This bold new book offers an exhaustive diagnosis of global capitalism. Proposing a novel system of economic and political coordination based on a combination of market socialism and state planning, it offers crucial insights for thinking about alternatives to capitalism.

With the world’s attention fixed on the travails of leading global economies due to a still unfolding financial crisis of gigantic proportions, there has been a studied silence on the fate of the third world as the malaise increasingly impacts it. This silence is particularly disturbing because questions of potential pitfalls in the neoliberal policy package, which the third world (unlike Western Europe and Japan) was largely forced to adopt, were never countenanced. as One third world state after another discovered that international institutions were in effect hostile to their governments if they chose alternative developmental models or otherwise resisted the neoliberal triage of liberalization, privatization and deregulation. This collection is a tour de force, effectively countering not only the neoliberal ideology of development as a whole but the marginalizing within today’s mainstream crisis discourse of any discussion of the monstrous misallocation of global resources wrought by the so-called “Washington Consensus” and the suffering and destruction it has wreaked on third world peoples and economies. This edited volume is intended as both a textbook for introductory classes in global development or area studies and as a conduit for advanced students, policymakers, NGO activists and an educated readership to gain knowledge about the socio-economic conditions existing across much of the world we live in, and the policies that brought them about. The specially commissioned and peer reviewed chapters are written by experts in the fields of economics, politics, sociology and international studies. Chapter authors hail from around the world including: Brazil, Mexico, Canada, United States, United Kingdom, South Africa, South Korea and Thailand. The countries/regions’ neoliberal experience and potential futures covered in this book are: Brazil, China, Cuba, Egypt, Mexico, Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam), South Africa, South Korea, Syria, Thailand and Venezuela.

The Future of Capitalism After the Financial Crisis: The Varieties of Capitalism Debate in the Age of Austerity contains thirteen world leading political economists writing from within eight different countries who critically analyze the current crisis tendencies of capitalism both globally and in particular countries. Given the likelihood of an increasingly crisis prone future for capitalism, it is important not only to rethink capitalism in its current manifestations or varieties. It is also important to rethink research methods and conceptual frameworks in preparation for understanding an increasingly rocky future in which capitalism itself could go the way of the many species that in the past were endangered only to become extinct. More and more titles of books and articles are suggesting that capitalism or perhaps civilization itself is endangered if we do not make radical changes in the near future. This book breaks with academic path dependency and attempts to open new vistas of political economy and of multidisciplinary analysis that are crucially important if our thought processes are to be effective in a world in jeopardy. The varieties of capitalism (VoC) debate itself came into being as the Soviet Union unraveled. It drew in scholarship from a cross-section of Marxian and heterodox political economy. The key argument of VoC was that if capitalism was the only global option then those on the Left must get involved in policy discussions on how capitalist economies can be fashioned to become competitive as well as progressive. However, the financial crisis has seen policy across the advanced economies veer toward competitiveness coupled with austerity. The lesson for the Left is that alternatives to capitalism must be sought in the here and now.

This bold new book offers an exhaustive diagnosis of global capitalism. Proposing a novel system of economic and political coordination based on a combination of market socialism and state planning, it offers crucial insights for thinking about alternatives to capitalism.

The topic feminist research has too often been neglected in standard research methods books. The Handbook of Feminist Research represents the establishment of a new tradition or paradigm in viewing how the research process is implemented. Feminist researchers bring unique epistemological and methodological perspectives to the research process. Feminists′ approach to methodology allows for `new′ types of questions about women′s lives and those of `other/ed′ marginalized groups to be addressed within their respective fields of research. This Handbook stresses the interconnections between epistemology, methodology and methods.They are not de-linked from each other but work together in dynamic ways to produce new knowledge and this openness itself is also characteristic of how feminist researchers approach their work. Feminists engage synergistically with all three aspects of the research process - epistemology, methodology and method. Through a synergistic connection between these elements of research: epistemology; methodology; and method, we find that feminist research often shapes new research endeavors that are greater than `the sum of their parts′. In other words, while traditional research employs these components of research, the synergistic engagement of these components in feminist research questions the status quo, aiming to raise our consciousness about how we do research. Looking at the selections provided in this Handbook we are able to look at feminist research, its implementation of synergistic use of epistemology, methodology and method, and the resulting qualities of feminist research in practice.

Shows how transnational corporations use lobby groups to shape EU policy. New updated edition

What do Cape Breton and Colombia have in common? Coal, for one thing. Coal mining was the backbone of Cape Breton's industrial economy for more than one hundred years, but the last mine was closed in 2001 when the province's utility company took advantage of neoliberal globalization by importing coal-from Colombia. Colombia and Cape Breton represent the loss of well-paid, unionized industrial jobs as a result of neoliberal globalization-the economic hegemony that allows multinational corporations in the global North, primarily North America and Europe, to exploit the natural resources and cheap labour of the global South: Latin America, Africa and Asia. But the commonalities between Cape Breton and Colombia do not end with coal, there are numerous connections directly related to the capitalist system: militant labour struggles, repression, economic insecurity, population displacement, social inequality and environmental devastation. The Failure of Global Capitalism uses the examples of Cape Breton and Colombia to illustrate the harsh realities suffered by people throughout the global North and the global South under neoliberal globalization, particularly with regard to socio-economic and environmental issues. Ultimately, it exposes the failure of industrial capitalism, and looks toward more sustainable and egalitarian alternatives.

At a time of the profound crisis of the world capitalist system a group of social scientists and theologians takes up anew the issue of liberation theology. Having arisen out of the struggle of the poor Churches in the world's South, its pros and cons dominated the discourse of the Churches throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s. Then dependency theory was considered to be the analytical tool at the basis of liberation theology. But the world economy -- since the Fall of the Berlin Wall -- has dramatically changed to become a truly globalized capitalist system in the 1990s. Even in their wildest imaginations, social scientists from the dependency tradition and theologians alike would not have predicted for example the elementary force of the Asian and the Russian crisis of today. The Walls have gone, but poverty and social polarization spread to the center countries. After having initially rejected Marxist ideology in many of the liberation theology documents, the Vatican and many other Christian Church institutions moved forward in the 1980s 1990s to strongly declare their "preferential option for the poor." Now, the authors of this book, among them Samir Amin, one of the founders of the world system approach, take up the issues of this preferential option anew and arrive at an ecumenical vision of the dialogue between theology and world system theory at the turn of the new millenium.