After Globalization

AFTER GLOBALIZATION “Relentlessly, remorselessly, endlessly, we are told there is no alternative to globalization, whether our lecturers are bourgeois economists, progressive journalists, or imaginative litterateurs. Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman dare to go beyond the standard thinking of the day and query the very heart of mobile capital and its impact on daily life. Their alternative vision breathes new life into our sense of evolution and inevitability.” Toby Miller, author of Globalization and Sport and Global Hollywood “Cazdyn and Szeman begin with the idea that the current economic crisis has historicized globalization, turning it from a process that looked as inevitable as, say, global warming still does, into an episode in the history of capitalism: hence the possibility not just of more globalization but of an “after globalization.” And hence also, they argue, the renewed possibility of an “after capitalism.” In powerful critiques of what they describe as the common sense of capital today they sketch out the terms in which changes more radical than substituting generous and honest leaders for the greedy and dishonest ones we’ve currently got might begin to be imagined.” Walter Benn Michaels, University of Illinois at Chicago 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, nation, future, history, capitalism, and common sense) that challenge the false promises that sustain this time limit, After Globalization examines four popular thinkers (Richard Florida, Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman, and Naomi Klein) and considers 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 is a scholarly and erudite work. . . There is a wealth of detail, all illustrated with plenty of fascinating examples. . . It is impossible to give the full flavour of this thoughtful and stimulating book in even a long review, but it deserves to be widely accessible and read. Citizen s Income . . . this is the greatest book ever about work (in all its forms). . . Work after Globalization offers us the kind of foundation we need to launch a new social-democratic program. . . do yourself a favour, don t take my word for it. You need to read this book for yourself. . . If you re ever going to read a book about work, make it this one. Peter Hall-Jones, New Unionism Network This is an important book. It shifts emphasis from the role of capital to the creativity of labour in the creation of value in the real economy. A central role is accorded to each and all of the skills and occupations which contribute to the construction of an economy and a civic culture governed by the public interest. Guy Standing has made an original contribution to the validation of human creativity in the economic process. The work owes an acknowledged debt to the vision of Karl Polanyi. Kari Polanyi-Levitt, McGill University, Canada Standing has written a comprehensive account of what the forces and developments that govern the contemporary world (such as states, employers, trade unions, the globalization of labor markets, financial market crises etc.) do to workers and the conditions under which they work and live. It is rare for a social science work that is full of empirical information to be as accessibly written as this one. It is even rarer to find all three of the things that good social science can deliver fine-grained description, original explanation, sophisticated normative reflection in the pages of a single volume. One of the richest accounts of the fates of labor since Polanyi (1944). Claus Offe, Hertie School of Governance, Germany In Work after Globalization, Guy Standing, one of the most knowledgeable and theoretically sophisticated scholars in the area of labor relations today, paints a rich panorama of contemporary labor practices around the world to demonstrate that we are in the midst of a societal shift of historical dimensions. Standing s concept of occupational citizenship provides a way to re-capture both human agency and community, thereby reconciling the individual with society and flexibility with new forms of social security. This book is a tour de force for its sweeping scope, incisive analysis, and predictive power. Katherine Stone, University of California, Los Angeles, US In this ground-breaking book, Guy Standing offers a new perspective on work and citizenship, rejecting the labourist orientation of the 20th century. Karl Polanyi s The Great Transformation marked the rise of industrial citizenship, which hinged on fictitious labour decommodification. Since the 1970s, this has collapsed and a Global Transformation is under way, in which inequalities and insecurities are becoming unsustainable. Guy Standing explains that while a struggle against paternalism is essential, the desirable egalitarian response to the problems caused by globalization is a strategy to build occupational citizenship. This is based on a right to universal economic security and institutions to enable everybody to develop their capabilities and work whilst respecting the ecological imperatives of the 21st century. The book also explores a phasing out of labour law and a re-orientation of collective bargaining towards collaborative bargaining, highlighting the increased importance of the relationship between groups of workers and citizens as well as between workers and capital. Work after Globalization offers a new perspective on work, rejecting the labourist orientation of the 20th century. Social scientists interested in globalization and labour market issues will warmly welcome this book. It will also strongly appeal to stude

The internet has fundamentally transformed society in the past 25 years, yet existing theories of mass or interpersonal communication do not work well in understanding a digital world. Nor has this understanding been helped by disciplinary specialization and a continual focus on the latest innovations. Ralph Schroeder takes a longer-term view, synthesizing perspectives and findings from various social science disciplines in four countries: the United States, Sweden, India and China. His comparison highlights, among other observations, that smartphones are in many respects more important than PC-based internet uses. Social Theory after the Internet focuses on everyday uses and effects of the internet, including information seeking and big data, and explains how the internet has gone beyond traditional media in, for example, enabling Donald Trump and Narendra Modi to come to power. Schroeder puts forward a sophisticated theory of the role of the internet, and how both technological and social forces shape its significance. He provides a sweeping and penetrating study, theoretically ambitious and at the same time always empirically grounded.The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of digital media and society, the internet and politics, and the social implications of big data.

