Plural processes, patterned connections

Plural globalizations refer to large-scale processes occurring today at an accelerated pace (due to information and communication technologies) and with extremely uneven effects (due to continuing and new inequalities). Conventional analytical and disciplinary frameworks can neither make adequate sense of, nor effectively politicize, these developments. The quantitatively large scales and qualitatively novel changes require new orientations. This essay draws on critical, interpretive, feminist perspectives to propose conceptual innovations and a cross-disciplinary framework for analyzing globalizations. The alternative framing moves beyond a narrow definition of economics to identify and integrate reproductive, productive, and virtual economies (understood in a Foucauldian sense as systemic sites through and across which power opcratcs). The new framing brings the concepts and practices of 'social reproduction', non-wage labor, and informalization into relation with the familiar but increasingly global, flexibilized, and service-oriented 'productive economy', as well as with the less familiar but increasingly consequential 'virtual economy' of financial markets, commodified information, and the exchange less of goods than of signs.