Unions have long been a central force in the democratization of national and global governance, and this timely book examines the role of labor in fighting for a more democratic and equitable world. In a clear and compelling narrative, Dimitris Stevis and Terry Boswell explore the past accomplishments and the formidable challenges still facing global union politics. Outlining the contradictions of globalization and global governance, they assess the implications for global union politics since its inception in the nineteenth century. The authors place this key social movement in a political economy framework as they argue that social movements can be fruitfully compared based on their emphases on egalitarianism and internationalism. Applying these concepts to global union politics across time, the authors consider whether global union politics has become more active and more influential or has failed to rise to the challenge of global capitalism. All readers interested in global organizations, governance, and social movements will find this deeply informed work an essential resource.

This book provides a cogent analysis of the globalization process and the role of the imperial state in twentieth-century capitalist expansion on a world scale. It examines the development of capitalism and the capitalist state across national boundaries and traces the evolution of imperialism and interimperialist rivalries that have come to define the nature of the world political economy. As transnational capital has become a mighty force controlling the economies of advanced and less-developed capitalist countries around the world, capitalism and capitalist relations of production have spread to and dominated societies and social relations in remote parts of the globe. The resulting globalization of capital has given transnationals free reign to impose capitalist practices on a global scale, such that only the biggest and most powerful capitalist monopolies have become the real beneficiaries. Berberoglu argues that while the globalization of capital enriches only a small segment of society- the owners of the transnational corporations - it devastates the great majority of the world's population. The process has immense consequences for working people throughout the world. As workers become aware of this reality and begin to address the issues that affect them, they begin to organize and become involved in class struggle to effect change.

Shaheed Nick Mohammed's Communication and the Globalization of Culture: Beyond Tradition and Borders provides a unique perspective on the concept of culture and its fate in the globalized, mediated environment. Acknowledging widespread fears of cultural erosion at the hands of dominant global forces, Mohammed argues that what we understand as culture has always been the product of global forces, including those of trade and exchange. Our very conceptions of culture are questioned. The sanctity of tradition, religion, and heritage, the book suggests, should give way to an appreciation of the quite mundane origins of cultural artifacts, invented often as matters of political or social expedience, adopted sometimes in accidents of history and canonized by time into the catechisms of cultural belief. Communication and the Globalization of Culture also suggests several mechanisms by which pragmatic social practices and fictional discourses make their way into the cultural beliefs and traditions of societies. Shaheed Nick Mohammed examines how the modern globalized environment gives rise to cultural practices that demonstrate cultural inventions, imagined communities, and manufactured cultural products, suggesting that such inventions and imaginations are not uniquely modern but rather a continuation of cultural inventions that long pre-date our media-globalized environment.

Global Issues in the Context of Spaces examines globalization using the concept of space to contextualize discussion of global issues. The manuscript uses the concept of space to contextualize global issues because spaces are the theater of human activity. Global issues result from specific dynamics emerging between people and their activities within specific spaces. The growth of population, the increase of human activity, and the usage of new spaces explain the complexity and challenges of global issues today.

Unions have long been a central force in the democratization of national and global governance, and this timely book examines the role of labor in fighting for a more democratic and equitable world. In a clear and compelling narrative, Dimitris Stevis and Terry Boswell explore the past accomplishments and the formidable challenges still facing global union politics. Outlining the contradictions of globalization and global governance, they assess the implications for global union politics since its inception in the nineteenth century. The authors place this key social movement in a political economy framework as they argue that social movements can be fruitfully compared based on their emphases on egalitarianism and internationalism. Applying these concepts to global union politics across time, the authors consider whether global union politics has become more active and more influential or has failed to rise to the challenge of global capitalism. All readers interested in global organizations, governance, and social movements will find this deeply informed work an essential resource.

This book critically engages with a series of provocative questions that ask: Why are contemporary societies so dependent on constructive and destructive effects of individualization? Is this phenomenon only related to the 'second' or 'late' modernity? Can the concept of individualization be productively used for developing a sociological diagnosis of our time? The innovative answers suggested in this book are focused on two types of challenges accompanying the rise of individualization. First, that it is caused by controversial changes in social structures and action patterns. Second, that the effects of individualization question varieties of the common good. Both challenges have a long history but reached critical intensity in advanced contemporary societies in the context of current globalization.

