Glocalism: Journal of Culture, Politics and Innovation 

About: Glocalism: Journal of Culture, Politics and Innovation is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Globalization & The Internet. It has an ISSN identifier of 2283-7949. Over the lifetime, 42 publications have been published receiving 240 citations.

Digital Nomads: Employment in the Online Gig Economy

Abstract: In 1997, Tsugio Makimoto and David Manners published their future-looking manifesto Digital Nomad that, decades later, would present as a manifesto for a lifestyle movement. At the time, businesses and the US government were interested in looking at tele-commuting, productivity, and work-family balance. Critiques of a neoliberal economy provide insight into understanding the context of freelance and online, piecemeal employment. This article examines the types of employment that digital nomads engage in, based on in-depth interviews with thirty-eight self-identified digital nomads. The participants mostly originate from wealthy, industrialized nations, and have many class privileges, but are underemployed compared to what their socio-economic status would historically suggest. As most participants are in the Millennial Generation, an overview of the shifting socio-economic status of this age-cohort is examined in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and the European Union – notably their high educational achievements and increasingly precarious employment status. Many of the nomads were working part-time with their own micro-business, with few able to maintain full-time employment. Few have benefits such as healthcare, retirement, unemployment insurance, or family leave. While “freedom” is touted as the benefit of gig-work, by both industry management and digital nomad enthusiasts, this lifestyle marks a shift towards precarious employment – itself not a basis for economic freedom, nor security.

Seeing Like a Tesla: How Can We Anticipate Self-Driving Worlds?

Abstract: In the last five years, investment and innovation in self-driving cars has accelerated dramatically. Automotive autonomy, once seen as impossible, is now sold as inevitable. Much of the governance discussion has centred on risk: will the cars be safer than their human-controlled counterparts? As with conventional cars, harder long-term questions relate to the future worlds that self-driving technologies might enable or even demand. The vision of an autonomous vehicle – able to navigate the world’s complexity using only its sensors and processors – on offer from companies like Tesla is intentionally misleading. So-called “autonomous” vehicles will depend upon webs of social and technical connectivity. For their purported benefits to be realised, infrastructures that were designed around humans will need to be upgraded in order to become machine-readable. It is vital to anticipate the politics of selfdriving worlds in order to avoid exacerbating the inequalities that have emerged around conventional cars. Rather than being dazzled by the Tesla view, policymakers should start seeing like a city, from multiple perspectives. Good governance for selfdriving cars means democratising experimentation and creating genuine collaboration between companies and local governments.

From Global Cities to Globalized Urbanization

Abstract: Urbanization is rapidly accelerating, and extending ever more densely, if unevenly, across the earth’s surface. The combined demographic, economic, sociotechnological, material-metabolic and sociocultural processes of urbanization have resulted in the formation of a globalized network of spatially concentrated human settlements and infrastructural configurations in which major dimensions of modern capitalism are at once concentrated, reproduced and contested. This pattern of increasingly globalized urbanization contradicts earlier predictions, in the waning decades of the twentieth century, that the eraof urbanization was nearing its end due to new information technologies (such as the internet), declining transportation costs and new, increasingly dispersed patterns of human settlement. Despite these trends, all major indicators suggest that urbanization rates across the world economy are now higher and more rapid than ever before in human history.

Collective food purchasing networks in Italy as a case study of responsible innovation

Abstract: Based upon fieldwork in Italy and the USA, the authors present work-in-progress insights into solidarity economies, and in particular alternative food networks, as a form of active citizenship that could re-orient the current debate on responsible innovation.