Gathering scholars from five continents, this edited book displaces the elitist image of cosmopolitan as well as the blame addressed to aesthetic cosmopolitanism often considered as merely cosmetic. By considering aesthetic cosmopolitanism as a tool to understand how individuals and social groups appropriate the sphere of culture in a global world, the authors are concerned with its operationalization on two strongly interwoven levels, macro and micro, structural and individual. Based on the discussion of theoretical perspectives and empirically grounded research (qualitative and quantitative, conducted in many countries), this volume unveils new insights, on tourism and food, architecture and museums, TV series and movies, rock, K-pop and samba, by providing resources for making sense of aesthetic preferences in a global perspective. Contributors are: Felicia Chan, Vincenzo Cicchelli, Talitha Alessandra Ferreira, Paula Iadevito, Sukhmani Khorana, Anne Krebs, Antoinette Kujilaars, Franck Mermier, Sylvie Octobre, Joana Pellerano, Rosario Radakovich, Motti Regev, Viviane Riegel, Clara Rodriguez, Leslie Sklair, Yi-Ping Eva Shi, Claire Thoumelin and Dario Verderame.

Since the early 1980s, Japanese firms have massively globalized their production operations and have shown superb competitive powers in global markets. This meant, however, they had to establish their unique Japanese-style management and production system locally, taking into account different conditions in countries that had not originally nurtured their unique system. In each case, firms found ways to balance applications and adaptations, resulting in a hybridization of their management and production systems. These experiences abroad dictated changes to the traditional system-in order to retain its basic logic and competitiveness, the essentials of the system needed to be redefined.
Hybrid Factories in the United States elucidates the real advantages and weaknesses of the Japanese-style management and production system (JMPS) in the United States and elsewhere in the globalized economy. To assess the success of the "hybridization" dynamics of JMPS abroad, the editor and authors developed their own "hybrid-analysis" model, which has been used successfully around and globe for decades, and has been recognized as a major research framework for elucidating the study of international transferability of management and production systems in general. In very concrete ways and attentive to regional differences, the authors' hybrid-analysis methods identify which aspects of JMPS will inevitably change and which should be sustained. Tetsuji Kawamura and his team have provided a crucial and comprehensive resource not only for anyone interested in the Japanese story, but also for those concerned about the future of American manufacturing industries, for the investigation of Japanese transplants provides an invaluable perspective of the real dimensions of major management innovations of U.S. industries.

Maritime spaces are socially constructed by humans and refer to seas and islands, coasts, port cities and villages, as well as ships and other human-made marine structures. Social interaction with marine environments and living beings, e.g. in a symbolic, cultural or economic manner, has led to the emergence of spatial structures which affect the knowledge, beliefs, meanings and obstinately patterns. Those structures shape mutual expectations of human beings and form the perception, imagination, or memory of inhabitants of maritime spaces. They enable or restrict human action, construct people's everyday life, their norms and values, and are changeable. Contributors include: Jan Asmussen, Robert Bartlomiejski, Benjamin Bowles, Isabel Duarte, Eduardo Sarmento Ferreira, Rita Gracio, Marie C. Grasmeier, Karolina Izdebska, Seung Kuk Kim, Arkadiusz Kolodziej, Agnieszka Kolodziej-Durnas, Maciej Kowalewski, Urszula Kozlowska, Ulrike Kronfeld-Goharani, Rute Muchacho, Giacomo Orsini, Wlodzimierz Karol Pessel, Celia Quico, Harini Sivalingam, Joana Sousa, Frank Sowa, Nuno Cintra Torres, and Gunter Warsewa.

A Companion to Border Studies introduces an exciting and expanding field of interdisciplinary research, through the writing of an international array of scholars, from diverse perspectives that include anthropology, development studies, geography, history, political science and sociology. * Explores how nations and cultural identities are being transformed by their dynamic, shifting borders where mobility is sometimes facilitated, other times impeded or prevented * Offers an array of international views which together form an authoritative guide for students, instructors and researchers * Reflects recent significant growth in the importance of understanding the distinctive characteristics of borders and frontiers, including cross-border cooperation, security and controls, migration and population displacements, hybridity, and transnationalism

Globalization, along with its digital and information communication technology counterparts, including the Internet and cyberspace, may signify a whole new era for human rights, characterized by new tensions, challenges, and risks for human rights, as well as new opportunities. Human Rights and Risks in the Digital Era: Globalization and the Effects of Information Technologies explores the emergence and evolution of digital rights that challenge and transform more traditional legal, political, and historical understandings of human rights. Academic and legal scholars will explore individual, national, and international democratic dilemmas--sparked by economic and environmental crises, media culture, data collection, privatization, surveillance, and security--that alter the way individuals and societies think about, regulate, and protect rights when faced with new challenges and threats. The book not only uncovers emerging changes in discussions of human rights, it proposes legal remedies and public policies to mitigate the challenges posed by new technologies and globalization.

