Threads Of Globalization

Download or read book Threads written by Jane L. Collins and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-09-03 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans have been shocked by media reports of the dismal working conditions in factories that make clothing for U.S. companies. But while well intentioned, many of these reports about child labor and sweatshop practices rely on stereotypes of how Third World factories operate, ignoring the complex economic dynamics driving the global apparel industry. To dispel these misunderstandings, Jane L. Collins visited two very different apparel firms and their factories in the United States and Mexico. Moving from corporate headquarters to factory floors, her study traces the diverse ties that link First and Third World workers and managers, producers and consumers. Collins examines how the transnational economics of the apparel industry allow firms to relocate or subcontract their work anywhere in the world, making it much harder for garment workers in the United States or any other country to demand fair pay and humane working conditions. Putting a human face on globalization, Threads shows not only how international trade affects local communities but also how workers can organize in this new environment to more effectively demand better treatment from their distant corporate employers.

Download or read book Threads of globalization written by Melia Belli Bose and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-06 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Threads of globalization is an interdisciplinary volume that brings fashion-specific garments, motifs, materials, and methods of production into dialogue with gender and identity in various cultures throughout Asia during the long twentieth century. It examines how the shift from artisanal production to 'fast fashion' over the past 150 years has devalued women’s textile labour and how skilled textile/ garment makers and the organizations that support them are preserving and reviving heritage traditions. It also offers examples of how socially engaged artists in Asia and the diaspora use their work to criticize labour and environmental abuses in the global fashion industry.

Download or read book Globalization at Risk written by Gary Clyde Hufbauer and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-19 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History has declared globalization the winner of the 20th century. Globalization connected the world and created wealth unimaginable in the wake of the Second World War. But the financial crisis of 2008-09 has now placed at risk the liberal economic policies behind globalization. Engulfing the entire world, the crisis gave new fuel to the skeptics of the benefits of economic integration. Policy responses seem to favor anti-globalizers. New regulations could balkanize the global financial system, while widespread protectionist impulses might undo the Doha Round. Issues from climate change to national security may be used as convenient excuses to keep imports out, keep jobs at home, and to clamp down on global capital. Will globalization triumph or perish in the 21st century? What reforms make sense in the post-crisis world?International economists Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Kati Suominen argue that globalization has been a force of great good, one that needs to be actively advanced and honed. Drawing on the latest economic analyses, they reveal the drivers and effects of global finance and trade, lay out the key risks to globalization, and offer a practical policy roadmap for managing the challenges while increasing the gains. Vital reading for anyone in business, finance, foreign affairs, or economics, Globalization at Risk is sure to advance public debate on this defining issue of the 21st century.

Download or read book Threads of Global Desire written by Dagmar Schäfer and published by Pasold Studies in Textile, Dress and Fashion History. This book was released on 2018-05 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considering silk as a major force of cross-cultural interaction, this book examines the integration of silk production and consumption into various cultures in the pre-modern world.

Download or read book Market Threads written by Koray Çalişkan and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-16 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is a global market? How does it work? At a time when new crises in world markets cannot be satisfactorily resolved through old ideas, Market Threads presents a detailed analysis of the international cotton trade and argues for a novel and groundbreaking understanding of global markets. The book examines the arrangements, institutions, and power relations on which cotton trading and production depend, and provides an alternative approach to the analysis of pricing mechanisms. Drawing upon research from such diverse places as the New York Board of Trade and the Turkish and Egyptian countrysides, the book explores how market agents from peasants to global merchants negotiate, accept, reject, resist, reproduce, understand, and misunderstand a global market. The book demonstrates that policymakers and researchers must focus on the specific practices of market maintenance in order to know how they operate. Markets do not simply emerge as a relationship among self-interested buyers and sellers, governed by appropriate economic institutions. Nor are they just social networks embedded in wider economic social structures. Rather, global markets are maintained through daily interventions, the production of prosthetic prices, and the waging of struggles among those who produce and exchange commodities. The book illustrates the crucial consequences that these ideas have on economic reform projects and market studies. Spanning a variety of disciplines, Market Threads offers an original look at the world commodity trade and revises prevailing explanations for how markets work.

Download or read book Threads of Labour written by Angela Hale and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-07-20 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Threads of Labour presents new empirical research by a network of garment workers' support organizations and makes sense of global supply chains from the bottom up. Presents new empirical research by a network of garment workers' support organizations in ten different locations in Asia, Europe and Mexico. Creates a blueprint for conducting worker-orientated action research in order to better understand and resist the negative impact of globalization on labour. Ensures that workers' voices reach those who are already trying to reconfigure global capitalism in more humane directions. Explores the ways in which workers might begin to develop new forms of organization that are more suited to securing gains in the global garment industry. Bridges the gap between activist and academic research, improving the conversation between these two groups.

Download or read book Globalization and Its Enemies written by Daniel Cohen and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2007-09-07 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative argument that the frustrations of globalization stem from the gap between the expectations created and the lagging economic reality in poor countries. The enemies of globalization—whether they denounce the exploitation of poor countries by rich ones or the imposition of Western values on traditional cultures—see the new world economy as forcing a system on people who do not want it. But the truth of the matter, writes Daniel Cohen in this provocative account, may be the reverse. Globalization, thanks to the speed of twenty-first-century communications, shows people a world of material prosperity that they do want—a vivid world of promises that have yet to be fulfilled. For the most impoverished developing nations, globalization remains only an elusive image, a fleeting mirage. Never before, Cohen says, have the means of communication—the media—created such a global consciousness, and never have economic forces lagged so far behind expectations. Today's globalization, Cohen argues, is the third act in a history that began with the Spanish Conquistadors in the sixteenth century and continued with Great Britain's nineteenth-century empire of free trade. In the nineteenth century, as in the twenty-first, a revolution in transportation and communication did not promote widespread wealth but favored polarization. India, a part of the British empire, was just as poor in 1913 as it was in 1820. Will today's information economy do better in disseminating wealth than the telegraph did two centuries ago? Presumably yes, if one gauges the outcome from China's perspective; surely not, if Africa's experience is a guide. At any rate, poor countries require much effort and investment to become players in the global game. The view that technologies and world trade bring wealth by themselves is no more true today than it was two centuries ago. We should not, Cohen writes, consider globalization as an accomplished fact. It is because of what has yet to happen—the unfulfilled promises of prosperity—that globalization has so many enemies in the contemporary world. For the poorest countries of the world, the problem is not so much that they are exploited by globalization as that they are forgotten and excluded.