Both academic and popular representations of globalization, critical or celebratory, have tended to conceptualize it primarily in spatial terms, rather than simultaneously temporal ones. However, time, in both its ideational and material dimensions, has played an important role in mediating and shaping the directions, courses, and outcomes of globalization. Focusing on the intersection of time and globalization, this book aims to create an interdisciplinary dialogue between the (largely separated) respective literatures on each of these themes. This dialogue will be of both theoretical and empirical significance, since many urgent issues of contemporary human affairs-from large epochal problems such as climate change, to everyday struggles with the dynamics of social acceleration-involve a complex interplay between temporality and globalization. A critical understanding of the relationship between time and globalization will not only facilitate innovative thinking about globalization; it will also foster our imagination of alternatives that may lead to more socially just and sustainable futures. This innovative collection illustrates the theoretical benefits of bridging time with globalization and also exemplifies the methodological strengths of engaging in cutting-edge, interdisciplinary scholarship to better understand the changing economic, social, political, cultural and ecological dynamics in this globalizing world. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Globalizations.

The ability to deploy interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives that speak to interconnected global dimensions is critical if one's work is to be relevant and applicable to the emerging global-scale issues of our time. The Global Turn is a guide for students and scholars across all areas of the social sciences and humanities who wish to embark on global-studies research projects. The authors demonstrate how the global can be studied from a local perspective and vice versa. They show how global processes manifest at multiple levels-transnational, regional, national, and local-all of which are interconnected and mutually constitutive. This book takes readers through the steps of thinking like a global scholar in theoretical, methodological, and practical terms, and it explains the implications of global perspectives for research design.

The concept of globalization has become ubiquitous in social science and in the public consciousness and is often invoked as an explanation for a diverse range of changes to economies, societies, politics and cultures - both as a positive liberating force and as a wholly negative one. Whilst our understanding of the politics, economics, and social resonance of the phenomenon has become increasingly sophisticated at the macro-level, this book argues that globalization too often continues to be depicted as a set of extra-terrestrial forces with no real physical manifestation, except as effects. The essays challenge this dominant understanding of 'globalization from above' through explorations of the mundane means by which globalization has been achieved. Instead of a focus on the meta-political economy of global capitalism, the book concentrates on the everyday life of capitalism, the not-so-'little' things that keep the 'large' forces of globalization ticking over. With its eye on the mundane, the book demonstrates that a series of everyday and, consequently, all but invisible formations critically facilitate and create the conditions under which globalization has flourished. The emphasis is on concrete moments in the history of capitalism when these new means of regular reproduction were invented and deployed. Only by understanding these infrastructures can we understand the dynamics of globalization. In short, punchy essays by distinguished researchers from across a range of disciplines, this book provides a new way of understanding globalization, moving away from the standard accounts of global forces, economic flows, and capitalist dynamics, to show how ordinary practices and artefacts are crucial elements and symbols of globalization.

The success of individual nation states today is often measured in terms of their ability to benefit from and contribute to a host of global economic, political, socio-cultural, technological, and educational networks. This increased multifaceted international inter-dependence represents an intuitively contradictory and an immensely complex situation. This scenario requires that national governments, whose primary responsibility is towards their citizenry, must relinquish a degree of control over state borders to constantly developing trans and multinational regimes and institutions. Once state borders become permeable all sorts of issues related to rights earned or accrued due to membership of a national community come into question. Given that neither individuals nor states can eschew the influence of the growing interdependence, this new milieu is often described in terms of shrinking of the world into a global village. This reshaping of the world requires us to broaden our horizons and re-evaluate the manner in which we theorize human personhood within communal boundaries. It also demands us to acknowledge that the relative decline of Euro-American economic and political influence and the rise of Asian and Latin American states at the global level have created spaces in which a de-territorialized and a de-historicized notion of citizenship and state can now be explored. The essays in this volume represent diverse disciplinary, analytical, and methodological approaches to understand what the implications are of being a citizen of both a nation state and the world simultaneously. In sum, Deconstructing Global Citizenship explores the question of whether a synthesis of contradictory national and global tendencies in the term "global citizenship" is even possible, or if we are better served by fundamentally reconsidering our ideas of "citizenship," "community," and "politics."

This volume discusses Korea's role as a middle power in the midst of the 21st century global power shift. Focusing on Korea's middle power diplomacy from the perspective of coalition building, the book discusses structural factors that shape middle power strategy and diplomacy. Written by leading Korean researchers, the chapters use diverse methodologies to offer a range of perspectives on Korea's place in the developing global order. Topics discussed include South Korea's approach to technology policy in the midst of US-China cyber competition, the East Asian 'Thucydides Trap', MITKA and middle power diplomacy, Korea's role in the South China Sea dispute, and South Korean cyber security. Providing a unique treatment of middle power opportunities and motivations in the East Asia region, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, Asian politics, diplomacy, security studies, and global governance.