After a 35 year-long career on worldwide TV screens, Lieutenant Columbo has become one of the most famous fictional detectives. Lilian Mathieu shows that the Columbo series owes its success to its implicit but formidable political dimension, as each episode is structured as a class struggle between a rich, famous, cultured or powerful criminal and an apparently humble and blunderer police officer dressed in a crumpled raincoat and driving an antique car. Highlighting the contentious context that gave birth to the series in 1968, he shows that the sociology of culture offers intellectual tools to understand how a TV detective story can be appreciated as a joyful class revenge.

Today's globalised world means offshore finance, airport boutiques and high-speed Internet for some people, against dollar-a-day wages, used t-shirts, and illiteracy for others. How do these highly skewed global distributions happen, and what can be done to counter them? New Rules for Global Justice engages with widespread public disquiet around global inequality. It explores (mal)distributions in relation to country, class, gender and race, with international examples drawn from Australia to Zimbabwe. The book is action-oriented and empowering, presenting concrete proposals for 'new rules' in regard to climate change, corruption, finance, food, investment, the Internet, migration and more.

Processes of neoliberal globalization have put national trade unions under pressure as the transnational organization of production puts these labour movements in competition with each other. The global economic crisis has intensified these pressures further. And yet, economic and political integration processes have also provided workers with new possibilities to organize resistance. Emphasizing the importance of agency, this book analyzes transnational labour action in times of crisis, historically and now. It draws on a variety of fascinating cases, across formal and informal collectives, in order to clarify which factors facilitate or block the formation of solidarity. Moving beyond empirical description of cases to an informed understanding of collective action across borders, the volume provides an insightful theorization of transnational action.

"In lively and unflinching prose, Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman argue that contemporary thought about the world is disabled by a fatal flaw: the inability to think "an after" to globalization. After establishing seven theses (on education, morality, history, future, capitalism, nation, and common sense) that challenge the false promises that sustain this time-limit, After Globalization examines four popular thinkers (Thomas Friedman, Richard Florida, Paul Krugman and Naomi Klein) and how their work is dulled by these promises. Cazdyn and Szeman then speak to students from around the globe who are both unconvinced and uninterested in these promises and who understand the world very differently than the way it is popularly represented. After Globalization argues that a true capacity to think an after to globalization is the very beginning of politics today"--

This book examines the impact of globalization on languages in contact, including the study of linkages between the global and local, and transnational and situated communication. It engages with social theory and social processes while grappling with questions of language analysis raised by globalized language contact. Drawing on case studies from North America, Europe and Africa, the volume makes three important contributions to contemporary sociolinguistics by: * arguing that concepts of scale and space are essential for understanding contemporary sociolinguistic phenomena * showing that the transnational flows and movements of peoples highlight the problem and work of identity in relation to both place and time * addressing methodological challenges raised by different approaches to the study of globalization and language contact. This cutting-edge monograph featuring research by renowned international contributors will be of interest to academics researching sociolinguistics, and language and globalization.

This book addresses a seemingly paradoxical situation. On the one hand, nationalism from Scotland to the Ukraine remains a resilient political dynamic, fostering secessionist movements below the level of the state. On the other, the competence and capacity of states, and indeed the coherence of nationalism as an ideology, are increasingly challenged by patterns of globalisation in commerce, cultural communication and constitutional authority beyond the state. It is the aim of this book to shed light on the relationship between these two processes, addressing why the political currency of nationalism remains strong even when the salience of its objective - independent and autonomous statehood - becomes ever more attenuated. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach both within law and beyond, with contributions from international law, constitutional law, constitutional theory, history, political science and sociology. The challenge for our time is considerable. Global networks grow ever more sophisticated while territorial borders, such as those in Eastern and Central Europe, become seemingly more unstable. It is hoped that this book, by bringing together areas of scholarship which have not communicated with one another as much as they might, will help develop an ongoing dialogue across disciplines with which better to understand these challenging, and potentially destabilising, developments.

