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My essay illuminates the plights of those who live on the southern shore of the Mediterranean under the antagonistic forces of globalisation, according to which the free movement of capital between...

The present article approaches the trends of HRD in the Finnish pulp and paper industry. The recent two decades have introduced several major changes into this field of industry. Technical breakthroughs have led to drastic changes in the competence requirements of the personnel. On the other hand, the boom of mergers and acquisitions in this industry segment has cut down the humber of corporations with world wide operations. Globalization challenges the European labor market, social policy, vocational education as well as HRD practices to develop high value jobs and competencies essential for survival in the labor cost competition.

The rapid speed of globalization and increasing economic interdependence has had a direct impact on defence policies and countries are constantly seen fine-tuning their priorities. Walden Bello arg...

The basic themes in the White Paper of the European Commission on education and training, published in November 1995, were the coming of the information society and globalization. These two "shake-ups" were seen as current realities that bring challenges and risks as they broaden and deepen the feeling of insecurity that has been recorded as the most significant feature of the 1995-96 conjuncture in Europe. The White Paper expressed the Commission's strong interest in the real contribution of education to the growth of productivity and competitiveness of the European economy and to the softening of the social consequences of the "neoliberal voluntarism" of the early 1990s that officially prevailed in Maastricht through the adoption of the European unified economic indicators.1

Clare Short, the UK Government's International Development Secretary, characterises the anti-globalisation movement as 'well-intentioned' but 'destructive and dangerous'. Such sentiments could be turned round and applied to her Department's recent White Paper (WP) entitled Elimninating World Poverty: Making Globalisation Work for the Poor, published in December 2000. Well-intentioned, it has introduced some useful legislative intentions. Destructive and dangerous, its faith in global capitalism as the solution to world poverty is fraught with problems of intensifying unacceptable levels of human exploitation and environmental degradation.

(2001). Review of Eliminating World Poverty: Making globalization work for the poor. DFID White Paper on International Development, 2000. Journal of Human Development: Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 153-155.

This paper examines the extent to which the key elements of globalisation, such as international trade, investments, foreign aid, transnational labour migration and tourism have been mainstreamed into the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) in the Asia-Pacific region. Using a content analysis, the paper finds that trade openness gained the highest priority in the PRSPs, followed by foreign investment, aid, tourism and, lastly, migration. As transnational migration of low-skilled workers brings higher benefits to poorer countries, further research is essential to find out the reasons behind the fact that this issue is being given the lowest priority in the PRSPs. Integration de la mondialisation dans les Documents de strategie pour la reduction de la pauvretedans la region Asie-Pacifique Cet article traite de la mesure dans laquelle les elements cles de la mondialisation, comme le commerce international, les investissements, l'aide etrangere, la migration transnationale de la main-d'œuvre et le touri...

The undeniable realities of globalization at the dawn of the 21st century have brought the United States and its citizens to the startling realization that we must grapple politically, economically, and culturally with the wide range of diversity existing within and without our borders. As greater numbers of culturally diverse persons are now represented in their caseloads, psychoanalysts are also forced to examine the relevance of psychoanalytic theories and practice in meeting their needs. The author discusses three papers that propose overlapping and differing opinions as to the function of psychoanalysis in the lives of culturally diverse patients, and its capacity to influence more public, social and political change. This paper questions the meaning of the term “culture.” It attempts to tease apart the nature of memory and dissociation among those who suffer intergenerational trauma because of their membership in particular cultural or ethnic groups. Also addressed is the extent to which, as describ...

[Extract] With the current growing interest in media and the global economy, Don Slater's New Media, Development and Globalization may appear to be a straightforward, state-of-things type of book, but behind the cover it is a deconstructionist critique of the titular concepts. New Media's title dramatically contrasts with the book's content, as Slater breaks down each of the three elements from a universally applicable, taken-for-granted object to a culturally constructed network of people and things that must be constantly negotiated. By the book's end, Slater challenges core dogmas in order to promote change and growth.

Identity and structure as signifiers of the unconscious are in flux as a result of the evaporation of the relations in the modern world. The author develops some hypotheses on the input of the changing identity in respect to the psychoanalytic encounter in therapy and to processes in institutions. He comes to the conclusion that the orientation to the individual dynamics, the therapy room and the therapeutic relationship, which is at present substantial for most analysts, will no longer be relevant. Whether we will be successful or not as psychoanalysts depends on whether we see the world growing together, share the responsibility for it and take up the burning questions of globalisation.