This work is a study of the impacts of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). By focusing on the issue of justice in the contexts of globalization and neo-colonialism, the book contributes to a broader discussion of the significance of NAFTA. Authors Laurence French and Magdaleno ManzanOrez emphasize cultural and ethnic issues in the relations of NAFTA partners and enrich treatment of the topic by bringing to bear sociology, political science, justice studies, psychology, and educational theory. The authors relate classical sociological theory to contemporary issues of social and criminal justice.

In this book Ari Ofengenden examines the ways that Israel's integration into global economy has affected its main stream culture. Ofengenden uses works of Israeli film, literature, and television, from the past 30 years to conceptualize the changes in Israel's culture. He analyzes the central phenomena associated with Israel's integration into the global economy including: the demise of realism and the rise of commercial culture, the production of film, television, and novels for western audiences, and the critiques of capitalism in media. Ofengenden also explores the refiguring national identity through critique of masculinity. The book also discusses the affect globalization and marketization has had on modern narratives of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

This work is an ethnographic investigation into the everyday lives of young people growing up and living in contemporary Bangalore. Moving beyond the hype of the Indian 'knowledge society', it examines how new forms of technology and outsourced labour become integral to their lives, changing the experience of Indian modernity and globalisation.

This book articles presents new scholarship on the subject of imperial expansion through colonization and globalization from a variety of postcolonial perspectives. The essays in this volume, grouped in three chapters, scrutinize imperial expansion within the context of national identities and imageries-deconstructing the modernist and utopian idea of a nation as a site of homogeneity, and reviewing the importance of the concept in the different phases of colonization. Hence the first chapter is entitled 'Neo-Imperial Traces or Premonitions in Modernism.' The post-classical phase of colonialism is examined through the representation of the colonized and the once-colonized. Applying postcolonial theories and often moving beyond them, scholars scrutinize such textual and filmic representations as exemplified in Asia. These make up Chapter Two, 'Interference of the Imperial Tradition in Asia, ' which allows for the re-articulations of cultural heritage in the region within the different and ever renewed schemes of imperial expansion. Chapter Three, 'Reformulations of the Imperial Project, ' seeks to explore the questions surrounding inclusion in and exclusion from the realm of power as the founding principle of empire, suggesting that they are discursive and deliberate. Postcolonial societies inherit the trauma of colonialism that subjected people to a cultural displacement that is exacerbated by renewed efforts of imperial influence through globalizatio

Civilizations and World Order: Geopolitics and Cultural Difference examines the role of civilizations in the context of the existing and possible world order(s) from a cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary perspective. Contributions seek to clarify the meaning of such complex and contested notions as "civilization," "order," and "world order"; they do so by taking into account political, economic, cultural, and philosophical dimensions of social life. The book deals with its main theme from three angles or vectors: first, the geopolitical or power-political context of civilizations; secondly, the different roles of civilizations or cultures against the backdrop of "post-coloniality" and "Orientalism"; and thirdly, the importance of ideological and regional differences as factors supporting or obstructing world order(s). All in all, the different contributions demonstrate the impact of competing civilizational trajectories on the functioning or malfunctioning of contemporary world order.

Globalization is a highly debated term, and struggles over its meaning are played out in a variety of ways, from academe and the media to the streets of Seattle, Melbourne and Genoa.

This book provides a welcome introduction to the discourses, practices and technologies that have been grouped together under that term. It outlines the historical contexts of globalization, and addresses the politics of naming that are so central to the reproduction of the narratives and patterns of globalization.

The authors examine specific sites that are being transformed by globalization such as capitalism, state governments, the media and cultural identity, and explore the notion of a post-globalization world.

This will be a valuable book to undergraduate and MA students on communication, media, cultural studies, sociology, politics and development courses.

Gender and the Politics of Possibilities explores the lesser-known side of globalization beyond the effects of national governments and multinational cooperations by taking a look at grassroots movements by women that have and continue to shape globalization today. Manisha Desai highlights the significant role that women play in cross-border trade in Africa, in transborder activism on issues that affect women, and in cultural change and social justice.

