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The relationship between globalisation and institutional change is an issue frequently debated in economic geography and the social sciences. Some see firms, whatever their national culture or heritage, as facing common market forces that undermine self-determination and predict convergence towards a global best practice. Others are sceptical, arguing that different country-specific 'varieties of capitalism' have market-distorting effects, resulting in path dependence that limits the strength of global incentives to converge at the firm level. Others still are unconvinced by both these arguments. As such, this paper seeks to better understand globalisation's impact on institutions and firms by documenting the effect of global finance and its affiliated agents on institutions and firms. Specifically, I examine the experiences of firms in both Japan and the US that sponsor pension funds to see if they have had similar experiences and behaviours in both jurisdictions. I find that American and Japanese pension sponsors, despite clear manifestations of societal differences, have in fact had very similar experiences. So, some of the predictions held by path dependence and the varieties of capitalism are not confirmed in this case. However, because convergence towards a 'best practice' corporate pension offering is also rejected, the paper concludes that new research that focuses on the impact of financial markets on institutions and firms offers important insights for explaining the outcomes in both places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ke Alaka'i, the student newspaper at the Brigham Young University-Hawaii, has embarked on an experiment in cross-cultural communication. It is attempting to transition from an American-oriented student newspaper into one that reflects the wide diversity of the audience on campus. Practical problems and intercultural/philosophical difficulties have accompanied the transition. Of most immediate concern is the problem of agreeing on what news is. This essay highlights possibilities and problems involved with questioning traditional definitions of news in training future journalists. Specifically, it examines the tension between increasing the multicultural emphasis of the newspaper and sustaining operations in the newsroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors examine the impact of globalization on the domestic labor market for low-skilled workers. Whereas existing research typically focuses on the effects on labor market outcomes such as wages and employment, the authors of this paper examine whether American workers respond to globalization by increasing their investment in human capital. Using both Census data and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) for the period 2000-2007, they measure the extent to which offshoring and immigration affect enrollment at institutions of higher education. Results indicate that both offshoring and immigration increase enrollment at community colleges but not other types of institutions, particularly among older, non-traditional age students. The authors conclude that U.S. workers are indeed responding to globalization by acquiring the skills necessary to compete in a global economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critiques Los work on the Asian Crisis (see Spring 1999 issue of Capital & Class) and offers a regulationist alternative. This suggests there was a certain structural coherence between the production and financial forms in the post-Plaza period and that this productive-financial configuration was prone to crises of overproduction-underconsumption, overborrowing, and exchange weaknesses. This vulnerability was exacerbated by specific conjunctural developments that disrupted the previous coherence. The resulting disarticulation has had differential effects on economies in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of the process of globalization on workers and their families in Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. Globalization is based on the ideology of neoliberalism, which is promoted by the most powerful economic and political actors in the world, and includes the deregulation of financial transactions and the promotion of free trade. Globalization and neoliberalism have brought tremendous profits to transnational corporations and international financial institutions, and accelerated the accumulation of wealth to a small, powerful elite in all countries involved, At the same time, globalization has led to economic decline for workers, massive impoverishment, and growing income inequality world-wide, These effects have appeared, albeit to differing degrees, in both developed and developing economies. Once again workers are forced to pay the price of political and economic change but, this time, on a truly global scale. This paper is part of a long-standing research project initiated by the authors to uncover the meaning of globalization, to describe its critical policy components, to empirically analyze its impacts, and, finally, to propose educational and action strategies for workers and unions in response to it.

