We came across this while using the Advanced Dataflow profiles in Magento
PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function getIsGlobal() on a non-object in /var/www/html/app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/Model/Product/Type/Configurable.php on line 173
Finally narrowed it down to a missing column in the CSV sheet!! Hope this helps you if you’re having the same issue. Was 8-9 hours hard effort to figure out what broke and then it came down to a silly error 🙁