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383 books match the query 'Globalization' and 14 start with w

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Walmart in the Global South

Workplace Culture, Labor Politics, and Supply Chains

Edited by Carolina Bank Muñoz, Bridget Kenny,and Antonio Stecher

University of Texas Press, 2018

As the largest private employer in the world, Walmart dominates media and academic debate about the global expansion of transnational retail corporations and the working conditions in retail operations and across the supply chain. Yet far from being a monolithic force conquering the world, Walmart must confront and adapt to diverse policies and practices pertaining to regulation, economy, history, union organization, preexisting labor cultures, and civil society in every country into which it enters. This transnational aspect of the Walmart story, including the diversity and flexibility of its strategies and practices outside the United States, is mostly unreported.

Walmart in the Global South presents empirical case studies of Walmart’s labor practices and supply chain operations in a number of countries, including Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Nicaragua, Mexico, South Africa, and Thailand. It assesses the similarities and differences in Walmart’s acceptance into varying national contexts, which reveals when and how state regulation and politics have served to redirect company practice and to what effect. Regulatory context, state politics, trade unions, local cultures, and global labor solidarity emerge as vectors with very different force around the world. The volume’s contributors show how and why foreign workers have successfully, though not uniformly, driven changes in Walmart’s corporate culture. This makes Walmart in the Global South a practical guide for organizations that promote social justice and engage in worker struggles, including unions, worker centers, and other nonprofit entities.

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Weathering Risk in Rural Mexico

Climatic, Institutional, and Economic Change

Hallie Eakin

University of Arizona Press, 2006

From floods and droughts to tsunamis and hurricanes, recent years have seen a distressing and often devastating increase in extreme climatic events. While it is possible to study these disasters from a purely scientific perspective, a growing preponderance of evidence suggests that changes in the environment are related to both a shift in global economic relations and these weather-related disasters.

In Weathering Risk in Rural Mexico, Hallie Eakin draws on ethnographic data collected in three agricultural communities in rural Mexico to show how economic and climatic change are not only linked in cause and effect at the planetary scale but also interact in unpredictable and complex ways in the context of regional political and trade relationships, national economic and social programs, and the decision making of institutions, enterprises, and individuals.She shows how the parallel processes of globalization and climatic change result in populations that are “doubly exposed” and thus particularly vulnerable.

Chapters trace the effects of El Niño in central Mexico in the late 1990s alongside some of the principal changes in the country’s agricultural policy. Eakin argues that in order to develop policies that effectively address rural poverty and agricultural development, we need an improved understanding of how households cope simultaneously with various sources of uncertainty and adjust their livelihoods to accommodate newly evolving environmental, political, and economic realities.

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Welfare Discipline

Discourse, Governance and Globalization

Sanford F. Schram

Temple University Press, 2005

For the past decade, political scientist Sanford Schram has led the academic effort to understand how Americans and their political officials talk about poverty and welfare and what impact that discourse has on policy and on the global society.

In Welfare Discipline, Schram argues that it is time to take stock of the new forms of welfare and to develop even better methods to understand them. He argues for a more contextualized approach to examining welfare policy, from the use of the idea of globalization to justify cutbacks, to the increasing employment of U.S. policy discourse overseas, to the development of asset-based approaches to helping the poor.

Stressing the importance of understanding the ways we talk about welfare, how we study it, and, critically, what we do not discuss and why, Schram offers recommendations for making welfare policy both just and effective.

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What's Left of the Left

Democrats and Social Democrats in Challenging Times

James Cronin, George Ross, and James Shoch, eds.

Duke University Press, 2011

In What’s Left of the Left, distinguished scholars of European and U.S. politics consider how center-left political parties have fared since the 1970s. They explore the left’s responses to the end of the postwar economic boom, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the erosion of traditional party politics, the expansion of market globalization, and the shift to a knowledge-based economy. Their comparative studies of center-left politics in Scandinavia, France, Germany, southern Europe, post–Cold War Central and Eastern Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States emphasize differences in the goals of left political parties and in the political, economic, and demographic contexts in which they operate. The contributors identify and investigate the more successful center-left initiatives, scrutinizing how some conditions facilitated them, while others blocked their emergence or limited their efficacy. In the contemporary era of slow growth, tight budgets, and rapid technological change, the center-left faces pressing policy concerns, including immigration, the growing population of the working poor, and the fate of the European Union. This collection suggests that such matters present the left with daunting but by no means insurmountable challenges.

