Globalization is a fascinating spectacle that can be understood as global systems of competition and connectivity. These man-made systems provide transport, communication, governance, and entertainment on a global scale. International crime networks are also outgrowths of the same systems. In this course, you will learn how to identify and analyze global systems and better understand how they are changing societies around the world.

Both human rights and globalization are powerful ideas and processes, capable of transforming the world in profound ways. Notwithstanding their universal claims, however, the processes are constructed, and they draw their power from the specific cultural and political contexts in which they are constructed. Far from bringing about a harmonious cosmopolitan order, they have stimulated conflict and opposition. In the context of globalization, as the idea of human rights has become universal, its meaning has become one more terrain of struggle among groups with their own interests and goals. Part I of this volume looks at political and cultural struggles to control the human rights regime -- that is, the power to construct the universal claims that will prevail in a territory -- with respect to property, the state, the environment, and women. Part II examines the dynamics and counterdynamics of transnational networks in their interactions with local actors in Iran, China, and Hong Kong. Part III looks at the prospects for fruitful human rights dialogiue between competing universalisms that by definition are intolerant of conradiction and averse to compromise.

This ambitious work provides a unique statement on the question of place-based activism and its relationship to powerful forces of international capital. Arguing that specific places around the world are sites for the defense and enhancement of daily life in the context of rapidly expanding global technologies and investment options, the contributors reach for a vision of social development that supports sustainable, humane cultures. Bringing together the local and the global, this work provides the first sustained linkage of ethnic groups in diaspora to macrocosmic processes of world capital that inevitably reach down to mediate even the most local experiences. The essays, ranging in their discussion of place from Los Angeles and New York to New Zealand and Indonesia, offer both reasoned argument and authoritiative information on how local experience interacts with larger processes of global capital and the diasporic phenomenon. The book will be an invaluable resource and launching point for scholars and students in ethnic and identity studies and will interest all readers exploring the production of place and identification.

This volume provides a compendium of papers presented at the 36th World Congress of the International Institute of Sociology, papers which address issues related to the age of globalization and social change, including cultural diversities, migration and equality, social transformation, and national identity.

In recent years women's movements and democracy movements appear to have been more successful in promoting social equality than labour movements or development movements. Wage gaps between men and women have narrowed. New democracies have flourished. Yet, gaps between the rich and poor remain. Do differences in organization and strategy account for the differences in outcomes? Through in-depth studies of the United States, Eastern and Western Europe, Latin America, Africa, China, and north- and southeast Asia the contributors to this volume provide some thought-provoking answers.

Rapid growth, reduced poverty, and stable societies: the announced benefits of the world economy celebrated by neoliberal proponents of "the Washington consensus" have failed to materialize. What does this failure mean for future world order and the U.S. role as global hegemon? Addressing this crucial question, William Tabb argues that global economic institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund constitute a nascent international state for which all previous models of sovereignty, accountability and equity are inadequate. Integrating economics and political science, Tabb traces the emergence of this global state from the closing days of World War II and examines its future prospects. Even as the United States will continue to dominate the emerging structures of world governance, Tabb maintains, it will have to change the assumptions behind its championing of classical models of international free trade. A new financial architecture must encompass debt forgiveness, multilateral agreements on investment, and a more inclusive model of growth in the twenty-first century.

Samir Amin remains one of the world's most influential thinkers about the changing nature of North-South relations in the development of contemporary capitalism. In this highly prescient book, originally published in 1997, he provides a powerful analysis of the new unilateral capitalist era following the collapse of the Soviet model, and the apparent triumph of the market and globalization. Amin's innovative analysis charts the rise of ethnicity and fundamentalism as consequences of the failure of ruling classes in the South to counter the exploitative terms of globalization. This has had profound implications and continues to resonate today. Furthermore, his deconstruction of the Bretton Woods institutions as managerial mechanisms which protect the profitability of capital provides an important insight into the continued difficulties in reforming them. Amin's rejection of the apparent inevitability of globalization in its present polarising form is particularly prophetic - instead he asserts the need for each society to negotiate the terms of its inter-dependence with the rest of the global economy. A landmark work by a key contemporary thinker.

This book offers a timely analysis of work and labor processes and how they are rapidly changing under globalization. The contributors explore traditional sectors of the U.S. and world economies—from auto to steel to agriculture—as well as work under new production arrangements, such as third world export processing zones. They explain why more intensified forms of control by the state and by capital interests are emerging under globalization. Yet they also emphasize new possibilities for labor, including new forms of organizing and power sharing in a rapidly changing economy.

Topics include: Government Intervention and Economic Growth in East Asia, Agricultural Nationalism in the Age of Globalization, Japan's Dominance and Multi- Racial Coalitions in Malaysia.

This book remains the definitive introductory text on the theory and history of regionalist architecture in the context of globalization. It addresses issues of identity, diversity, community, inequality, geopolitics, and sustainability. From the authors who coined the concept of Critical Regionalism, this new edition enhances the understanding of the complex evolution of regionalism and its rival, unchecked globalization. Covering a rich selection of the most outstanding examples of design from all over the world, Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, who introduced the concept of Critical Regionalism to architecture, present an enlightening, concise historical analysis of the endurance of regionalism and the ceaseless drive for globalization. New case studies include current cutting-edge projects in Japan, Africa, China, and the United States. Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization offers undergraduate and graduate students of architecture, geography, history, environmental studies, and other related fields an accessible, vivid, and scholarly perspective of this major conflict as it relates to the design and to the future of the human-made environment.