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Begin New Search Topic Globalization Content Type Working Paper Publishing Institution Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University

1. An Interdisciplinary Forum on Time and Globalization

Author:
Christopher Breu
Publication Date:
09-2012
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
How do globalization and temporality relate to one another? This was the question addressed by a 2011 workshop sponsored by Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition (IGHC) at McMaster University. In the past, globalization and temporality have both been characterized as moving forward independently of human volition, carrying all of us along in their flow. Now there are large literatures challenging this view, and showing how globalization and time are constructed and modified by humans. However, with some important exceptions (Harvey 1990, Sassen 2000, Appadurai 2005, Bauman 2000), the literatures on globalization and on temporality have developed separately from one another. It is important to bring these literatures into closer dialogue, because a great many urgent issues in contemporary human affairs involve interactions between temporality and globalization. These range from individual-level questions, such as managing the accelerated pace of everyday life, to large epochal problems, such as climate change, that may not always be readily apprehended, but are no less significant. The workshop participants, drawing on their backgrounds in a variety of academic disciplines, addressed the relationship between temporality and globalization in a variety of settings. Six of the papers presented at this workshop are gathered in this IGHC Working Paper. The assembled papers, individually and jointly, identify a number of themes of particular relevance to any comprehensive discussion of globalization and time. By way of introduction, it is useful to briefly consider how the most prominent of these themes are addressed by the contributors.
Topic:
Globalization, Human Development, and Time
Political Geography:
Global Focus

2. The Politics of Globalization Studies: From the problem of sovereignty to a problematics of government

Author:
Wanda Vrasti
Publication Date:
10-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
In the interest of convenience, the study of globalization can be grouped into three camps – hyperglobalist, sceptic, and transformationalist approaches (Held et al. 1999). Over the past decade or so, the first two have gradually fallen into disrepute for their empirical weaknesses and their theoretical lack of sophistication. By default, proponents of the transformationalist thesis, although by no means a unified approach, have emerged triumphant by being able to offer increasingly compelling examinations of the changing relation between space and sovereignty.
Topic:
Globalization, Sovereignty, Political Theory, and Governance
Political Geography:
North America

3. Wal-Mart: The Panopticon of Time

Author:
Max Haiven and Scott Stoneman
Publication Date:
04-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
At a moment when the future of global capitalism seems altogether uncertain, we want to take another look at Wal-Mart, the world's largest corporation. Despite its importance to the American and global economy, surprisingly little critical scholarship has emerged on the “Beast from Bentonville.” In this working-paper we suggest that we can understand Wal-Mart as both a unique instance as well as a telling example of tendencies within the process of planetary social transformation that has come to be known as globalization. In particular, Wal-Mart strives to become what we will call a “panopticon of time”: a particularly acute and emblematic crystallization of social, economic and technological forces which express a new constellation of power under globalizing capitalism. Wal- Mart represents among the most advanced consolidations of corporate, financial, technological and managerial technologies which employees afford it unprecedented control over consumers, employees, sub-contractors, communities and even nations, as well as unprecedented profit. We argue its power stems in part from its ability to hinge various modes of power: the local and the global, spectacle and surveillance, the private and the public, the everyday and the exceptional. And it is driven as much by the need to intervene in the production of subjects and the shaping of networks as the need to generate profit; indeed, these two imperatives have become inseparable. Wal-Mart is a symptom and an agent of the depotentiation of time under corporate globalization, the confinement or incarceration of temporality within the neoliberal webs of technology, commerce and management.
Topic:
Globalization, Political Economy, Political Theory, and Power Politics

4. Omens and Threats in the Doha Round: The Decline of Multilaterialism?

Author:
Daniel Drache and Marc D. Froese
Publication Date:
05-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
Faced with the lengthening shadow of the Doha Round of trade negotiations, scholars often point to the seven years it took negotiators to conclude the Uruguay Round. This paper argues that the negotiating deadlock in the Doha Round represents a transformative shift on the part of Member nations away from the current model of multi-platform, single-undertaking multilateralism and towards smaller negotiating platforms. We examine two dynamics that mark this round as qualitatively different from the Uruguay Round. First, new, highly vocal global trading powers such as India, China and Brazil have begun to use their market power to push for a trade deal that directly benefits the Global South. Second, the new rules for trade that were agreed to in the Uruguay Round had promised a reduction in non-tariff protectionism, but the continuing popularity of protectionist industrial policies has shown the developing world that greater access to northern markets might not be delivered at the World Trade Organization. The paper concludes with a discussion of trade multilateralism in historical context. This is not the first time the world has been faced with systemic changes in international economic relations. In the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, global trade broke down – first with the end of the British free trade system, and shortly thereafter with the catastrophic collapse of the interwar trading order. Nevertheless, this qualitative shift in the negotiating strategies of states need not be seen as a return to protectionism. The explosion of preferential regional agreements offers a number of new ways to address the social and political dimensions of economic integration.
Topic:
Agriculture, Globalization, International Organization, International Trade and Finance, Post Colonialism, Sovereignty, Treaties and Agreements, and World Trade Organization
Political Geography:
China and Brazil