Existing accounts of American sociology’s founding years during the early twentieth century assume that the discipline was ‘metrocentric.’ They assume that it was only interested in processes occurring within the United States; that American sociologists fell prey to state-centrist thought; and that, therefore, contextualizing America sociology’s emergence necessitates understanding relations, events, and processes within the confines of US territorial boundaries. By contrast, this paper shows the imperial and hence global aspects of early American sociological thought. Early American sociologists were interested in imperialism and, therefore, in cross-societal, transnational, and global processes and relations. Implicitly or explicitly they approached imperialism as a process by which social groups, not least ‘races,’ interacted and conflicted. They also saw it as a route towards new global forms. Early American sociology thus articulated a sociological imagination that looked beyond American society and to the wider world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The past quarter century has witnessed a 'quieter revolution' in land-use management in the United States, from top-down regulation and adversarial environmentalism to multistakeholder collaboration and voluntary market-based mechanisms designed to forge a compromise between nature protection, property rights, and local livelihoods. The latter approach has become hegemonic, and yet this dramatic shift has received little attention from political ecologists. In this paper I argue that two contradictory lessons on the topic can be drawn from political ecology. On the one hand, proponents of the 'quieter revolution' invoke themes and normative stances shared by political ecologists, celebrating self-management by place-based communities drawing on local knowledge, in opposition to control by central governments and powerful environmental groups wielding 'big science'. On the other hand, the 'quieter revolution' exemplifies the neoliberalization of nature, which political ecologists have critiqued as providing a 'stamp of environmental approval' for capitalist expansion, often at the expense of the nature values it claims to defend. Thus, the 'quieter revolution' exposes tensions in the application of the Third-World-based political ecology orientation to a First World setting. I explore these tensions through a case study of voluntary and collaborative approaches (specifically, transfer of development rights and habitat conservation planning) in exurban Collier County in southwest Florida. I argue that in this context, it is more useful to focus on the neoliberalization of nature than on the valorization of local knowledge and control, because the discourse of local knowledge and livelihoods aligns with the (anti-environmental) interests of locally powerful actors. These power relations-and the limits of deeply embedded assumptions that undergird the political ecology literature-are revealed most effectively through ethnographic examination of the micropolitics of particular cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas Friedman's 2005 book The world is flat was meant as a wake-up call to those in the United States who direct its corporate boardrooms and govern its political/economic state, a warning that globalization has brought about a level economic 'playing field' in which the United States might be losing the game. As rhetoric, the title certainly works well to raise fears about North America's future economic role. It also works in concretizing a popular view of globalization, a view that obscures its uneven, discordant, and decidedly unflat processes and practices. In this paper I help deconstruct this view by fleshing out the everyday ways through which United States expanded economically in its early (1890-1927) global empire. Based on archival work in Argentina, Russia, Scotland, and the United States, I provide a historical look at encounters between North American business men and women and their foreign customers, students, and workers. Focusing on the diverse practices and personal encounters that were critical to the early global efforts of select United States-based corporations, I expose the uneven, contested, and messy ways in which economic expansion works. By analyzing early global encounters when the economic dominance of the United States was just becoming apparent, I am able to highlight the sheer complexity and truly relational nature of United States' expansion in the early twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Queer geographers have been surprisingly slow to engage with the global turn that has existed for some time in queer studies outside the discipline. This is beginning to change but the range of sites addressed is limited largely to Euro-American ones. This paper considers the ways in which queer geographers might contribute to already-existing debates over the relationship between the ‘West’ and the ‘non-West’ in global queer studies. The paper departs from Larry Knopp and Michael Brown's ‘Queer diffusions’, a paper that appeared in a special issue of Society and Space (2003, 21 461-477). Though they limit themselves to the national scale of the United States, their argument that we should destigmatize places and identities cast as ‘backward’ has obvious relevance at the global scale. Its consistencies and inconsistencies with various strands of argument within the global queer-studies literature reveal that geographers might also learn from the spatial nuance developed in these debates. Specifically, this literature review concludes that we must also destigmatize those places and identities that are cast as ‘forward’ if queer globalization is to truly be decentered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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U.S. unions are paying increasing attention to "globalization." From the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) struggle, through the successful effort to block "fast track" authority to extend that agreement to all of the Americas, to the protests at the Seattle World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in 2000, unions have advanced considerably in their understanding of international global issues and how they affect workers, But until recently mass immigration to the U.S. from poorer countries has received less attention. In a February 2000 reversal of its historic position the AFL-CIO called for blanket amnesty for undocumented workers in the U.S. and an end to employer sanctions for employing such people. This is a major advance in organized labor's outlook, because the new immigration is intimately tied to the worldwide globalization of capital, which is leading to a smaller but still significant globalization of the workforce. This paper examines the responses of four south Florida unions to mass immigration: the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners (UBC), the International Association of Bridge, Structural, and Ornamental Ironworkers, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE), and Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE).

