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This paper arises out of research on the New Zealand designer fashion industry. An unexpected success story, this export-oriented industry is dominated by women as designers, employees, wholesale and public relations agents, industry officials, fashion writers and editors, in addition to women holding more traditionally gendered roles as garment workers, tastemakers and consumers. Our analysis of the gendered globalization of the New Zealand fashion industry exposes a number of disconnections between women's positions in this industry and the literatures on globalization, clothing and fashion. We argue that the New Zealand designer fashion industry not only embodies new ways of working associated with the movement of first world women into the labour force, but its very success is underpinned by these changes. Our conclusion is that more work is needed to explicate links between globalization and first world women's entry into the labour force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a modified circuit of culture as a methodological and theoretical framework, this paper examines the interrelated moments associated with the production, representation, and consumption of a recent televised advertisement for adidas's sponsorship of the New Zealand All Blacks. The study suggests that each articulatory moment represents a key site for in-depth multiperspectival analyses, which can facilitate a broad contextual understanding of the complexities, contradictions, and power relations associated with contemporary culture in general and specifically in relation to indigenous culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the concept of mediascapes in relation to the production and distribution of television dramas set in the countryside. The concept involves two distinct, but inter-related media geographies, one focused on material dimensions of 'media in space' and the other concerned with symbolic aspects of 'space in media'. The paper explores these in relation to ten television drama series produced and distributed within Australia, Britain and New Zealand. It is argued that whilst television research has often overlooked the rural in favour of the urban, there is clear evidence that the countryside is an important global mediascape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on so-called ‘global cities’ dominates the existing literature on globalization, fashion, and cities. In this we paper analyze the recent rise of a designer fashion industry in Auckland, New Zealand. The designer fashion industry has emerged as an unlikely success story as the New Zealand economy has globalized. Together with other creative industries, designer fashion is seen as an industry that can revamp New Zealand's international image and in doing so foster additional foreign investment. As the industry has succeeded, Auckland has disproportionately benefited, with sustained industry agglomeration and increasing infrastructural development in this city. However, the symbolic benefits of the designer fashion industry have proved more elusive. We show that the New Zealand designer fashion industry borrows symbolic capital from the global cities of designer fashion. We argue that this borrowing of symbolic capital underlines the need to think more carefully about the geographical specificity of the material, political, and symbolic processes associated with globalization and the cultural economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a theoretical framework for understanding the New Zealand economic development landscape from a Deleuzian poststructuralist perspective. The Deleuzian concept of the ‘plateau’ is metaphorically used to denote levels of understanding that an economic development practitioner needs to know. It also demonstrates how changing government polices and key concepts such as globalization, clusters and business incubators can be visualized through metaphors. Deleuzian terms such as territorialization, folds, smooth and striated space, and nomads have been used to describe recurring key local economic development concepts. The importance of thinking outside the square is also highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines the relationship between sport, globalization and national identity. Specifically, the article focuses on how Team New Zealand’s 2003 America’s Cup campaign represents and reproduces the concept of corporate nationalism. Located within a critical cultural studies perspective the analysis uses a multi-method approach including textual and contextual analysis and semi-structured interviews with key media cultural intermediaries to examine a unique global-local nexus involving the ‘Family of five’ sponsors whose elective affinity set about to unite the New Zealand nation. The findings reveal that: a) both local and multinational corporations (MNCs) use sport as a vehicle through which to articulate their brands with national identity as part of a process of localization; b) the promotional culture of major sporting events such as the America’s Cup provides a platform for MNCs to (re)present, (re)produce and (re)construct national identity; and c) despite their strategic attempts to appropriate national icons and themes multinational corporations face resistance and national identity remains a contested domain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