Contributors. Sheri Berman, James Cronin, Jean-Michel de Waele, Arthur Goldhammer, Christopher Howard, Jane Jenson, Gerassimos Moschonas, Sofia Pérez, Jonas Pontusson, George Ross, James Shoch, Sorina Soare, Ruy Teixeira

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When Good Jobs Go Bad

Globalization, De-unionization, and Declining Job Quality in the North American Auto Industry

Rothstein, Jeffrey S

Rutgers University Press, 2016

From Chinese factories making cheap toys for export, to sweatshops in Bangladesh where name-brand garments are sewn—studies on the impact of globalization on workers have tended to focus on the worst jobs and the worst conditions. But in When Good Jobs Go Bad, Jeffrey Rothstein looks at the impact of globalization on a major industry—the North American auto industry—to reveal that globalization has had a deleterious effect on even the most valued of blue-collar jobs.

Rothstein argues that the consolidation of the Mexican and U.S.-Canadian auto industries, the expanding number of foreign automakers in North America, and the spread of lean production have all undermined organized labor and harmed workers. Focusing on three General Motors plants assembling SUVs—an older plant in Janesville, Wisconsin; a newer and more viable plant in Arlington, Texas; and a “greenfield site” (a brand-new, state-of-the-art facility) in Silao, Mexico—When Good Jobs Go Bad shows how global competition has made nonstop, monotonous, standardized routines crucial for the survival of a plant, and it explains why workers and their local unions struggle to resist. For instance, in the United States, General Motors forced workers to accept intensified labor by threatening to close plants, which led local unions to adopt “keep the plant open” as their main goal. At its new factory in Silao, GM had hand-picked the union—one opposed to strikes and committed to labor-management cooperation—before it hired the first worker.

Rothstein’s engaging comparative analysis, which incorporates the viewpoints of workers, union officials, and management, sheds new light on labor’s loss of bargaining power in recent decades, and highlights the negative impact of globalization on all jobs, both good and bad, from the sweatshop to the assembly line.

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Wild Tides

Media Infrastructure and Financial Crisis in Ireland

Patrick Brodie

Duke University Press, 2026

In Wild Tides, Patrick Brodie maps the shifting fortunes of the Irish economy before the 2008 financial crisis up to 2020, outlining how the Irish state moved from rampant and irresponsible financialized development to incentivizing private media infrastructure and policy as instruments for economic recovery. Brodie contends that, while the Irish state’s investment in creative and technological sectors of media was supposed to bring resources back into the country and stabilize the economy, it instead rendered the country even more vulnerable to future instability and transferred wealth into the hands of multinational corporations. Through ethnographic work and close engagement with the Irish state’s policy and planning across a number of key media infrastructure sites, Brodie unfolds the very real environmental and social impacts of Ireland’s naturalized model of financialized, foreign direct investment-led infrastructural development. Richly researched and comprehensively argued, Wild Tides reveals the multifarious, unexpected ways that financialization reaches into the daily life of a nation.

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Will Big League Baseball Survive?

Globalization, the End of Television, Youth Sports, and the Future of Major League Baseball

Lincoln A. Mitchell

Temple University Press, 2016

Major League Baseball is a beloved American institution that has been a product of the economic, social, and media structures that have evolved in the United States over the last century. In his shrewd analysis, Will Big League Baseball Survive?, Lincoln Mitchell asks whether the sport will continue in its current form as a huge, lucrative global business that offers a monopoly in North America—and whether those structures are sustainable.

Mitchell places baseball in the context of the larger, evolving American and global entertainment sector. He examines how both changes directly related to baseball—including youth sports and the increased globalization of the game—as well as broader societal trends such as developments in media consumption and celebrity culture will impact big league baseball over the next few decades.