Organizational trends toward team-based structures, globalization, and reliance on communication technology have spurred research addressing the communication processes of virtual teams. However, much of the extant research focuses on the ways virtual teams differ from conventional, face-to-face teams and fails to examine variations in virtual team characteristics that may impact team communication behaviors and experiences. The study reported here identifies two categories of virtual team characteristics (communicative and structural) and uses these to explore their relationships to team communication technology use and team outcomes. Analysis of data from 98 virtual teams reveals that structural features primarily relate to media use, whereas communication considerations are associated with team outcomes. Additional analyses indicate that various communicative predictors moderate the relationships between technology use and outcomes. These results point to theoretical and practical implications for rese...

The Globalization and Localization in Computer-Assisted Language Learning (GLoCALL) series of conferences, which are jointly organized by APACALL and PacCALL, aim primarily to share knowledge, rese...

As an explanatory concept, globalization is of relatively recent vintage. Even though the word “global” is more than 400 years old, the use of the term “globalization” in a processual sense only em...

The authority of the nation states and their capacity to govern their education policy has been reconfigured by the processes of globalisation. This paper examines recent education policy in Pakistan in order to reveal the nature of national authority in education policy-making in a challenging context. The central piece of analysis is the pre-policy text issued by the Ministry of Education, Pakistan — the White Paper. This analysis is further supported through interviews with senior policy actors and other significant policy texts. The paper identifies several tensions caused by the interaction of global and national education policy priorities and explores how the national government of Pakistan seeks to expand its SoA through ‘soft’ governance approaches despite the material and financial constraints within which it operates.

That the lack of competitiveness of EU member states in the wake of the globalization era was a problem from the start of EMU is clear from the various interventions on this issue by the European institutions. These started from the White Paper on Growth, Competitiveness and Employment, of 1993, up to the various versions of the Lisbon agenda and agenda 2020. It might even be possible to hypothesize, in line with Colin Crouch and the literature on the political economy of competitiveness, that the establishment of EMU was an attempt to regain some of the competitiveness lost with the advent of the era of globalization. Accordingly, the role of the ECB to save the Eurozone dominant socio-economic sectors has been divided into two phases. In the first phase, the strategy was to rely on the depreciation of the euro vis-a-vis the dollar, which indeed gave some results in the first years of life of the European currency. With respect to the present phase, it is undeniable that the burden of the costs o...

This article contextualises Education in Pakistan, a White Paper (2007), an influential education policy paper in Pakistan. The focus is on the ways the White Paper constructs its own contexts as a complement to the policy solutions proffered. Here we recognise Seddon’s point about the discursive work of policy in constructing context. We focus on the way the White Paper constructs its political/ideological context and its global/national context. The White Paper works with the trope of a binary construction of Islam – fundamentalist or moderate – which rearticulates Orientalist Western constructions. The analysis of the construction of the global/national contexts demonstrates the framing of the policy by the Millennium Development Goals, and the Washington and post‐Washington consensus.

Yeung H. W.-C. Regional development and the competitive dynamics of global production networks: an East Asian perspective, Regional Studies. The debate on the nature and dynamics of regional development in both academic and policy circles has now moved on from the earlier focus on endogenous regional assets to analysing the complex relationship between globalization and regional change. This position paper attempts to engage with this debate through the experience of regional development in East Asia. The paper shows that regional development cannot be understood independently of the changing dynamics of global production networks. While the existing literature on East Asia tends to focus on the state as the key driver of economic development at the national and regional levels, it is argued that the developmental state is a necessary but not sufficient condition for regional development to take place. Instead, one needs to study the complex strategic coupling of those economic actors, particularly large ...

Editor's note: The following article is the final section of a ‘thought paper’ entitled ‘Contexts, comparison and critical research’ prepared for the National Research Foundation (NRF), the main state-funded agency supporting academic research in the natural and social sciences. It is included here as part of our ongoing debate on how to strengthen South African sociology, and we welcome responses in the form of publishable letters. The full paper, which was one of a number commissioned by the NRF, is available from the author. At present, NRF research funding is structured around nine inter-disciplinary ‘focus areas’, including one called ‘Challenge of Globalisation: Perspectives from the Global South,’ which the author was involved developing.

