The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century Thomas L. Friedman Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005 Thomas Friedman is a widely-acclaimed journalist, foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, and author of four best-selling books that include From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989). His eminence as a journalist is clearly demonstrated in the way he prepared for The World is Flat. He traveled throughout the world, interviewing in depth the political and business leaders who have the most direct, hands-on knowledge of the truly incredible developments occurring in the business structures and technology of globalization. Only a journalist who moves freely at the highest levels could interview the likes of Sir John Rose, the chief executive of Rolls-Royce; Nobuyuki Idei, the chairman of Sony; Richard Koo, the chief economist for the Nomura Research Institute; Bill Gates of Microsoft; Wee Theng Tan, the president of Intel China; David Baltimore, president of Caltech; Howard Schultz, founder and chairman of Starbucks; Nandan Nilekani, CEO of Infosys in Bangalore - and many others, each of whom gave him the inside story of how, specifically, the barriers of time and space separating economies, workforces, sources of capital, and technical abilities are crumbling. The result of this unfolding story, already far along but with much farther to go, according to Friedman, is that "the world is flat." With some notable exceptions in sub-Saharan Africa and the Islamic swathe, everything is connected with everything else on a horizontal basis, with distance and erstwhile time-lags no longer mattering. Friedman describes in detail the galloping globalization that has unfolded in even so limited a time as the past five years. Under the impetus of a worldwide network of interconnectivity, the world economy is much-changed from what it was at the turn of the century a mere half-decade ago. Friedman quotes the CEO of India's Infosys: "What happened over the last [few] years is that there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables," while (Friedman paraphrases him) "computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there was an explosion of software - e-mail, search engines like Google, and proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part to Bangalore, and one part to Beijing...." Microprocessors today have 410 million transistors compared to the 2800 they had in 1971. And now, "wireless is what will allow you to take everything that has been digitized, made virtual and personal, and do it from anywhere." The effect on productivity is revolutionary: "It now takes Boeing eleven days to build a 737, down from twenty-eight days just a few years ago. Boeing will build the next generation of planes in three days, because all the parts are computer-designed for assembly." The most strikingly informative aspect of this book, however, is not about technology. Most especially, Friedman explores the rapidly evolving global business systems, each constantly regenerating itself to keep ahead of the others. These are systems that span the continents seeking the lowest-cost providers of everything from expert scientific and engineering work to the lowliest grunt work. Friedman points out that India produces 70,000 accounting graduates each year - and that they are willing to start at $100 a month. It is no wonder that Boeing employs 800 Russian scientists and engineers for passenger-plane design when "a U.S. aeronautical engineer costs $120 per design hour, a Russian costs about one-third of that." Friedman describes a call center in India where outbound callers sell "everything from credit cards to phone minutes," while operators taking inbound calls do "everything from tracing lost luggage for U.S. and European airline passengers to solving computer problems for confused American consumers. …

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Aihwa Ong. Durham, NIC: Duke University Press, 1999. ix. 322 pp., notes, bibliography, index.

Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality

The intention of this work is to show that European expansion not only transformed the historical trajectory of non-European societies but also reconstituted the historical accounts of these societies before European intervention. It asserts that anthropology must pay more attention to history.

Europe and the People without History

At the beginning of the 21st century the conditio humana cannot be understood nationally or locally but only globally. This constitutes a revolution in the social sciences. The `sociological imagin...

The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies

Roy A. The 21st-century metropolis: new geographies of theory, Regional Studies. This paper calls for ‘new geographies’ of imagination and epistemology in the production of urban and regional theory. It argues that the dominant theorizations of global city-regions are rooted in the EuroAmerican experience and are thus unable to analyse multiple forms of metropolitan modernities. By drawing on the urban experience of the global South, the paper presents new conceptual vectors for understanding the worlding of cities, the production of space, and the dynamics of exurbanity. It makes the case that such area-based knowledge deepens recent theoretical attempts to articulate a relational study of space and place. Roy A. Les metropoles du XXIe siecle: nouvelle geographie de la theorie, Regional Studies. Cet article appelle a de nouvelles geographies de l'imagination et de l'epistemologie pour la production de theories urbaines et regionales. Il avance que les theorisations dominantes des villes-regions du monde ...

/pdf/the-21st-century-metropolis-new-geographies-of-theory-3tot0k1f61.pdf

The 21st-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory

Personal Relations and Divergent Economies: a Case Study of Hong Kong Investment in South China

After 1949 China's welfare system developed on the basis of a status division between urban and rural residents. Urban and rural societies were profoundly influenced by the respective organization of their welfare systems, which shared the feature of being fixed to specific places (rural) or enterprises (urban). Reform of core institutions is constrained by path dependency. Knowledge of those constraints, however, can aid efforts to shape new paths. In this paper we examine how institutional legacies of urban – rural status differentiation continue to structure economic and welfare reform. China's reform process has been characterized by an unusual degree of decentralization and local experimentation. As a result, the nature of change is not easily seen by examining only laws and policies related to welfare. Instead, broader changes in the economy and the loosening of controls on mobility have interacted with the locality/enterprise welfare systems to generate diverse local outcomes. After an overview of ...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1068/a3454

Local Citizenship: Welfare Reform Urban/Rural Status, and Exclusion in China:

▪ Abstract Much of the literature about globalization exaggerates the degree of novelty. In this review, we concentrate on claims about what has changed about cities under late capitalism and globalization. Although we suggest that cities have long been influenced by global forces, we conclude that the roles of cities in the global system have changed considerably as a result of the time-space compression made possible by new transportation, communication, and organizational technologies. After discussing what the global perspective means within anthropology, and how it affects urban anthropological research, our review concentrates on three complex issues. First is whether the global factory and increasing knowledge-intensivity have decreased or increased the utility of the intermediary or brokerage roles that cities play. Second, we examine changes in how people live in globalizing cities. Third, we consider the implications of the construction and maintenance of relationships across borders for process...

Urbanization and the Global Perspective

Rapid industrialization in southern China has brought together two types of migrants: young women from towns and villages seeking work and upward mobility and affluent men from Hong Kong sojourning in the coastal provinces to supervise or service export-oriented industries. The result is that many married Hong Kong men who cross the border regularly on business have taken “second wives” or mistresses in China. We analyze this phenomenon using government statistics, selected court cases, and personal interviews. We show that the emergence of the “second wife” phenomenon among migrants in southern China is consistent with recent studies on the causes of polygyny, and we make some predictions about the likelihood of this type of polygyny among migrants.

Josephine Smart

Papers

Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality

Personal Relations and Divergent Economies: a Case Study of Hong Kong Investment in South China

Local Citizenship: Welfare Reform Urban/Rural Status, and Exclusion in China:

Urbanization and the Global Perspective

Migration and the Second Wife in South China: Toward cross-border polygyny