The post-communist states of Central and Eastern Europe have gone from being among the world's most closed, autarkic economies to being some of the most export-oriented and globally integrated. While previous accounts have attributed this shift to post-1989 market reform policies, Besnik Pula sees the root causes differently. Reaching deeper into the region's history and comparatively examining its long-run industrial development, he locates critical junctures that forced the hands of Central and Eastern European elites and made them look at options beyond the domestic economy and the socialist bloc. In the 1970s, Central and Eastern European socialist leaders intensified engagements with the capitalist West in order to expand access to markets, technology, and capital. This shift began to challenge the Stalinist developmental model in favor of exports and transnational integration. A new reliance on exports launched the integration of Eastern European industry into value chains that cut across the East-West political divide. After 1989, these chains proved to be critical gateways to foreign direct investment and circuits of global capitalism. This book enriches our understanding of a regional shift that began well before the fall of the wall, while also explaining the distinct international roles that Central and Eastern European states have assumed in the globalized twenty-first century.

In the 1980s, U.S. officials adopted tax and monetary policies that channeled huge new resources into Wall Street, which fueled a stock market boom. To increase profits and payouts to investors as stock prices soared, corporate managers consolidated businesses, outsourced manufacturing to low-wage countries, and adopted new technologies to increase productivity. Government officials then facilitated mergers and negotiated free trade agreements to speed the process of globalization. Wall Street became an engine of capital accumulation and a force for global change. These developments resulted in massive job losses and stagnant wages for most Americans. Meanwhile, tax cuts and the stock market boom created vast new wealth for the rich, and the top 10 percent seized 50 percent of all income in the United States. The result was growing economic inequality. During the decades that followed, globalization triggered regional economic crises, toppled governments, transformed societies, galvanized economic development in China, and created new forms of wealth and inequality around the world. Then in 2008, a financial crisis rooted in Wall Street triggered the Great Recession, wrecked the legitimacy of globalization as a development strategy, and unleashed populist or "restrictionist" social movements and political parties that challenged globalization and attacked its economic and political foundations. This book examines the origins of globalization in the 1980s, the developments that triggered the Great Recession, and the political and economic forces that contributed to the disintegration of globalization as a force for change in the modern world. After Globalization explains what happened—and what comes next.

Over the past two decades, the percentage of the world’s population living on less than a dollar a day has been cut in half. How much of that improvement is because of—or in spite of—globalization? While anti-globalization activists mount loud critiques and the media report breathlessly on globalization’s perils and promises, economists have largely remained silent, in part because of an entrenched institutional divide between those who study poverty and those who study trade and finance. Globalization and Poverty bridges that gap, bringing together experts on both international trade and poverty to provide a detailed view of the effects of globalization on the poor in developing nations, answering such questions as: Do lower import tariffs improve the lives of the poor? Has increased financial integration led to more or less poverty? How have the poor fared during various currency crises? Does food aid hurt or help the poor? Poverty, the contributors show here, has been used as a popular and convenient catchphrase by parties on both sides of the globalization debate to further their respective arguments. Globalization and Poverty provides the more nuanced understanding necessary to move that debate beyond the slogans.

This powerful, unsettling book gives us a rare glimpse behind the closed doors of global financial institutions by the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics. When it was first published, this national bestseller quickly became a touchstone in the globalization debate. Renowned economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz had a ringside seat for most of the major economic events of the last decade, including stints as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist at the World Bank. Particularly concerned with the plight of the developing nations, he became increasingly disillusioned as he saw the International Monetary Fund and other major institutions put the interests of Wall Street and the financial community ahead of the poorer nations. Those seeking to understand why globalization has engendered the hostility of protesters in Seattle and Genoa will find the reasons here. While this book includes no simple formula on how to make globalization work, Stiglitz provides a reform agenda that will provoke debate for years to come. Rarely do we get such an insider's analysis of the major institutions of globalization as in this penetrating book. With a new foreword for this paperback edition.