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Globalization Under Fire
David Bacon, The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (Berkeley: University of California Press 2004)
Jacques B. Gelinas, Juggernaut Politics: Understanding Predatory Globalization (London & New York: Zed Books 2003)
Ronaldo Munck, ed., Labour and Globalisation: Results and Prospects (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2004)
James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer, System in Crisis: The Dynamics of Free Market Capitalism (Black Point, NS: Fernwood 2003)
THE CONCEPT OF GLOBALIZATION has been used to signify many social, economic, political, and cultural processes that have unfolded within the global economy in recent decades. Broadly defined, the concept is associated with the spatial reorganization of social relations in ways that produce new forms of transnational connections and linkages.1 In economic terms, these include the growing power of international financial institutions, rapid rates of technological change and technology transfer, the internationalization of systems of production, increases in the size, flow, and speed of foreign direct investment, the spread of wage labour relations across the globe, increased population mobility and urbanization, and new forms of cultural interpenetration and commodification.2
The concept of globalization is itself contested, as some scholars have noted that processes often associated with the term are not new. For example, David Harvey argues that globalization itself dates back 500 years to the beginnings of Western European colonialist expansion, and that the internationalization of trade and commerce dates back even further. Nonetheless, while capitalism's need for a "spatial fix" has always been present within the system, Harvey also writes that the contemporary global political economy is characterized by a "geographical dispersal and fragmentation of production systems, divisions of labour, and specializations of tasks" in a manner not experienced in previous eras.4 The challenge then is to give meaning and specificity to the contemporary context.
The breadth of contemporary scholarship on globalization processes illustrates that there is no simple or single picture of what constitutes globalization. If there ever were simple notions of globalization - economic saviour versus economic juggernaut - those days are past as recent scholarship has sought to integrate complexity, diversity, agency, and critique into globalization narratives. Globalization is the power of transnational corporations and international financial institutions; the rule of free-trade regimes and the policies of neoliberal nation-states; a codeword for...