A large number of international institutions and policy makers advocate for the potential of globalization to deliver on the promises of development, and have reorganized development and poverty reduction strategies in a comprehensive way. This is reflected, for example, in the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper and Millennium Development Goals (MDG) initiatives. These strategies are globally constituted, although they are to be implemented within national domains as national development strategies. From this perspective, globalization and development are conceptualized in ahistorical terms, while methodologically the approach remains corroborated by the formal comparative method. I argue that a critical re-evaluation of the formal comparative method is necessary not merely to rectify a methodological problem, but also to expose the politics of methodological choices. The formal comparative method is inextricably underpinned by temporal and spatial delineations that reproduce a particularly problem...

This article discusses the current framework for development research in Norway, which today is entirely dependent on the development assistance budget. Compared to the policy statements of the seminal White Paper on development research (No. 42 (1987–88)), which distinguished between development research as an academic endeavour and the many other tasks related to it, the situation today is a relapse. Development research has been purged from national research policy, and funding from sources geared to academic research is dwindling. The close association between development research and development assistance policies marginalises development research from its many ‘mother disciplines’. Rather than attracting the interest and involvement of the academic community, the current structures for Norwegian development research seem to stigmatise development research as second-rate research that fails to keep up with the standards of the discipline. In addition to the issue of quality, it is highly regrettable...

This article analyzes recent policy proposals to reform Czech tertiary education. A brief overview of the evolution of Czech tertiary education presents the background against which emerging policy trends in education are examined. We relate the changes in tertiary education to the policy framework and recommendations of the OECD, underpinned by the ideology of neoliberal globalization. Finally, we discuss some issues that the Czech government is encountering while trying to implement its new policies in tertiary education and the consequences these policies may have on Czech tertiary education, academia and students.

The rise of Asian maritime power is a sequel to Rising Powers in Asia. Maritime power in the age of globalisation has been a critical instrument for the emergence of the latent powers and capabilit...

Many workplaces in Vietnam, such as international non-government organisations (INGOs), where Vietnamese staff collaborate with people from different cultures, have become increasingly culturally diverse and interdisciplinary. This paper is based on the findings of broader qualitative research conducted between December 2010 and November 2012 that explored young Vietnamese graduates’ experiences of working at the intersection of different cultural worlds in the context of development projects at INGOs in Vietnam. Interviewees were nineteen young Vietnamese graduates and six international directors or deputy directors. This paper discusses their experiences of working for INGOs. Young graduates developed intercultural communication skills, became empathetic with others, and reconciled disparate cultural practices. While helping local communities adapt to development projects, graduates harmoniously combined the cultural values and customs of both sides. They disseminated information, promoted mutual understanding, formed culturally relativistic attitudes, promoted cross-cultural empathy, spread international goodwill and reconciled disparate cultural practices, facilitated communication, and interacted with persons or groups of different cultures.

Some might fear that the local flavours of education will evaporate when encountering the hegemony of global, cognitive standards of the knowledge economy. This paper, however, shows that the evolution of curriculum can emerge in surprising directions, creating hybrid forms of education. We will investigate forms of meaning that emerge in Norwegian curriculum in the timespan 1988-2020, and show how systems theory can contribute to studying curriculum changes in a temporal perspective. The empirical case for investigation, is a diverse range of material, documenting curriculum changes in the mentioned period. Concepts from the late Luhmann’s 'theory of distinctions’ will thus be used to give meaning to the emergence of school reforms in Norway. The paper shows that Norwegian policy makers use increasingly complex deparadoxification strategies to deal with an uncertain future, conceptualized as externalization, oscillation, asymmetrisation, and internalization (re-entry). This is most pertinently demonstrated in the latest Norwegian reform LK20, in which a new, hybrid, 'temporal' construct of education, called “new-old-curriculum” or 'competence-Bildung’ emerges. We thus contribute to the field of curriculum studies by observing how changing observations of the past and future fuel and legitimize the evolution of new reforms. publishedVersion

In this paper, I develop the idea of cosmopolitan stances – one ‘intellectual’ and the other ‘aesthetic’ – to examine conceptions of cosmopolitanism within a range of university strategies. Recent research into cosmopolitanism has adopted a Bourdieusian lens, understanding it as cultural capital, which acts as a locus of stratification in the global system. By examining the strategies in 11 London-based universities, this paper sought to identify which cosmopolitan stances are mobilised. Following a thematic analysis this paper argues that those stances privileged by the global middle class are often implicit and generated incidentally as a function of other initiatives such as inclusivity and diversity, global citizenship, placement opportunities and graduate attributes/outcomes.