5. Global Tensions, Global Possibilities: Everyday Forces of Conformity and Contestation

Author:
Jean Michel Montsion, Samah Sabra, James Gaede, Jeremy D. Kowalski, Rhiannon Mosher, Teresa Kramarz, Kathryn Mossman, Adam Sneyd, Luis Alfredo Marroquin-Campos, Rob Downie, Heather Battles, Adrienne Smith, Ahmed T. Rashid, Joanne Nowak, Liam Riley, David Haldane Lee, Greg Shupak, Arun Nedra Rodrigo, Lauren Scannell, Naomi Achus, and Ethel Tungohan
Publication Date:
07-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
Academics theorizing and analyzing the impacts of globalization on everyday life are conventionally divided between those who highlight the (overt or hidden) opportunities and advantages afforded by globalizing processes and others who emphasize their negative impacts on populations across the world. The former tend to focus on such things as increased access to paid labour, faster modes of communication, and technological ease of transportation (of people and information) across global networks. The latter, in contrast, generally stress the vicious implications of globalization's systemic processes, which continue to exacerbate polarization between rich and poor and, invariably, mean uneven access to labour, communication, and transportation. With this division in mind, the Graduate Student Research Group of the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition held a conference titled Global tensions, global possibilities in September 2007. The conference organizers intended to bring together graduate students to challenge the above oppositions which often characterize contemporary globalization theories. By gathering an eclectic group of young scholars from various disciplines and backgrounds, the key aim driving Global tensions, global possibilities was to question disciplinary and attitudinal divides in theorizing globalization. A secondary, and related, intention of the organizers was for the conference to be a space in which participants (i.e. presenters, discussants, and audience) would together (re)think the implications of globalizing processes in non-dichotomizing ways that transcend such traditional divides. The organizers recognized that their intentions were not necessarily revolutionary. The works of several prominent scholars in various disciplines have denoted the need to be critical of further polarizing contemporary globalization theory (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Mudimbe-Boyi 2002; Ong 2006). For example, in their discussions of globalization, Jean and John Comaroff (2001) have indicated that globalizing processes and their attendant consequences can be neither classified nor understood in simple terms. Like the Comaroffs, the conference organizers felt that one cannot deny the intense messiness of any investigation of globalizing processes. Instead, they wanted to stress that globalization is simultaneously creative and destructive, enabling and constraining, beneficial and detrimental. Given that it has come out of the conference, the same line of reasoning forms the driving force behind this graduate student volume of the Working Paper Series. Below, we discuss our rationale for organizing the volume in the way we have. We begin with a brief discussion of our understanding of the need to move beyond theorizing globalization as either liberating or oppressive. Throughout the following sections, we move back and forth between our theorization of this necessity and the specifics of how the dichotomy beyond which we want to move re-emerged in the context of the conference. In the final section, we provide a brief description of the papers and our motivation for organizing them as we have.
Topic:
Gender Issues, Globalization, Health, Human Rights, Human Welfare, International Organization, Markets, Migration, and Science and Technology

6. Urban Representation of Multiculturalism in a Global City: Toronto's Iranian Community

Author:
Shahrzad Faryadi
Publication Date:
08-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
Globalization is known as a set of interrelated processes that are increasing economic, political, social, and cultural interconnections in the whole world (O'Byrne 1997). There is a direct connection between globalization and the city as “Globalization takes place in cities and cities embody and reflect globalization. Global processes lead to changes in the city and cities rework and situate globalization” (Short and Kim 1999, 9). A global city is conceived as a strategic site not only for global capital, but also for the transnationalization of labour and the formation of translocal communities and identities. In this regard, global cities are a site for new types of political operations and for a whole range of new cultural and subjective operations (Sassen 2005). As a consequence of globalization and the development of global cities and networks, the level of international immigration has been increasing, too, in the last decades. The growing number of world immigrants has raised the plurality of different cultures in global cities (as well as in the global city of Toronto), inspiring in such cities a “multicultural nature” (Hawkins 2006).
Topic:
Civil Society and Globalization
Political Geography:
Canada

