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Introduction to Spaces and Cultures of Quarantine. This special issue assembles a set of short interventions selected by internal blind review from submissions in response to a call for papers. The contributors document the first phase of the pandemic from February to May 2020, reflect on and respond to the first few months of the global spread of COVID-19, its arrival in communities and its personal impacts and effects on the public realm, from travel to retail to work and civil society. They encompass many continents, from Latin America to Asia. Staying six feet apart provides a rubric for the spatial experience and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on urban life, our understanding of public interaction, crowd practice, and everyday life at home under self-isolation and lockdown. Time changed to a before and after of COVID-19. The temporality of pandemics is noted in its present and historical popular forms such as nursery rhymes (Ring around the Rosie). Place ballets of avoidance, passing by, long days under lockdown and hurried forays into public places and shops create a new social performativity and cultural topology of care at a distance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The current competition regime that characterizes international science is often presented as a quest for excellence. It diversely affects research in Latin America and research in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. This article asks how this competition regime may orient the direction of research in Latin America, and to whose advantage. It is argued that, by relating excellence to quality differently, a research policy that seeks to improve the level of science in Latin America while preserving the possibility of solving problems relevant to the region can be designed. Competition, it is also argued, certainly has its place in science, but not as a general management tool, especially if the goal is to improve overall quality of science in Latin America. Scientific competition is largely managed through journals and their reputation. Therefore, designing a science policy for Latin America (and for any ‘peripheral’ region of the world) requires paying special attention to the mechanisms underpinning the production, circulation and consumption of scientific journals. So-called ‘international’ or ‘core’ journals are of particular interest as local, national, or even regional journals must struggle to find their place in this peculiar publishing eco-system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to understanding whether there is a thematic gap between journalists' and consumers' preferences, and whether the media converge or diverge across nations. The concurrent news choices of journalists and consumers in 11 online newspapers from six countries in Western Europe and Latin America were examined. A comparison of the most prominently displayed stories on the homepages of each of these sites and the most frequently clicked stories on these sites shows a pattern of convergence across divergence: A thematic gap in the online news choices of journalists and consumers that is shared by all sites despite different levels of preference for public affairs reportage (news about political, economic, and international topics). The theoretical implications and social relevance of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The industrialization of developing countries has fundamentally transformed work, employment, and labor for millions. Despite the industrialization of most of the developing world, we present evidence that Latin America has experienced stagnating industrial employment in the past few decades. Benefiting from recently available data on industrial employment as a percentage of total employment from 1980 through 2006, we analyze fixed-effects models for 20 Latin American countries. Specifically, we examine three theoretical explanations: productivity/comparative advantage, institutionalism, and dependency/world-systems. Our analyses demonstrate that the prevailing productivity/comparative advantage explanation has limited value. By contrast, we find supportive evidence for a combination of institutional and dependency/world-systems variables. In particular, the stagnating industrial employment share in Latin American countries has been driven by the negative effects of (in order of magnitude) the Mercosur trade agreement, mineral and ore exports (as a percentage of total exports), the duration of the current political regime, military spending (as a percentage of GDP), and inward foreign direct investment flows (as a percentage of GDP). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study analyzes the coverage, organizational patterns, problems and trends of international organizations for university cooperation in Latin America and the Caribbean. More than 30 international organizations for cooperation currently operating in Latin America and the Caribbean were identified. Two groups of institutions with more than 60% similitude were established by the Bray-Curtis index, according to the countries of origin of member universities. Multivariate discriminant analysis revealed that variables measuring levels of affiliation are more effective in accounting for integration into a given group than those variables associated with coverage or past experience. These organizations show highly redundant and territorial concentration. The most recurrent management problems, evaluated by analyzing the content of documents and interviews, are related to: budgets, information and university culture. In spite of favorable conditions for internationalization, performance observed in international organizations for university cooperation reveal limited impact on higher education and academic development in Latin America and the Caribbean. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the great debate about 'cultural imperialism' in the 1970s and 1980s, the advertising industry was singled out as a key mechanism by which the economies and societies of the 'Third World' countries were seen to be dominated by the rich countries of North America and Europe. Yet, relative to critical research on the other international communication industries also held to exert such dominance, notably television and news, the advertising industry as such has since been rather neglected. The research presented in this article is based on material gathered by a collaborative team of researchers reporting on the recent state of play within the constellation of interests which make up the advertising industry in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Chile. The article thus provides a detailed empirical account of the modes in which the advertising industry now binds these leading nations of Latin America into both economic and cultural globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leftists