Globalisation, human capital, and institutions have been widely recognised in the literature to be causally important for economic development. Most of the available studies, however, treat measures of these determinants either separately or as substitutes. In this paper, we study the income effects of border openness to migration, education, and the rule of law (our proxies for globalisation, human capital, and institutions, respectively). Using cross-country data covering all regions of the world, and employing instrumental variables for all three factors, we establish that they each have a robust, positive, and strong association with economic development. We then consider whether there are any useful interrelations between the three factors in explaining income. On the interaction effects, the results show that the impact on income of: (i) migration can be materially affected by cultivating good institutions but this effect is not dependent on the education level; (ii) education is important irrespective of the levels of migration and institutions; and (iii) institutions is significantly improved by raising the level of education but is not influenced by migration level. Our paper makes a significant contribution as the first investigation into the effects of migration, education, and institutions jointly and as complements.

The papers assembled in this forum examine the Geographies of Fashion and Style through texts, visual images, material objects and processes of growing and making, as lived experiences and performative practices and, crucially, as concepts and practices that travel and mutate over time and place. In this introduction, we chart the Eurocentric cultural episteme of the fashion industry and fashion studies and dismantle it by drawing on, and out, globally-orientated and decentered approaches to the study of fashion and style. Our contribution to debates on fashion and style is to draw out five impulses arising at the intersections of geography and fashion studies and which our collection of papers brings to the fore: Theorizing, Queering, Decolonizing, Ecologizing, and Curating. In doing so, our introduction foregrounds the significance of fashion and style as sites of (micro) political problems and potentials, and is a call and a framework through which to extend and take seriously the diverse processes of fashion and style as sentient to the broader themes and scholarship of concern in the geohumanities.

University libraries are constituted in the literature by a range of overlapping and shifting conceptual models that are deployed to capture, express and legitimise their repurposing, progressive status and function within the university campus. Over the last two decades university libraries have been increasingly characterised as highly responsive and receptive to the fast-moving currents of technological innovation, and emergent teaching and learning paradigms. This paper charts and discusses the evolutionary trajectory of the university library set within an historical context, exploring the discursive influences that have both stimulated and propagated what might be described as progressive transformation. The paper seeks to portray and unpack the Zeitgeist of the academic library that has been cultivated in contemporary times;positioning the university library against a backdrop of global developments that have shaped the university sector from the early 1990s, and offering a macro-level exploration of the increasing status of the university library. © 2021 Patrick ODonnell and Lorraine Anderson Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

none 4 si This paper investigates the changing nature of quality employment in the United States, considering the social and economic consequences of neoliberal policies on the quality and availability of good jobs. Neoliberalism and its policies have profoundly influenced the American economy and impaired the socioeconomic landscape. Access to quality employment is a critical component of the future of work, as it shapes worker identities and empowers them to meet household needs. Quality employment can curb rising inequality, reduce job polarization, close urban-rural divides, and halt the corrosion of trust in American social democracy. This paper proposes a new conceptual and analytical approach to evaluating trends and structural changes in quality employment across American industries. The analytical framework involves a composite indicator — the Quality Employment Index (QEI) — that measures industries’ capacity to offer quality employment relative to one another. We use the QEI to rank fifteen American manufacturing industries from 2001 to 2018, and evaluate them in the context of the U.S. political economy. mixed Christine Ngoc Ngo, Marco R. Di Tommaso, Mattia Tassinari & John Marcus Dockerty Christine Ngoc Ngo, Marco R. Di Tommaso, Mattia Tassinari & John Marcus Dockerty

The rigorous deliberations of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law to create a global regulatory framework for Online Dispute Resolution have failed to generate a consensus. This paper analyses whether UNCITRAL’s ambition to develop an inclusive ODR regulatory platform has considered the complexities of cutting across cultural boundaries and power (im)balances. The objective here is to challenge UNCITRAL’s assumption that technology’s a-territorial nature facilitates homogeneity in ODR. To this end, the paper examines the implications of globalisation and the evolution of diverse cultures on ODR and proposes that an alternative approach is needed to combine cosmopolitan and legal pluralism in developing a platform trusted by all disputing parties. The author argues that the focus of contemporary research should extend to consider commonalities across and between national, regional and global levels of governance when regulating for ODR. The paper’s findings will inform policy makers and regulators, including UNCITRAL, when considering the role and interaction of various stakeholders when developing an ODR framework. The significance of this article lies in bringing out that the creation of a regulatory ODR framework needs to be more finely nuanced due to its nature as a normative and legal hybrid.

