Globalization

About: Globalization is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 81812 publications have been published within this topic receiving 1799230 citations. The topic is also known as: globalization.

Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity

Abstract: Bringing together classic and new writings of the trailblazing feminist theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders addresses some of the most pressing and complex issues facing contemporary feminism. Forging vital links between daily life and collective action and between theory and pedagogy, Mohanty has been at the vanguard of Third World and international feminist thought and activism for nearly two decades. This collection highlights the concerns running throughout her pioneering work: the politics of difference and solidarity, decolonizing and democratizing feminist practice, the crossing of borders, and the relation of feminist knowledge and scholarship to organizing and social movements. Mohanty offers here a sustained critique of globalization and urges a reorientation of transnational feminist practice toward anti-capitalist struggles. Feminism without Borders opens with Mohanty's influential critique of western feminism ("Under Western Eyes") and closes with a reconsideration of that piece based on her latest thinking regarding the ways that gender matters in the racial, class, and national formations of globalization. In between these essays, Mohanty meditates on the lives of women workers at different ends of the global assembly line (in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States); feminist writing on experience, identity, and community; dominant conceptions of multiculturalism and citizenship; and the corporatisation of the North American academy. She considers the evolution of interdisciplinary programs like Women's Studies and Race and Ethnic Studies; pedagogies of accommodation and dissent; and transnational women's movements for grassroots ecological solutions and consumer, health, and reproductive rights. Mohanty's probing and provocative analyses of key concepts in feminist thought - "home," "sisterhood," "experience," "community" - lead the way toward a feminism without borders, a feminism fully engaged with the realities of a transnational world.

Globalization and the Inequality of Nations

Abstract: The paper considers a model in which an imperfectly competitive manufacturing sector produces goods which are used both for final consumption and as intermediates. Intermediate usage creates cost and demand linkages between firms and a tendency for manufacturing agglomeration. How does globalization affect the location of manufacturing and the gains from trade? At high transport costs all countries have some manufacturing industry, but when transport costs fall below a critical value a core-periphery pattern forms spontaneously, and nations that find themselves in the periphery suffer a decline in real income. As transport costs continue to fall there comes a second stage of convergence in real incomes, in which the peripheral nations gain and the core nations may well lose.

Runaway World : How Globalisation is Reshaping our Lives Ed. 2

Abstract: In Runaway World, Anthony Giddens, intellectual pioneer of Third Way politics, shows how the globalization of science, technology and the economy impacts every human on earth. In his characteristically clear-headed manner, Giddens includes an overview of the New World global marketplace, but goes beyond a conventional economic perspective to look at such larger issues as marriage, gender and the family. Giddens finds the changes largely positive---liberating women, spreading democracy, and creating new wealth--but acknowledges there are potential hazards as well with so much money crossing so many borders and distant cultures colliding. Identifying globalization as a true cultural force, this eloquent and important volume is the staring point for anyone concerned about our increasingly interconnected world. A fascinating assessment of the coming world order, Runaway World is an enlightening and thought-provoking read from one of our most incisive public thinkers