The article focuses on the impact of economic policies on increase in wage inequality in the U.S. The author says that reversing the increase in inequality will require restoration of the bargaining power of employees. Wage increases at the top level is the result of growth of compensation of chief executive officers and top managers, and the expansion of the financial services industry.

Unplanned, exponential economic growth has been the liberal standard for evaluating economies, societies and effectiveness of political leaders and for addressing problems of all sorts. In the later twentieth century, the American conservative movement revived market liberalism to restore growth after the long post- World War II boom ended. The neoliberal policy regime stressed the growth imperative to the exclusion of other social ends, which were alleged to undermine innovation and growth. Neoliberalism conflates growth with development, precludes sustainable growth, and trends toward plutocratic dedemocratization. This immoderate policy regime denies the reality of the commons and disregards the interdependence of nature and culture and individual and society. This paper addresses crisis tendencies, which have been exacerbated by neoliberal policies, and concludes with a departure point for an alternative. John Dewey's naturalism stressed the need to secure the commons, biotic and social, and to balance individualism with community, efficiency with social justice, and markets with planning to cultivate uncoerced cooperation and preserve democracy, in the face of crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces an analysis of international relocation decisions of venture capital (VC)-backed companies. Relocations to the United States are motivated by economic conditions as well as an improvement in the laws of the country in which the entrepreneurial firm is based. Relocations to the United States yield much greater returns to Asia-Pacific VCs than investing in companies already based in the United States at the time of VC investment. Further, more experienced Asia-Pacific VCs have greater success with their investee relocations to the United States, and these relocations yield higher returns relative to staying in their country of origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of migration and financial globalization focus on either the movement of money, with people staying put, or on the movement of people, with little attention to the impact of the money that moves with them. This paper uses in-depth interviews with executives at ethnic-Chinese foreign-bank offices in Los Angeles to consider the comovement of people and money. We find that understanding the causes and consequences of this comovement requires adding both ethnic and macrostructural layers to discussions of financial globalization. The forces that have led to the rise of a ChineseAmerican banking sector and to the opening of twenty-one Chinese foreign-bank offices in Los Angeles are intertwined: immigration from the Chinese diaspora to the USA, the growth trajectory and financial transformation of East Asia, and the financial and economic evolution of Los Angeles. Ethnic-Chinese foreign-bank offices in Los Angeles have dual roles: they function both as global outposts managing their headquarters' cross-border financial flows, and as localized institutions that are gradually becoming incorporated into Southern California's internal banking and financial markets. Foreign and domestic ethnic-Chinese banks play complementary roles in facilitating ethnic-Chinese economic development in Southern California. Framing these cross-border money-population flows and this cross-border institution building, respectively, are macrostructural constraints rooted in aggregate net financial flows and the changing strategies of global megabanks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States' Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program seeks to help workers transition away from jobs lost to import competition. By contrast, trade remedies like antidumping seek to directly reduce the effect of competition at the border. Though they have very different economic effects, we show that trade adjustment and protectionism act as substitutes. Using the first geo-coded measure of US trade protectionist demands, we show that controlling for trade shocks, counties with a history of successful TAA petitions see fewer calls for trade protection. This effect holds when we confine our analysis to the steel industry, a heavy user of antidumping duties. And though they are both means of addressing import exposure, the two policy options have distinct political effects: in particular, successful TAA petitions carry a significant electoral benefit for Democratic candidates. Greater recognition of the substitutability of trade compensation and protectionism would improve governments' response to import exposure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors argue that offshoring of legal work from the United States has contributed to the fracturing of the long-established internal labor market arrangements in large U.S. law firms. Drawing on evidence from the United States and India on legal employment, the growth of offshoring, and the rapidly changing nature of work that is offshored, the authors contend that the changes in employment systems in law firms are likely to be permanent, in contrast to other researchers who suggest they are temporary adjustments to the financial crisis. As U.S. law firms are dismantling their internal labor market systems, Indian law firms are partially recreating them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pathways of equitable access to work and residency for migrants in the United States are fraught with inconsistencies. Spouses of