This paper draws on the fund of regional knowledge about career guidance that comparative research has generated in the “global South”. The goal of the paper is to add another voice to the challeng...

This paper focuses on the complex, entangled relationships between research and policy and suggests this is a very important topic in the contemporary era of so-called, ‘evidence-based’ or ‘research-based’ policy in education. The paper argues that we can only ever have ‘evidence-informed’ and ‘research-informed’ policy because all policy is an admixture of facts (research), politics (discourses, values, ideologies) and professional knowledges, a position readily apparent in respect of ESE and broader climate policy. The paper also argues that post-truth contexts and the politics of affect provide a significant backdrop to research/policy relationships with specific salience in respect of environmental and sustainability education (ESE) research and policy, given the conflictual politics surrounding this domain. The distinction between research for and of policy is used analytically in the paper. While research for policy, often conducted by private consultancies, might have a more direct and immediate impact on policy, it is suggested that research of policy, often conducted by academic researchers, and indeed research of a critical kind, potentially can have long-term impact, affecting the assumptive worlds of policy makers, often in unacknowledged ways. Globalization has resulted in the global circulation of policy ideas and thus research can affect policy at varying levels in contemporary policy processes of the restructured/rescaled state. Some consideration is also given to the rise of big data and policy as numbers. The paper discusses implications of such developments for considerations of research/policy relationships, particularly in relation to ESE. The paper concludes by suggesting the current climate emergency demands activist research and researchers in the ESE domain and also activist teachers and students.

The purpose of this paper is to provide community practitioners with the theoretical background to recognize and work in the interplay of global and local forces. This paper reviews globalization a...

The paper investigates the influences of globalisation on Russian higher education in accounting. Drawing on interviews with academic staff and secondary data sources, the paper discusses the tensi...

This paper contributes to a theoretical discussion of fashion studies by using the framework of creative industries to analyze the Chinese fashion system. First, the paper relates the robust theore...

This paper investigates how and why test-based accountability (TBA), a global model for education reform, began to dominate educational debates in Norway in the early 2000s, and how this policy has been operationalised and institutionalised over time. In examining the adoption and retention of TBA in Norway, we build on the cultural political economy framework, in combination with a political sociology-driven approach to policy instruments. The analysis draws on two data sources: four White Papers and 37 in-depth interviews with top-level politicians, policy-makers and stakeholders, conducted between September 2017 and February 2018. The findings indicate that ‘scandalisation’ of Norway’s below-expected PISA results and promotion of standardised testing as a neutral device contributed to the relatively abrupt adoption of national testing in the early 2000s. The increasingly dominant policy discourse equalising education quality and learning outcomes led to the institutionalisation of TBA, developed to ensure equity and quality standards in a decentralised education system. Increased visibility, benchmarking and administrative control are identified as key mechanisms in putting pressure on local actors to re-orient their behaviour. The study provides original insights into the drivers, expectations and strategies underlying TBA in a social democratic institutional regime.

A growing body of literature has addressed the ‘complex layers and nuances of today’s multilingual, mobile and global society’ [Barakos & Selleck, 2019, Elite multilingualism: Discourses, practices, and debates. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 40(5), 361]. Heller [2010. The commodification of language. Annual Review of Anthropology, 39, 101–114] argues that the globalised new economy is bound up with transformations of language and identity in many different ways [e.g. Bauman, 1997. Postmodernity and its discontents. London: Routledge; Castells, 2000. The information age: Economy, society and culture (3 vols). Oxford: Blackwell; Giddens, 1990. The consequences of modernity. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University California Press]. This paper examines how these themes play out in Wales, in the relative value placed on Welsh and English by ‘new’ or ‘learner’ speakers of Welsh. These ‘new’ or ‘learner’ speakers have learnt a minority language often through non-traditional routes and this article seeks to understand what linguistic varieties are capitalised by these learners, how they characterise their own language knowledge, and how these ‘new speakers’ position themselves in relation to mobility and the new globalised economy. Additionally, the paper seeks to explore how disparities in terms of access to resources can impact on new speakers’ trajectories–in other words, how different routes to bilingualism are perceived as opening or closing metaphorical doors.