The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy

Abstract: In April 1970, Susan Strange published an article in the Chatham House review which challenged the mutual exclusivity of international economics and international politics.(f.1) The consequence was a rebirth of the concept of political economy in international studies. She has continued consistently her liberation struggle from academic self-enclosure, disciplinary defensiveness, and turf wars. She insisted that the new international political economy be a broad church open to historians, geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and the whole range of humanistic studies, as well as economists and political scientists. In this, she echoed Fernand Braudel's appeal in 1958 for the integration of the human sciences in his famous essay on the longue duree. Her work never stood still. She moves forward in responding to her critics and, above all, by her acute perceptions of change in reality. She is not alone in perceiving that the field of international relations study (IR) is beset by an identity crisis.(f.2) The problem now is not just the need for a more ecumenical use of methods and approaches but also for a new ontology -- an updated view of the basic entities and relationships that constitute reality. This is what The Retreat of the State is all about. Susan Strange is a realist in the literal sense that she asks: Where does the power lie? What is the nature of the power? Who benefits? Who suffers? Conventional IR has said a priori that power lies with states. Susan Strange challenges the exclusivity of that assumption. Her enquiry into power and its workings contributes to a 'new realism' quite different from the 'neorealism' of established IR. It has, she writes, led her to a 'final parting of the ways from the discipline of international relations' (p xv). As a realist, Strange cuts through such currently fashionable euphemisms as 'regimes,'(f.3) 'interdependence,' 'globalization,' and 'global governance,' to demonstrate that these terms can act as ideological screens to obscure relations of dominance and subordination. Although she has been associated with the proposition that power is shifting from political authorities to markets,(f.4) in this book the classical notion of 'market' is also implicitly questioned. A market is no longer that abstractly defined infinity of buyers and sellers whose interactions are guided to a beneficent outcome by a providential unseen hand. There are many different markets, and they all need to be analysed as power systems. She illustrates with a few cases: telecoms, insurance, the big accountancy firms, and cartels. In all of these cases, the power systems work to strengthen big corporate translational business. On cartels, she asks why the subject of private protectionism seems to be taboo among liberal economists and concludes that 'while the rhetoric of free enterprise and open competition is necessary to a full integration of a world economy operating on a market principle, the rhetoric is often, in reality, empty of meaning' (p 60). The ontology of Strange's new realism includes a decline in the authority of states, an increase in the authority of big translational firms, a parcelling of authority downwards from states to smaller territorial entities, along with a general erosion of power based on territory and a rise in non-territorial power in economy, technology, and communications. Others have noted these tendencies; they give substance to Hedley Bull's vision of a new medievalism of overlapping authorities and loyalties.(f.5) While accepting this vision as foreshadowing present reality, Strange takes the next step and asks who governs in such circumstances. This must be the first question in reflecting upon the condition of the world and its future; and, of course, there is no clear answer to it. A conspiracy theory will not do. There is no effective conclave of big corporations with United States government power, though these forces do seem to be the predominate actors. A key word in this book is 'symbiosis. …

Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences

Abstract: Methodological nationalism is understood as the assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form of the modern world. We distinguish three modes of methodological nationalism that have characterized main- stream social science, and then show how these have influenced research on migra- tion. We discover parallels between nationalist thinking and the conceptualization of migration in postwar social sciences. In a historical tour d'horizon, we show that this mainstream concept has developed in close interaction with nation-state building pro- cesses in the West and the role that immigration and integration policies have played within them. The shift towards a study of 'transnational communities' - the last phase in this process - was more a consequence of an epistemic move away from methodo- logical nationalism than of the appearance of new objects of observation. The article concludes by recommending new concepts for analysis that, on the one hand, are not coloured by methodological nationalism and, on the other hand, go beyond the fluidism of much contemporary social theory. After the first flurry of confusion about the nature and extent of contemporary pro- cesses of globalization, social scientists moved beyond rhetorical generalities about the decline of the nation-state and began to examine the ways in which nation-states are currently being reconfigured rather than demolished. That nation-states and nationalism are compatible with globalization was made all too obvious. We wit- nessed the flouring of nationalism and the restructuring of a whole range of new states in Eastern Europe along national lines in the midst of growing global interconnec- tions. The concomitance of these processes provides us with an intellectual opening to think about the limitations of our conceptual apparatus. It has become easier to under- stand that it is because we have come to take for granted a world divided into discrete and autonomous nation-states that we see nation-state building and global inter- connections as contradictory. The next step is to analyse how the concept of the nation-state has and still does influence past and current thinking in the social sciences, including our thinking about transnational migration. It is our aim in this article to move in this direction by exploring the intellectual potential of two hypotheses. We demonstrate that nation-state building processes have fundamentally shaped the ways immigration has been perceived and received. These perceptions have in turn influenced, though not completely determined, social science