The collection brings together scholars from Public Policy and Foreign Policy to address the theme of policy fiascos. So far research on failure and fiascos in both Public Policy and Foreign Policy has existed independent of each other with very little communication between the two sub-disciplines. The contributions aim to bridge this divide and bring the two sides into a dialogue on some of the central issues in the study of fiascos including how to define, identify and measure policy failure (and success); the social and political contestation about what counts as policy fiascos; the causes of policy fiascos and their consequences; the attribution of blame; as well as processes of learning from fiascos. A common theme of the collection is to explore different epistemological and methodological approaches to studying policy fiascos. This book will appeal to scholars and practitioners interested in policy failures and fiascos both within and among states and other international actors. It was previously published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.

Technology, Globalization, and Sustainable Development offers a unified, transdisciplinary approach for transforming the industrial state in order to promote sustainable development. The authors present a deep analysis of the ways that industrial states - both developed and developing - are currently unsustainable and how economic and social welfare are related to the environment, to public health and safety, and to earning capacity and meaningful and rewarding employment. The authors offer multipurpose solutions to the sustainability challenge that integrate industrial development, employment, technology, environment, national and international law, trade, finance, and public and worker health and safety. The authors present a compelling wake-up call that warns of the collision course set between the current paths of continued growth and inevitable unsustainability in the world today. Offering clear examples and real solutions, this textbook illustrates how the driving forces that are currently promoting unsustainability can be refocused and redesigned to reverse course and improve the state of the world. This book is essential reading for those teaching and studying sustainable development and the critical roles of the economy, employment, and the environment.

The Asia-Pacific region has been enjoying fast growing economy. As President Barack Obama's "pivot to Asia" strategy indicates, this region is an engine for the world economic growth. However, the Asia-Pacific has also been an unstable region suffering from many sources of conflicts such as disputes on Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, the unsettled Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) borders, and many others. Do we need a hegemonic power to stabilize this region? What can we do to deal with the emergence of China? How can we understand anti-Japanese feelings? Is there any way to deal with the problem on Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands? How can we analyze nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula? Can the European Union make any contribution to stabilizing the Asia-Pacific region? Those are some of the concrete questions this book tackles with in order to find ways and means to establish a more amicable Asia-Pacific region.

Gender and the Politics of Possibilities explores the lesser-known side of globalization beyond the effects of national governments and multinational corporations by taking a look at grassroots movements by women that have and continue to shape globalization today. Manisha Desai highlights the significant role that women play in cross-border trade in Africa, in transborder activism on issues that affect women, and in cultural change and social justice.

Recent studies have highlighted the diversity, complexity, and plurality of identities in the ancient world. At the same time, scholars have acknowledged the dynamic role of material culture, not simply in reflecting those identities but their role in creating and transforming them. This volume explores and compares two influential approaches to the study of social and cultural identities, the model of globalization and theories of hybrid cultural development. In a series of case studies, an international team of archaeologists and art historians considers how various aspects of material culture can be used to explore complex global and local identity structures across the geographical and chronological span of antiquity. The essays examine the civilizations of the Greeks, Romans, Etruscans, Persians, Phoenicians, and Celts. Reflecting on the current state of our understanding of cultural interaction and antiquity, they also dwell on contemporary thoughts of identity, cultural globalization, and resistance that shape and are shaped by academic discourses on the cultural empires of Greece and Rome.

This book explores the phenomenon of soft power in international relations. In the context of current discourses on power and global power shift s, it puts forward a comprehensive taxonomy of soft power and outlines a methodological roadmap for its empirical study. To that end, the book classifies soft power into distinct components - resources, instruments, reception, and outcomes - and identifies relevant indicators for each of these categories. Moreover, the book integrates previously neglected aspects into the concept of soft power, including the significance of (political) personalities. A broad range of historical examples is drawn upon to illustrate the effects of soft power in international relations in an innovative and analytically differentiated way. A central methodological contribution of this book consists in highlighting the value of comparative-historical analysis (CHA) as a promising approach for empirical analyses of the soft power of different actors on the international stage. By introducing a comprehensive taxonomy of soft power, the book offers an innovative and substantiated perspective on a pivotal phenomenon in today's international relations. As the forces of attraction in world politics continue to gain in importance, it provides a valuable asset for a broad readership. This book was the winner of the 2021 ifa (German Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations) Research Award on Foreign Cultural Policy. "In this important and thoughtful book, Hendrik Ohnesorge explains and advances our knowledge of the ways that soft power, public diplomacy, and charismatic personal diplomacy are shaping the international relations of our global information age." Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Harvard University and author of The Future of Power