts and visuals, with discourse analysis, with fieldwork, archival research and interviews, and with the statistical analysis of quantitative data (when available for example electoral support and policy outputs). Other research uses multiple data sources (quantitative, qualitative, formal, informal) that are analyzed with the help of multiple methodologies (regression analysis, discourse analyses, framing theory). We also draw on the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) facilities and expertise within the Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies. Currently, quantitative methods are applied in most social science research. The most important properties of the data set usually are expressed statistically, with graphs being used to show patterns and trends. One important property of the data tends to be neglected, however: their spatial location.

A study of the kind of data used by governments and businesses shows that over 80% of them have some kind of spatial component. In the analyses of these data, however, the spatial component tends to be neglected, notwithstanding that it is often of crucial importance

This neglect is to be expected because traditional quantitative analytical methods have almost no provisions for dealing with spatial relationships. Notions like "nearby", "far away", and "adjacent" are not part of conventional database models. A Geographic Information System (GIS) utilizes the spatial information present in the data; it recognizes and maps the spatial relationships among data.

In these ways, tracing Geographies of Globalizations demands and enables both critical understanding and new ways of visualizing spatial process.

Selected key publications by members of the group:

• Aalbers, M.B. (2004) Creative destruction through the Anglo-American hegemony: A non-Anglo-American view on publications, referees and language. Area, 36 (3): 319-322.
• Bachmann V and Sidaway J D (2009) Zivilmacht Europa: a critical geopolitics of the European Union as a global power, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS, 34 (1): 94-109.
• Beerepoot, N. (2008) The benefits of learning in clusters: analysing upward mobility for skilled workers in the Cebu furniture cluster. Environment and Planning A, 40 (10): 2435-2452. 
• Engelen, E.R. (2003) The logic of funding European pension restructuring and the dangers of financialisation. Environment and Planning A, 35 (8): 1357-1372.
• Falah, G.-W., C. Flint & V. Mamadouh (2006) Just war and extraterritoriality: The popular geopolitics of the United States' war on Iraq as reflected in newspapers of the Arab World. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96 (1): 142-164.
• Kloosterman, R.C. (2008) Walls and bridges: Knowledge spillover between "superdutch" architectural practices. Journal of Economic Geography, 8 (4): 545-563.
• Mansvelt Beck, J. (2005) Territory and Terror: Conflicting Nationalisms in the Basque Country. London: Routledge.