Untapped collects twelve previously unpublished essays that analyze the rise of craft beer from social and cultural perspectives. In the United States, the United Kingdom, and Western Europe there has been exponential growth in the number of small independent breweries over the past thirty years - a reversal of the corporate consolidation and narrowing of consumer choice that characterized much of the twentieth century. While there are legal and policy components involved in this shift, the contributors to Untapped ask broader questions. How does the growth of craft beer connect to trends like the farm-to-table movement, gentrification, the rise of the "creative class," and changing attitudes toward both cities and farms? How do craft beers conjure history, place, and authenticity? At perhaps the most fundamental level, how does the rise of craft beer call into being new communities that may challenge or reinscribe hierarchies based on gender, class, and race?

This innovative volume highlights the relevance of globalization and the insights of gender studies and religious studies for feminist theology. Beginning with a discussion of position of the discipline at the turn of the twenty-first century, the handbook seeks to present an inclusive account of feminist theology in the early twenty-first century that acknowledges the reflection of women on religion beyond the global North and its forms of Christianity. Globalization is taken as the central theme, as the foremost characteristic of the context in which we do feminist theology today. The volume traces the impacts of globalization on gender and religion in specific geographical contexts, describing the implications for feminist theological thinking. A final section explores the changing contents of the field, moving towards new models of theology, distinct from both the structure and language of traditional Christian systematic theology and the forms of secular feminism. The handbook draws on material from several religious traditions and every populated continent, with chapters provided by a diverse team of international scholars.

Over the past decade, there has been continual development and renewal of strategies and practices surrounding e-governance. Governments around the world have embraced new information and communication technologies to increase the efficiency of internal processes, deliver better and more integrated services to citizens and businesses, invite citizen and stakeholder participation in planning decisions, improve communication, and sometimes even enhance democratic processes. Global Strategy and Practice of E-Governance: Examples from Around the World provides readers with an overview of relevant strategy and policy-level theoretical frameworks and examples, as well as up-to-date implementations from around the world. This book offers valuable insights into best practices, as well as some of the issues and challenges surrounding the governance of and with information and communication technologies in a globalized, knowledge-based world.

Examining the dynamics between subject, photographer and viewer, Fashioning Brazil analyses how Brazilians have appropriated and reinterpreted clothing influences from local and global cultures. Exploring the various ways in which Brazil has been fashioned by the pioneering scientific and educational magazine, National Geographic, the book encourages us to look beyond simplistic representations of exotic difference. Instead, it brings to light an extensive history of self-fashioning within Brazil, which has emerged through cross-cultural contact, slavery, and immigration. Providing an in-depth examination of Brazilian dress and fashion practices as represented by the quasi-ethnographic gaze of National Geographic and National Geographic Brazil (the Portuguese language edition of the magazine, established in 2000), the book unpacks a series of case studies. Taking us from body paint to Lycra, via loincloths and bikinis, Kutesko frames her analysis within the historical, cultural, and political context of Latin American interactions with the United States. Exploring how dress can be used to manipulate identity and disrupt expectations, Fashioning Brazil examines readers' sensory engagements with an iconic magazine, and sheds new light on key debates concerning global dress and fashion.

This is a philosophical analysis of the 9/11 events against the ongoing historical background. This clearly written and accessible work presents a philosopher's response to the series of events known as '9/11' and the global culture in the United States - and global society - that followed. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the emerging post-9/11 culture, situating it in a broad context that includes politics, religious discourse, economic theory, and philosophical orientation. Before and After 9/11 reconstructs the events that led to and departed from the attacks on September 11, 2001. It criticizes the attempts to explain 9/11 by George W. Bush, his administration's neoconservatives, Samuel Huntington, and Bernard Lewis. It also pays particular attention to the importance of the economic dimension in the emergence of conflicts in an age of globalization. The aim is to provide a philosophical overview of 9/11, understood as a series of connected events within an ongoing historical context. This unique work will appeal to anyone seeking to understand the current world, including the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a world of global communication, where each one's life depends increasingly on signs, language and communication, understanding how we relate and opening ourselves to otherness, to differences in all their forms and aspects is becoming more and more relevant. Today, we often understand the differences in terms of adversity or opposition and forget the value of the similarities. Semiotic approaches can provide a critical point of view and a more general reflection that can redefine some aspects of the discussion about the nature of these semiotic categories, differences and similarities. The dichotomy differences - similarities is fundamental to understanding the meaning-making mechanisms in language (De Saussure, 1966; Deleuze, 1995), as well as in other sign systems (Ponzio, 1995; Sebeok & Danesi, 2000). Meaning always appears in the "play of differences" (Derrida, 1978) and similarities. Therefore, the phenomena of similarities and differences must be considered complementary (Marcus, 2011). This book addresses and offers new perspectives for analyzing and understanding sensitive topics in the world of global communication (humanities education, responsive understanding of otherness, digital culture and new media power).