His book ultimately proposes several possible scenarios for what big league baseball might look like. Will it become more global, smaller, or remain the same, or will it transform into some kind of hybrid of the three?

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With the Saraguros

The Blended Life in a Transnational World

By David Syring

University of Texas Press, 2014

Highlighting globalization’s effects on humanity through the lens of Ecuador’s indigenous Saraguro people, With the Saraguros marks a compelling departure from conventional approaches to ethnography. While documenting and exploring the social patterns among the Saraguro, with an emphasis on the role of women beadworkers, David Syring blends storytelling, dialogue, poetry, and memoir to describe his own realm as a fieldworker in anthropology. As he considers the influence of women’s labor in a community in which the artistry of beadwork is richly symbolic, he also considers how the Saraguro view their observers—the anthropologists.

Probing the role of researchers in a time when basic humanistic questions now often reflect a critical balance between commerce and sustainability, With the Saraguros asks, “What does it mean to live ‘the good life’ in different cultural contexts, and how does our work life relate to this pursuit?” For those who have chosen a work life of anthropology, Syring captures the impact of fieldwork—which uproots the researcher from his or her daily routine—and its potential to deliver new levels of consciousness. The result constitutes more than just the first English-language book dedicated to the dynamic creativity of the Saraguro, contextualized by their social and political history; Syring’s work, which ranges from the ecological imagination to the metaphors of trade, is also a profound meditation on the ways we experience boundaries now that borders no longer create sharply drawn divides between cultural worlds, and “distant” no longer means “separate.”

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Women's Labor in the Global Economy

Speaking in Multiple Voices

Harley, Sharon

Rutgers University Press, 2007

Globalization is not a new phenomenon; women throughout the world have been dealing with the circumstances and consequences of an international economy long before the advent of the transnational corporate conglomerate. However, in a mercenary example of the tried clich "the more things change, the more they stay the same," women-particularly those of color-continue to be relegated to the lowest rung of the occupational ladder, where their indispensable contributions to global market capitalism are downplayed or invalidated completely through the perpetuation of stereotypes and the denial of access to better job opportunities and resources.

How women of color around the world adapt and challenge the economic, political, and social effects of globalization is the subject of this broad-minded and incisive anthology. From Mexico, Jamaica, Ghana, Zimbabwe, and Sri Lanka, to immigrant and non-immigrant communities in the United States-the women documented in these essays are agricultural and factory workers, artists and entrepreneurs, mothers and activists. Their stories bear stark witness to how globalization continues to develop new sites and forms of exploitation, while its apparent victims continue to be women, men, and children of color.

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Words in Motion

Toward a Global Lexicon

Carol Gluck and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, eds.

Duke University Press, 2009

On the premise that words have the power to make worlds, each essay in this book follows a word as it travels around the globe and across time. Scholars from five disciplines address thirteen societies to highlight the social and political life of words in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The approach is consciously experimental, in that rigorously tracking specific words in specific settings frequently leads in unexpected directions and alters conventional depictions of global modernity.

Such words as security in Brazil, responsibility in Japan, community in Thailand, and hijāb in France changed the societies in which they moved even as the words were changed by them. Some words threatened to launch wars, as injury did in imperial Britain’s relations with China in the nineteenth century. Others, such as secularism, worked in silence to agitate for political change in twentieth-century Morocco. Words imposed or imported from abroad could be transformed by those who wielded them to oppose the very powers that first introduced them, as happened in Turkey, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Taken together, this selection of fourteen essays reveals commonality as well as distinctiveness across modern societies, making the world look different from the interdisciplinary and transnational perspective of “words in motion.”

Contributors. Mona Abaza, Itty Abraham, Partha Chatterjee, Carol Gluck, Huri Islamoglu, Claudia Koonz, Lydia H. Liu, Driss Maghraoui, Vicente L. Rafael, Craig J. Reynolds, Seteney Shami, Alan Tansman, Kasian Tejapira, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

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World Bank Literature

Amitava Kumar

University of Minnesota Press, 2002

A trailblazing interrogation of the cultural, political, and economic implications of World Bank hegemony.

