Philip F. Kelly (2000) Landscapes of globalisation: human geographies of economic change in the Philippines. Routledge Pacific Rim Geographies, no. 1. Routledge,

This book can be read at two levels: First, it is an empirical analysis of the region in the Philippines where most of the recent industrial investments and employment creation have taken place. This region is the province of Cavite located south of metropolitan Manila. The focus of the Cavite Export Processing Zone (CEPZ) is the coastal town of Rosario, which covers an area of 275 hectares. A decade ago, no more than one thousand people were working in the CEPZ, but by 1998 some 54,000 people were employed here. This fast rate of growth implies substantial social and spatial changes in the region. The employees live in surrounding towns and villages where new sources of income have been generated for the inhabitants, many of them migrants. Moreover, as with similar zones all over the world, most of the people directly employed at CEPZ are women. This directly affects gender and power relations within the households. Kelly analyses these changes by focusing on two villages in which he carried out a survey. At this level of the concrete changes in people's lives the reader will find the analysis solid, although I would not go as far to say – as the author suggests in his introduction – that it shows how '….broad processes of social and economic change are experienced in people's lives'. Second, this book can be read at a methodological level. It questions how to approach regional economic and spatial developments at the regional level and considers how to operaltionalise the concept of globalisation. In chapter one, 'Putting globalisation in its place', the author presents some basic insights that can be clarified by contrasting his approach with that of Castells (). According to Castells, we are moving from a place centred world towards a global space of flows. In this view regions are defined by their position in the global network and it is the global scale that determines what happens at other scales. Thus a hierarchy of scales exists with the global at the top (and, as Ohmea () would say, regions with fast economic growth just below). As a consequence we understand social processes at the national, regional and local scales as the results of global processes. In place of this hierarchical model Kelly proposes that we conceptualise globalisation in terms of social processes that occur at all scales simultaneously.This way of thinking about globalisation reminds …