Individuals and Societies in a Global World

A rich collection of diverse voices,Sociology of Globalizationexamines the processes of globalization as well as its impact on people around the world. It looks beyond the headlines, stereotypes, and hype and features a balanced selection of classic scholarship and theory, cutting-edge research, and engaging journalism. Key pieces from prominent scholars, journalists, and theorists will resonate with students, stretch the classroom into their daily lives, and give the study of globalization concrete meaning. Each of three sections--culture, economy, and politics--begins with an original introduction from the editor which familiarizes readers with essential themes and concepts and provides necessary context for the readings that follow. Useful resources for further research, including websites, films, and class exercises, are also provided to exemplify and add relevance to major topics. Accessible and expansive, this is the ideal primary reader or supplement for undergraduate courses on the sociology of globalization.

Since ancient times the exercise of individual freedoms has been inseparable from the expansion of the market, driven by the search for profit. This force, namely capitalism, has stimulated human creativity and aggression in ways that have produced immense benefits. As capitalism has broadened its scope in the epoch of globalization, these benefits have become even greater. Human beings have been liberated to an even greater degree than hitherto from the tyranny of nature, from the control of others, from poverty and from war. The advances achieved by the globalization of capitalism have appeared all the more striking, when set against the failure of non-capitalist systems of economic organization. However, capitalist freedom is a two-edged sword. In an epoch of capitalist globalisation, its contradictions have intensified. They comprehensively threaten the natural environment. They have intensified global inequality within both rich and poor countries, and between the internationalised global power elite and the mass of citizens rooted within their respective nation. In this remarkable, expansive text, Peter Nolan explores the impact of the domineering economic phenomenon on our personal and social liberties.

Paula S. Fass, a pathbreaker in children's history and the history of education, turns her attention in Children of a New World to the impact of globalization on children's lives, both in the United States and on the world stage. Globalization, privatization, the rise of the "work-centered" family, and the triumph of the unregulated marketplace, she argues, are revolutionizing the lives of children today. Fass begins by considering the role of the school as a fundamental component of social formation, particularly in a nation of immigrants like the United States. She goes on to examine children as both creators of culture and objects of cultural concern in America, evident in the strange contemporary fear of and fascination with child abduction, child murder, and parental kidnapping. Finally, Fass moves beyond the limits of American society and brings historical issues into the present and toward the future, exploring how American historical experience can serve as a guide to contemporary globalization as well as how globalization is altering the experience of American children and redefining childhood. Clear and scholarly, serious but witty, Children of a New World provides a foundation for future historical investigations while adding to our current understanding of the nature of modern childhood, the role of education for national identity, the crisis of family life, and the influence of American concepts of childhood on the world's definitions of children's rights. As a new generation comes of age in a global world, it is a vital contribution to the study of childhood and globalization.

A new angle on the globalisation debate, which celebrates successful resistance as well as exploring the dangers. As languages and local cultures are swept away by the market-driven monoculture, Jeremy Seabrook looks at the threat to cultural diversity and integrity all around the globe, including in western societies. Amongst the disappearing cultures, Seabrook finds that resistance is breaking out as people rediscover the imprtance of the local and the value of community.

Many contemporary issues cannot be readily or fully understood at the level of the nation state and the concept of globalization is used to develop understanding through the analysis of global (transnational) processes. This volume explores the phenomenon of Americanization, and its worldwide impact, and the cultural consequences of globalization.

We inhabit a world of consequences and butterfly effects. When global economies integrate, what disintegrates as a result? The answer, Ronaldo Munck contends, is social equality. This is the first book to view globalization through the lens of social exclusion - defined as all the ways in which people are prevented from obtaining the necessities of life. place, gender, and class, in both the global North and South, the author highlights disparities in living conditions; the feminization of poverty and the global sex trade; the effects of racism, migration, and multiculturalism; and the formation and political manifestations of social class. He boldly develops a politics and ethics of transformation to move us beyond social exclusion - even beyond mere social inclusion. He provides us with the tools to transform society from within, creating a more democratic and just global order.

Throughout all ages, the activities of mankind have weighed heavily upon the environment. In turn, changes in that environment have favoured the rise of certain social groups and limited the actions of others. Despite this, environmental history has remained a 'blind spot' for most social and economic historians. This is to be regretted, as the various and unequal effects of environmental change often explain the strengths and weaknesses of certain social groups, irrespective of their being defined along the lines of class, gender and ethnicity. This volume brings together the expertise of social and environmental historians in an effort to assess the extent to which transnational agents changed socioecological space as a consequence of globalization since the Late Middle Ages.

Globalization, Gender, and Media tackles the emergence of "sexy violence" imagery and the coalescence of the sexual and violent meanings in contemporary global mainstream news, television, film, and social media. Tuija Parikka analyzes how such imagery advances particular interpretations of globalization, and the role of gender in such projects. Cases range from serious news journalism and film to social media spectacles, brought under the umbrellas of media production, contents, and perception. These versatile cases introduce issues revealing the limits of Western freedom discourse in the social media; universalizing an idea of motherhood and ethnicity in news production; time, home, and class in the formation of global imbalances of power online and in reality TV; instability of sex and gender in discourses of rape and porn; politicizing majority-minority relations in the social media. Globalization, Gender, and Media emphasizes the need to consider the interconnectedness and material - discursive aspects of globalization and the reality of gender in the media.