Sweeping changes wrought by globalization and disaggregation of global value chains by multinational companies poses challenges to territorial theories of competitiveness. Contemplating notions propounded by economic geographers and strategic management scholars, the paper examines firm-level competitiveness at the intersection of spatially mobile versus spatially bound geographies. It aims to understand if linkages between actors within sticky local ecosystems are sufficient for firm internationalization from emerging economies. The paper empirically uncovers how cognitive ties at both local and global levels contribute to the internationalization of firms from emerging economies such as India that have a lower level of development and which suffer from institutional voids.

Food safety knowledge is created, validated, disseminated, and acted upon. It is conflicted, contextual, and contingent. The technology has a history, the knowledge has a history, and how everyday people interact with food safety ideas has a history. Taking three historical examples from Singapore – pure food advertising; anxiety about botulism; and the prohibition of saccharin – this paper suggests that food safety helps us reposition food and globalization. Singapore was, and still is, a step in a long supply chain of comestibles that pass into and through the port, in which the identity and location of the producers is obscured by distance, value adding, and the complexities of global trade. With its early engagement with globalization, Singapore also provides a counter to the view that it is only the contemporary iteration of globalization, with its long supply chains, technologies and the media coverage of these, which makes food both unsafe and feared in the twenty-first century. Drawing on Frederick Cooper’s critique of globalization, this paper looks at the way that knowledge and anxieties about food safety in Singapore were informed by international media coverage to suggest that they were discursively globalized.

This paper makes the case for considering the role of cross-cultural encounters in shaping developers’ notions of information privacy. Recent studies on privacy by design shed light on developer practices yet tend to regard these workers as a generic category. The paper draws on two interviews with workers in a late-stage Israeli startup as a step toward localizing developers and the global products they design. The analysis identifies four narratives that juxtapose the local, the global and the commodification of users’ personal information: (1) the origin myth of the company; (2) workers’ personal and professional biographies; (3) reports on external regulations; and (4) accounts of work practices, rituals and communication formats. The analysis suggests how the globalization of the startup was implicated in changing ideas and practices relating to users’ information. The paper concludes by discussing some of the challenges facing a culturally-sensitive study of developers as mediators of privacy.

This paper engages the “culture gap” in the sustainable tourism literature by addressing issues of cultural sustainability through an investigation of traditional festivals in Bhutan. Cultural sightseeing is the major motivation for tourism to Bhutan, and religious festivals are among the primary contexts within which local people and tourists interact. Tourism brings forces of modernization and globalization into contact with traditional practices, with various consequences. Based primarily on on-site observation of religious festivals, and interviews with Bhutanese monks and abbots, this paper explores the incursion of modernization into traditional festivals. Bauman's concept of "liquid modernity" is applied to articulate the intertwining of traditional and modern practices and frames of reference in constantly changing ways. This leads to a critical discussion of how the case of Bhutan’s festivals reveals the necessity of seeing cultural sustainability in fluid and evolutionary terms, especial...

The Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) is expanding internationally and reaching countries that seemed to be immune to this education reform approach until quite recently. Accordingly, more and more educational systems in the world are articulated around three main policy principles: accountability, standards and decentralisation. National large-scale assessments (NLSAs) are a core component of the GERM; these assessments are increasingly used for accountability purposes as well as to ensure that schools achieve and promote centrally defined and evaluable learning standards. In this paper, we explore these trends on the basis of a new and original database on NLSAs, as well as on data coming from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) questionnaires. In the paper we also discuss how different theories on policy dissemination/globalisation explain the international spread of NLSAs and test-based accountability worldwide, and reflect on the potential of a political sociology approach to analyse this globalising phenomenon.

This paper examines the relationship between the shadow economy and trade openness in Uganda, using autoregressive distributed lag bounds testing approach. We find that the shadow economy and trade openness have a long- and short-run relationship. These results hold even when alternative econometric methods are used. The empirical evidence indicates that more exposure to foreign trade significantly reduces the size of the shadow economy. This could imply that as countries become more integrated into the world economy, firms and individual entrepreneurs are induced to engage in the formal sector so as to reap the benefits of international markets. This paper shows that trade openness is an important determinant of the shadow economy in both the short- and long-run. At the policy level, any policy framework that strengthens integration into the global economy will be an effective tool that can reduce shadow activities in both the short- and long-run. The practical implication of these results is that countries that have fully reformed their economies to allow for free trade and investment inflows experience a decline in shadow activities implying that, in more open economies, more trade reduces informality.