New Zealand's first primetime animated program, bro'Town, ran successfully for five seasons between 2004 and 2009. Described by its creators as a "modern-day non- PC satire," bro'Town focuses on five New Zealand teenagers of Samoan and Maori ethnicities growing up in Auckland. While the program was promoted as "The Simpsons of the South Pacific," its audience, critics, and politicians have celebrated it as a twenty-first- century New Zealand creative success story. This article explores the historical, cultural, and economic forces that have shaped bro'Town in the context of the debates on media globalization using the framework of hybridity as "the cultural logic of globalization" as well as the framework of global television formats. The authors suggest that bro'Town represents a complex case of television program adaptation and provides a unique case study to examine the multilayered nature of contemporary hybrid cultural forms moving beyond the simplistic local--global dyad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a source and destination country, nurse flows in and out of New Zealand (NZ) are examined to determine impacts and regional contexts. A descriptive statistics method was used to analyze secondary data on nurses added to the register, NZ nurse qualifications verified by overseas authorities nursing workforce data, and census data. It found that international movement of nurses was minimal during the 1990s, but from 2001 a sharp jump in the verification of NZ-registered nurses (RNs) by overseas authorities coincided with an equivalent increase in international RNs (IRNs) added to the NZ nursing register--a pattern that has been sustained to the present. Movement of NZ RNs to Australia is expedited by the Trans-Tasman Agreement, whereas entry of IRNs to NZ is facilitated by nursing being an identified Priority Occupation. Future research needs to consider health system and nurse workforce contexts and take a regional perspective on migration patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtually unheard of since the Great Depression, lockouts have reemerged strongly in Australia and New Zealand just as they have all but disappeared in Germany. The decline of lockouts in Germany is convincingly attributed to the enhanced vulnerability of firms to stoppages in certain circumstances amid globalization, but the small, open economies of Australia and New Zealand are equally subject to these pressures. Using macro- and micro-level data, this article illustrates that neoliberal legislative reforms and institutional change have reconfigured the risks, costs, and payoffs associated with lockouts amid globalization. In doing so, some flaws in the varieties of capitalism/dual convergence literature are highlighted. In particular, the post hoc classification of the antipodes as liberal market economies bypasses the role of legislative reform in reconstituting employer interests and the differences in electoral, party, and state structures that impeded/facilitated the rise of neoliberal reformers in Germany and the antipodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the global and local context in which practitioners are studying sociology' within Aotearoa , New Zealand, assesses new structures that are emerging to enable the practice and explores challenges these pose to sociology as both a discipline and as a set of research practices. Globalization and its attendant processes have been the dominant frame through which change and transformations, in both the object of sociology and its research activities, have been viewed since the late 1980's. For some it has led to reduction in differences and variations across nations to give increased homogeneity. Globalization thus, was seen as the triumph of modernity as it enabled greater rationalization and standardization of ideas and social and economic processes. However, for others it represents a series of transformations leading to increased diversity, fluidity and local difference thus privileging a more fine grained and contextual form of analysis, leading away from the grand narratives and structural explanations. The experience of tertiary and research reform over the past 20 years and its impacts upon the development of sociology in Aotearoa has been discussed. From the mid-1980's to the 1990's, neo-liberal reforms to both the tertiary sector and research environment resulted in extensive change to how both were done. The increased competitiveness and the creation of a less integrated system resulted in a shift to a more commercialized model of research funding, driven much more strongly by end user interests and a more consumer-centred tertiary education system. The challenge for the discipline in this new environment is to maintain its theoretical content while contributing constructively to multidisciplinary development and policy debates and refusing to accept a marginal or add-on role in research development.

Abstract While there have been significant refinements in the scholarly development of the sport and Americanization/globalization literature in recent years, the individual, psychosocial consequences resulting from the intersection of global forces and local cultures remain largely unexplored. A sample of 510 New Zealand youth (average age = 14.5 yrs) was administered a survey instrument to identify their public heroes and heroines (reference idols), that is, celebrity others who are 'very important in your life'. Statistical analysis of these data as well as movie and television consumption patterns revealed that these youth are heavily influenced by global media in general and American popular culture in particular. The data suggested that the influence of popular American cultural icons (e.g. Michael Jordan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jim Morrison, Michael Jackson) extended well beyond simple admiration for some respondents to include impacts on beliefs, values, self-appraisals, and behaviors. It was concluded that focusing on adolescent reference idol choices and their identityrelated consequences is a promising approach to understanding the influence of the 'global' on the 'local'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]