7. Global Panic, Local Repercussions: Exploring the Impact of Avian Influenza in Vietnam

Author:
Stacy Lockerbie
Publication Date:
09-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
Despite deliberately marked and guarded political and cultural boundaries, the current global state is one where epidemic is the norm and disease travels across the globe through the transnational movement of people and international trade. While developing countries or countries receiving foreign aid are at the centre of disease fatality and transmission, the rhetoric of blame serves to strengthen socio-economic divisions that divide East from West and North from South with adjectives like “modern” and “primitive,” “hygienic” and “unhygienic.” Using chicken as a metaphor, this paper draws attention to the paradoxes and misconceptions of avian influenza in Vietnam and through the exploration of local voices, comes to a better understanding of how the disease rhetoric has affected the social and cultural landscape. This research is situated in the discipline somewhere between the anthropology of infectious disease and the anthropology of food, while also incorporating themes from anthropological theory pertaining to borders, hegemonies and race. Moving beyond the epidemiological study of avian flu, I draw attention to the phenomenology or lived experience in a state of disease as residents voluntarily omit chicken, a valuable source of protein, from their diet in order to stay healthy.
Topic:
Globalization and Health
Political Geography:
Asia and Vietnam

8. Gendering Globalization: Imperial Domesticity and Identity in Northern Pakistan

Author:
Nancy Cook
Publication Date:
03-2007
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
In this paper I contribute to the feminist project of developing gendered analyses of globalization by providing a micro-level study of the effects of intersecting gender, racial, and class relations on global processes of cultural imperialism in contemporary northern Pakistan. More specifically, I examine the mutually constitutive link between the structuring of Western women development workers' domestic spaces and identities in Gilgit and imperial processes, what I will call imperial domesticity. Women's gendered rituals of domesticity and strategies of servant management are the key facets of imperial domesticity highlighted in the paper.
Topic:
Civil Society, Gender Issues, and Globalization
Political Geography:
Pakistan and Asia

9. The Politics of Form and Alternative Autonomies: Indigenous Women, Subsistence Economies and the Gift Paradigm

Author:
Rauna Kuokkanen
Publication Date:
11-2007
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
Many indigenous rights advocates around the world have emphasized over and over again the paramount importance of collective autonomy as a precondition for the long-term survival of Indigenous peoples as distinctive collectivities. Despite the fears and concerns of nation-states, for a great majority of Indigenous people this kind of autonomy — autonomy as a people — does not imply secession or independent statehood but "appropriate forms of association with surrounding states that would safeguard their distinctive identities and special relationships to their territories" (Lâm 2000, 135). Indigenous peoples' struggle for self-determination, therefore, is also a struggle to exist as a collective in the future, which implies being able to decide about and have control over that future as a people. In short, there is a difference between struggles for autonomy and separatist movements. Nira Yuval-Davis suggests.
Topic:
Civil Society, Economics, Gender Issues, and Globalization

10. Techno-Religious Imaginaries: On the Spiritual Telegraph and the Circum-Atlantic World of the 19th Century

Author:
Jeremy Stolow
Publication Date:
03-2006
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
Whether looking at matters of invention and design, of distribution and ownership, or of reception and use, popular histories of technology are typically framed within one of two meta-narratives: the optimistic or the dystopian. In the former case, technologies are seen as benign instruments that fulfill the needs, intentions, and desires of their human users. An extreme form of such technophilia can be found in the pages of the American magazine Wired, and among techno-gurus such as Nicholas Negroponte, who wax poetic about an imminent world populated by therapeutic Barbie dolls, selfcleaning shirts, driverless cars, and a range of devices enabling immediate access to inexhaustible supplies of media and information. This optimism has a considerable progeny, one root of which might be traced back to early modern European conceptions of the mechanical order of nature, and its susceptibility to ever-advancing human powers of inspection and rational design. In this tradition, technology is a pliable handmaiden to the forward march of history, taking such forms as the Haussmannized city, the Macadamized countryside, the prosthetically enhanced body, or the digitized archive. On the other hand, there is a tradition of thinking about technology, such as one finds in the philosophical writings of Martin Heidegger or Jacques Ellul, which is both dystopian and technophobic. Here one is presented with a vision of technology as an autonomous, self-directed realm, indifferent and impervious to our feeble calls for restraint, democratic control, or humane purpose. In this scheme, modern technologies resemble juggernauts running loose in the world, devouring the natural environment, and even human bodies, and transforming them into raw materials for their own mechanical processes.
Topic:
Globalization, Religion, Science and Technology, and History
Political Geography:
America