Globalized home environments: on the questions of production and social reproduction in rural Finland

Abstract

Major international changes often summarized as globalization have taken place throughout the end of the 20th century. The increased interconnectedness of the globe has certain impacts even on rural Finland and its women entrepreneurs, locations and people in the North, far away from the centers of global economy and politics. In this article, the following idea is under consideration: if the core characteristic behind globalization is the increased and accelerating interaction between different geographical scales, as I am inclined to see it, then in order to analyze processes, experiences and meanings in which globalization lies within but is still somehow hidden, one has to search for a mediating concept and trace the path of globalization from scale to scale in concrete phenomena. I suggest that in my study on female rural entrepreneurship, this mediating concept is the one of the discourse on entrepreneurship itself. It ‘collapses’ the global into personal while it ‘expands’ the personal to the scale of the global.