seem to be on the rise in Latin America, but it is unclear to what extent this impacts policy. Thus, a crucial question hangs over this apparent "shift" in regional preferences: does the left have any real options to offer? Or in Latin America in an age of globalization, "what's left for the left?" The contending perspectives are compared, and then the evidence is evaluated using a series of econometric models. In sum, no discernible policy differences between the left and the rest were found. In the conclusion, the implications of this result for Latin American democracy are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article questions the widely held view that indigenous movements in Latin America during the last decades of the twentieth century were caused by globalization. The author reviews several bodies of literature and concludes that, although globalization may be a fit descriptor for some of the actions and narratives of indigenous movements, it cannot be understood as a causal determinant. Many indigenous movements emerged long before the neoliberal current started, others coincide with it, and yet others lag significantly. The author proposes an alternative framework that gives primary significance to state-society relations. Contrary to the idea that national states may have lost prominence in the age of globalization I contend the opposite, suggesting also that indigenous movements have emerged where there are (1) challenges to preexisting corporate identities, (2) transcommunity networks to provide the resources for mobilization, and (3) associational spaces to facilitate collective expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do activist trade and industrial policies offer developing countries a viable alternative to either neoliberal or mercantilist development regimes? We hope to answer the question by, first, distinguishing the "open economy industrial policies" in vogue today from either their "closed economy" predecessors--i.e., import-substituting industrialization--or more orthodox approaches to development policy making; second, tracing the growth of nontraditional exports from Latin America and the Caribbean to the diffusion of more active approaches in the 1990s; and, third, accounting for activism's apparent success in an otherwise inauspicious spatial and temporal context by identifying three distinct limits to rent-seeking in the open economy: infant exporter maturation; the costs of government support; and the reactions of foreign rivals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization has intensified interconnectivily among television industries worldwide. Interconnectivity happens through structural and institutional linkages among television systems and industries worldwide, resulting in an increasingly integrated global business governed by similar practices and gods. The dynamics are reflected in the popularity of television formats. On the surface, global dissemination of formats may suggest not only the global integration of the economy of the industry but also the standardization of content. A dozen media companies are able to do business worldwide by selling the same idea, and audiences seem to be watching national variations of the same show. At a deeper level, how- ever, formats attest to the fact that television still remains tied to local and national cultures. Bringing up examples of Latin American cases, this article argues that television is simultaneously global and national, shaped by the globalization of media economics and the pull of local and national cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on work in Latin America has in many ways followed the region's struggles with economic development. As countries deal with globalization pressures, switching from import substitution state-driven development to export policies sustained by privatization, much has changed in the workplace of Latin Americans. Recently, that has translated into a growing body of literature on work in the region, with much of it reflecting the efforts of a new generation of Latin American scholars. Unfortunately, most of their work is yet to be circulated among scholarly circles in the United States. This article is an effort to provide U.S. researchers in the area with an overview of what is being done in sociology of work in Latin America, especially the research lines that have developed in the past 20 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how some current transnational relations between global agents and indigenous peoples' organizations in Latin America impress the representations of identities and associated ideas of these organizations in combination with being useful in the achievement of these organizations' goals for their peoples. Such a discussion serves two main purposes: (1) to contribute to the development of a theory of social change in the current age of globalization through criticizing the established scholarly practice of studying 'local' cases as if they actually exist, or as if they may at least be detached from the world orders in which they take part without any significant consequence; and (2) to criticize the colonial legacy of area studies, anthropology and other academic disciplines of studying 'the Other' - very often indigenous peoples - which, independently of researchers' intentions, contribute to informing agents of the colonial or post-colonial powers and trying instead to produce knowledge that is potentially useful to 'local' agents about 'global' agents, their practices and the impact they may have on 'local' agents' practices. A few illustrative examples taken from the author's field and documentary research about some current experiences in Latin America are used to show how transnational networks of 'local' grassroots organizations and diverse kinds of 'local' intermediary non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and 'global agents' (i.e. international agencies, bilateral cooperation agencies, the multilateral banks, transnational foundations, as well as transnational social movements and NGOs) play significant roles in the social making of representations of indigenous peoples' identities and associated ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with the transnational structural relationships affecting Latin American agriculture, and analyzes the transnationalization process as a function of forces operating in the world economy and in the international political context. It focuses on the internationalization of agricultural production and agroindustrial capital as manifestations of policies and trends operating in the central capitalist countries in recent years, and its impact on Latin American agriculture and agroindustrial systems. Some reflections on the process of internationalization of capital and its relation to agricultural developments observed for the region are presented.