Modern insights into globalization processes and their broader implications for societal developments can increasingly and successfully be applied to situations of great temporal-spatial diversity, as this volume attests. Paramount is Tomlinson’s insight (as applied and modied by Jennings) that globalization as complex connectivity – consisting of interregional, interdependent networks linked by ‘a “ow” of goods, information, people and practices’ – triggers social change (Tomlinson 1999: 2; Jennings 2011: 2, this volume). While integration in macro-scale networks may engender many economic, social and cognitive benets, globalization processes, by their very nature, have a transformative eect with unpredictable results, as both Feinman and Robertson (this volume) point out. At the micro-scale level, these may have a lasting impact on social identities, either positively or negatively. Conversely, not all inter-regional interactions automatically bring about ‘complex connectivity’ and social change.