Breaking with prevailing scholarship, Deciphering the Global relocates the terms of debate surrounding globalization from the heights of global markets, states, and international corporations to the messier, more complex ground of the local, where broad globalizing trends are negotiated in interesting and often unexpected ways. Each of the essays in Saskia Sassen's collection introduces a new type of complexity and ambiguity to the study of the global, confronting questions of space and the fact that both the local and the global are increasingly multi-scalar. In turn, the chapters in this book expand the analytical terrain of the global, demanding new methodologies and interpretive frames for the study of globalization. Employing ethnographies from the United States to continental Europe, Asia, and South America, Deciphering the Global exemplifies the next wave of globalization studies and lays the groundwork for a new school in the study of the global.