Examining the recent evolution of public skill institutions and the diverging trajectories of institutional change, this paper focuses on skill certification systems, empirically drawing from two middle-income countries (MICs), Mexico and Turkey. Building on the argument that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) prefer public skill systems to generate a technically skilled workforce more than large firms do, it puts forward that governments supporting and being supported by SMEs will be more willing to endorse skill certification systems for their distributional consequences. It argues that public skill institutions are embraced to varying degrees based on cost-benefit calculations of domestic elites; and only adopted effectively if they are in concord with key actors’ interests. Therefore, this paper contributes to the emerging literature on skill politics in the MICs by examining the dynamics of domestic political coalitions that support or prevent the development of skill institutions base...

This paper re-reads a selection of critical interdisciplinary theories in an attempt to open a space in higher education for cross-cultural dialogue during the rise of Asia. Theories of globalization, deterritorialization, power/knowledge and postcolonialism indicate that students and academics have the ability to re-imagine and influence globalization processes in higher education. The current power effects of global discourses restrict the imaginaries and territories of globalization – leading to specific enactments in ways that prioritize western understandings of higher education. The paper argues for the need to explore hegemonic discursive formations of globalization to uncover processes of “othering” and the subjugation of knowledges. In this regard, a postcolonial perspective can help by opening up scenarios for the future of higher education in the Asian Century.

This paper offers an alternative theoretical outlook informed by empirical findings. It suggests the need for a ‘Grand Theory’ in response to critiques as to whether the International Relations discipline is able to explain the contemporary global order. Existing theories and their strands, along with critical meta-theories, might have proved valuable as tools for approaching specific phenomena. Yet, the main schools of thought appear neither to give adequate coverage –empirically or theoretically –of the state-non-state interactions, nor between non-state entities. The merging of the internal and the external, the intensification of globalization, and the diffusion of power to multiple actors have made it clear that I.R. theory no longer concerns only interstate relations. The study suggests that I.R. needs to go beyond the existing paradigms that are either agent- or structure-oriented and find its remedy first in the identification of the ontology as the basis on which a holistic approach could be developed. While the international relations system remains traditionally state-centric, this work argues that non-state actors also contribute to its shaping and can stand as powers in their own right. Therefore, the paper builds on comparative studies, with a focus on the Kurdish case as a useful multidimensional exemplar.

Turkey, situated in the periphery of Europe, is governed by anti-labour policies of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) Governments in the last 15 years. Embarking on a historical materialist perspective that draws concepts from Gramsci, this paper questions whether labour can come up with an alternative and form a united front vis-a-vis globalization and European Union membership. It then examines impediments behind the lack of a united front and a viable alternative. The analyses rely on empirical data generated through interviews conducted with trade unionists and representatives from civil society for struggles against patriarchy, environmental degradation, and human rights violations at two critical junctures in 2010 and 2017. This paper argues that labour and struggles within civil society contest neoliberal restructuring with two rival class strategies, namely Ha-vet (Turkish abbreviations for No to Capitalist Europe - Yes to Social Europe) and neomerchantilism, none of which stands as a viable alternative.

Global discourses around English-medium instruction (EMI) have inspired controversy for many years now. A wide range of scholars has espoused multiple opinions exhorting the benefits and disadvantages of using English as a medium of instruction in higher education. Although EMI is certainly relevant to primary and secondary school education, this paper will focus on the impact of EMI on higher education due to its dominance in this sector and the implications for globalisation. In the Turkish context, this has developed into a mainly two-sided debate between those with nationalistic perspectives versus those with a more progressive and liberal approach. As well as considering these perspectives, this paper also evaluates the academic and sociological imperatives for using EMI. This study also examines the ethos surrounding the EMI discussion and considers some of the potentially detrimental effects on Turkish identity, traditions and cultural norms but concludes that the necessity and benefits of EMI are too great to be ignored, therefore the access and implementation should be reviewed to ensure the preservation of Turkish language and culture at the same time as reaping the benefits associated with EMI.