In light of the predatory practices employed by massive corporations-some of which are even bigger than nations-and their wealthy owners, a movement arose from among the people known as the 99 percent, those who are not among the wealthiest 1 percent of the population. The world watched as members of the Occupy movement poured into the streets, demanding that those responsible for the economic crises faced by the world be held accountable for their negligence and misconduct. Now, however, the crowds have gone; their voices are muted, but their demands endure. In light of the current situation, what's next for the world? The answer is action. In this compact manifesto, Frank Sykes summarizes the ideas that were voiced by the thousands who converged on Wall Street and in large cities across the globe, drawing a map of the future of this global phenomenon. Ordinary people demand not only our fair share of the wealth generated by our work and ingenuity, but also a say in its distribution. Even though the Occupiers have gone home, the problems they protested still exist, and the need to act is more urgent now than ever

In Deportation in the Americas: Histories of Exclusion and Resistance, editors Kenyon Zimmer and Cristina Salinas have compiled seven essays, adapted from the Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lecture Series, that deeply consider deportation policy in the Americas and its global effects. These thoughtful pieces significantly contribute to a growing historiography on deportation within immigration studies-a field that usually focuses on arriving immigrants and their adaptation. All contributors have expanded their analysis to include transnational and global histories, while recognizing that immigration policy is firmly developed within the structure of the nation-state. Thus, the authors do not abandon national peculiarity regarding immigration policy, but as Emily Pope-Obeda observes, "from its very inception, immigration restriction was developed with one eye looking outward." Contributors note that deportation policy can signal friendship or cracks within the relationships between nations. Rather than solely focusing on immigration policy in the abstract, the authors remain cognizant of the very real effects domestic immigration policies have on deportees and push readers to think about how the mobility and lives of individuals come to be controlled by the state, as well as the ways in which immigrants and their allies have resisted and challenged deportation. From the development of the concept of an "anchor baby" to continued policing of those who are foreign-born, Deportation in the Americas is an essential resource for understanding this critical and timely topic.

This title examines Sub-Saharan Africa's relations with states such as the US, India, China, the EU, and Britain as well as with non-state actors. "The International Relations of Sub-Saharan Africa" is an in-depth examination Africa's place in global politics. The book provides a comprehensive and critical appraisal of the ways in which peace, prosperity, and democracy are being advanced (or restricted) by the activities of the great powers in Africa, including non-state actors, as well as who benefits from these policies and who does not. The book is a needed comparative study of the role of great powers and 'new' actors such as China and India in Africa within the wider context of neo-liberal hegemony. It fills a gap in the literature and will be of interest to any student of the continent. Its focus on external actors contributes to providing a fuller picture of Africa's place in the global political economy and how the continent interacts with the rest of the world. This is an essential work for anyone researching issues in international relations, comparative foreign policies, and African politics.

Higher Education in the UK and the US: Converging University Models in a Global Academic World? edited by Sarah Pickard addresses the key similarities and differences in higher education between the two countries over the last thirty years, in order to ascertain whether there exists a specific 'Anglo-Saxon model'. This interdisciplinary book is divided into three thematic parts dealing with current fundamental issues in higher education within neoliberal Great Britain and the United States: economics and marketisation of higher education; access and admittance to universities; and the student experience of higher education. The contributors are all higher education specialists in diverse academic fields - sociology, political sciences, public policy studies, educational studies and history - from either side of the Atlantic. Contributors are: Bahram Bekhradnia, James Cote, Marie-Agnes Detourbe, John Halsey, Magali Julian, Kenneth O'Brien, Cristiana Olcese, Anna Mountford-Zimdars, Sarah Pickard, Chris Rust, Clare Saunders, Christine Soulas, and Steven Ward. *Higher Education in the UK and the US: Converging University Models in a Global Academic World? is now available in paperback for individual customers.