World Bank literature is more than a concept-it is a provocation, a call to arms. It is intended to prompt questions about each word, to probe globalization, political economy, and the role of literary and cultural studies. As asserted in this major work, it signals a radical rewriting of academic debates, a rigorous analysis of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and a consideration of literature that deals with new global realities.

Made more relevant than ever by momentous antiglobalization demonstrations in Seattle and Genoa, World Bank Literature brings together essays by a distinguished group of economists, cultural and literary critics, social scientists, and public policy analysts to ask how to understand the influence of the World Bank/IMF on global economic power relations and cultural production. The authors attack this question in myriad ways, examining World Bank/IMF documents as literature, their impact on developing nations, the relationship between literature and globalization, the connection between the academy and the global economy, and the emergence of coalitions confronting the new power. World Bank Literature shows, above all, the multifarious and sometimes nefarious ways that abstract academic debates play themselves out concretely in social policy and cultural mores that reinforce traditional power structures. Contributors: Anthony C. Alessandrini, Kent State U; Bret Benjamin, SUNY, Albany; John Berger; Suzanne Bergeron, U of Michigan, Dearborn; Lorrayne Carroll, U of Southern Maine; Manthia Diawara, NYU; Grant Farred, Duke; Barbara Foley, Rutgers; Claire F. Fox, U of Iowa; Rosemary Hennessy, SUNY, Albany; Doug Henwood, Left Business Observer; Caren Irr, Brandeis; Joseph Medley, U of Southern Maine; Cary Nelson, U of Illinois; Gautam Premnath, U of Massachusetts, Boston; Bruce Robbins, Columbia; Andrew Ross, NYU; Subir Sinha, U of London; Kenneth Surin, Duke; Rashmi Varma, U of North Carolina; Evan Watkins, U of California, Davis; Phillip E. Wegner, U of Florida; Richard Wolff, U of Massachusetts.

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World Development

An Introduction

Prodromos Panayiotopoulos

Pluto Press, 2001

Do the structures of the world economy invariably work against the interests of the Third World? What is the impact of industrialisation? How does it affect people and their livelihoods, gender relations, the environment, movements for social justice and democracy?

World Development offers answers to these questions. A comprehensive introductory guide for students, teachers, volunteers and NGO workers in development, World Development examines the substantive issues surrounding development, industrialisation and globalization and places them within a historic context. It outlines the historical development of the world economy and assesses the current prospects for developing countries. The book contains in-depth analyses of how particular industries operate at local and global levels, drawing from case studies on textiles, tourism and copper. There are also case studies of specific countries, including South Korea, Cyprus, Mexico, China and Spain.

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World-Systems Analysis

An Introduction

Immanuel Wallerstein

Duke University Press, 2004

In World-Systems Analysis, Immanuel Wallerstein provides a concise and accessible introduction to the comprehensive approach that he pioneered thirty years ago to understanding the history and development of the modern world. Since Wallerstein first developed world-systems analysis, it has become a widely utilized methodology within the historical social sciences and a common point of reference in discussions of globalization. Now, for the first time in one volume, Wallerstein offers a succinct summary of world-systems analysis and a clear outline of the modern world-system, describing the structures of knowledge upon which it is based, its mechanisms, and its future.

Wallerstein explains the defining characteristics of world-systems analysis: its emphasis on world-systems rather than nation-states, on the need to consider historical processes as they unfold over long periods of time, and on combining within a single analytical framework bodies of knowledge usually viewed as distinct from one another—such as history, political science, economics, and sociology. He describes the world-system as a social reality comprised of interconnected nations, firms, households, classes, and identity groups of all kinds. He identifies and highlights the significance of the key moments in the evolution of the modern world-system: the development of a capitalist world-economy in the sixteenth-century, the beginning of two centuries of liberal centrism in the French Revolution of 1789, and the undermining of that centrism in the global revolts of 1968. Intended for general readers, students, and experienced practitioners alike, this book presents a complete overview of world-systems analysis by its original architect.

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