The Routledge International Handbook of Globalization Studiesoffers students clear and informed chapters on the history of globalization and key theories that have considered the causes and consequences of the globalization process. There are substantive sections looking at demographic, economic, technological, social and cultural changes in globalization. The handbook examines many negative aspects - new wars, slavery, illegal migration, pollution and inequality - but concludes with an examination of responses to these problems through human rights organizations, international labour law and the growth of cosmopolitanism. There is a strong emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches with essays covering sociology, demography, economics, politics, anthropology and history. The Handbook written in a clear and direct style will appeal to a wide audience. The extensive references and sources will direct students to areas of further study.

Servants of Globalization offers a groundbreaking study of migrant Filipino domestic workers who leave their own families behind to do the caretaking work of the global economy. Since its initial publication, the book has informed countless students and scholars and set the research agenda on labor migration and transnational families. With this second edition, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas returns to Rome and Los Angeles to consider how the migrant communities have changed. Children have now joined their parents. Male domestic workers are present in significantly greater numbers. And, perhaps most troubling, the population has aged, presenting new challenges for the increasingly elderly domestic workers. New chapters discuss these three increasingly important constituencies. The entire book has been revised and updated, and a new introduction offers a global, comparative overview of the citizenship status of migrant domestic workers. Servants of Globalization remains the defining work on the international division of reproductive labor.

Despite the fact that the globalization process tends to reinforce existing inequality structures and generate new areas of inequality on multiple levels, systematic analyses on this very important field remain scarce. Hence, this book approaches the complex question of inequality not only from different regional perspectives, covering Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin and Northern America, but also from different disciplinary perspectives, namely cultural anthropology, economics, ethnology, geography, international relations, sociology, and political sciences. The contributions are subdivided into three essential fields of research: Part I analyzes the socio-economic dimension of global exclusion, highlighting in particular the impacts of internationalization and globalization processes on national social structures against the background of theoretical concepts of social inequality. Part II addresses the political dimension of global inequalities. Since the decline of the Soviet Union new regional powers like Brazil, China, India and South Africa have emerged, creating power shifts in international relations that are the primary focus of the second part. Lastly, Part III examines the structural and transnational dimension of inequality patterns, which can be concretized in the rise of globalized national elites and the emergence of multinational networks that transcend the geographical and imaginative borders of nation states.

'Vulnerability' is now a key term in globalisation studies. It is used to describe how globalisation impacts on individual security, local communities and even global flows of trade, finance and investment. Yet there has been little attempt to interrogate the term and what it is trying to express about globalisation. Peadar Kirby examines what is really meant by 'vulnerability' and links it to new forms of violence that have resulted from decreased security and social cohesion. He argues that vulnerability and violence are characteristic features of a new world order dominated by neoliberal globalisation. Illustrating his argument with a wealth of examples taken from all over the world -- from the sudden collapse of the middle class in Argentina to increased levels of poverty internationally -- he offers a robust theoretical grounding that will be of use to anyone studying vulnerability and violence and their relation to contemporary globalisation.

A sociologist and former fashion model takes readers inside the elite global party circuit of "models and bottles" to reveal how beautiful young women are used to boost the status of men Million-dollar birthday parties, megayachts on the French Riviera, and $40,000 bottles of champagne. In today's New Gilded Age, the world's moneyed classes have taken conspicuous consumption to new extremes. In Very Important People, sociologist, author, and former fashion model Ashley Mears takes readers inside the exclusive global nightclub and party circuit--from New York City and the Hamptons to Miami and Saint-Tropez--to reveal the intricate economy of beauty, status, and money that lies behind these spectacular displays of wealth and leisure. Mears spent eighteen months in this world of "models and bottles" to write this captivating, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking narrative. She describes how clubs and restaurants pay promoters to recruit beautiful young women to their venues in order to attract men and get them to spend huge sums in the ritual of bottle service. These "girls" enhance the status of the men and enrich club owners, exchanging their bodily capital for as little as free drinks and a chance to party with men who are rich or aspire to be. Though they are priceless assets in the party circuit, these women are regarded as worthless as long-term relationship prospects, and their bodies are constantly assessed against men's money. A story of extreme gender inequality in a seductive world, Very Important People unveils troubling realities behind moneyed leisure in an age of record economic disparity.

"Not then, men and their moments. Rather, moment and their men," writes Erving Goffman in the introduction to his groundbreaking 1967 Interaction Ritual, a study of face-to-face interaction in natural settings, that class of events which occurs during co-presence and by virtue of co-presence. The ultimate behavioral materials are the glances, gestures, positionings, and verbal statements that people continuously feed into situations, whether intended or not. A sociology of occasions is here advocated. Social organization is the central theme, but what is organized is the co-mingling of persons and the temporary interactional enterprises that can arise therefrom. A normatively stabilized structure is at issue, a "social gathering," but this is a shifting entity, necessarily evanescent, created by arrivals and killed by departures. The major section of the book is the essay "Where the Action Is," drawing on Goffman's last major ethnographic project observation of Nevada casinos. Tom Burns says of Goffman's work "The eleven books form a singularly compact body of writing. All his published work was devoted to topics and themes which were closely connected, and the methodology, angles of approach and of course style of writing remained characteristically his own throughout. Interaction Ritual in particular is an interesting account of daily social interaction viewed with a new perspective for the logic of our behavior in such ordinary circumstances as entering a crowded elevator or bus." In his new introduction, Joel Best considers Goffman's work in toto and places Interaction Ritual in that total context as one of Goffman's pivotal works: "His subject matter was unique. In sharp contrast to the natural tendency of many scholars to tackle big, important topics, Goffman was a minimalist, working on a small scale, and concentrating on the most mundane, ordinary social contacts, on everyday life.'"