migrants on a specialty occupation visa (H1B) cannot obtain a social security number, and therefore, their legal standing entirely depends on their H1B spouses. Moreover, these spouses, who are predominantly women from non-Western countries, are strictly prohibited from participating in any type of income-generating activities, including self-employment. Restriction on migrant spouses' workforce participation perpetuates their involuntary financial dependency, which creates such problems as lowered self-esteem, depression, suicidality, marital problems, and domestic violence. In this article, I build on the previous works to further illuminate how the social construction, that is, a popular image or stereotypes of non-Western women as dependents and deviants might have contributed to creating and maintaining the H4 visa regulations while contemplating its long-term impact in light of the U.S. nation-building effort based on the Theory of Social Construction of Target Populations. The social construction lens offers a framework for social work scholars, educators, and practitioners to critically examine and articulate the mechanisms through which stereotypes and bias toward vulnerable populations influence policy design and thereby dictate their life choices and positioning in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'America has a negro problem', the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal stated in the introduction to his modern classic An American Dilemma first published in 1944 Half a century later the so called immigrant problem is moving to the top of the political agenda of EU Europe. To speak about a European dilemma in this context means to relate established European values of social solidarity and social responsibility to an increasingly ethnicised and racialised social inequality in European cities How can the dilemma be made transparent? How can we transcend the disjunctures between 'creed' and reality? Along these lines the paper debates potentialities for transethnic alignment in the US and EU Europe exposed to a common condition of globalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we discuss the relatively recent integration of feminist thinking in the discipline of International Relations. We argue that the theoretical foundations of International Relations are still primarily based on traditional male-female dichotomies, particularly that of separate public and private spheres. By extension, women are largely excluded from state power and decision making. The state is itself gendered. The growing recognition of the links between the global economy and gender forces us to engage with International Relations in foreign and international policy. In this article we look at feminist interpretations of three main International Relations areas: international security, human rights, and international political economy and their implications for gender policies in the Caribbean. We also look at the contributions of Caribbean women to the international feminist agenda and suggest a research agenda for ongoing feminist theorizing in the discipline of International Relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to consider the promise and problems of the globalization of research for nurses and other healthcare professionals. Over the past decade, there has been an impressive increase in research activity in many regions of the world, such as in several of the Asian countries. This increasing capacity to conduct research and create innovations has great promise for shared health, prosperity, and well-being, but it also has some significant problems and limitations that are often not reported. One area of research that has drawn considerable international research attention is aging and longevity. In the United States, there is much to learn from the work of international colleagues in terms of clinical application; it is unclear how generalizable the findings are or, in other words, what may be lost in translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to the needs of intercultural understanding and competencies in a global economy, universities have devised strategies and programs to internationalize the campus to prepare students to work effectively in an increasingly interconnected economy and society. Internationalization at home (IaH) attempts to more effectively address gaps left by the traditional study abroad. This study examines the IaH activities at a regional higher education institution in a Midwestern city of the United States in faculty/staff recruitment and development, policies, and curriculum development. Results show that implementation of IaH is at odds with the institution's regional mission and underscores the need for a reconceptualization to better serve the region in this global era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to the needs of intercultural understanding and competencies in a global economy, universities have devised strategies and programs to internationalize the campus to prepare students to work effectively in an increasingly interconnected economy and society. Internationalization at home (IaH) attempts to more effectively address gaps left by the traditional study abroad. This study examines the IaH activities at a regional higher education institution in a Midwestern city of the United States in faculty/staff recruitment and development, policies, and curriculum development. Results show that implementation of IaH is at odds with the institution's regional mission and underscores the need for a reconceptualization to better serve the region in this global era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Problem The Academy of Human Resource Development (AHRD, used interchangeably here with the Academy) was founded and has always been headquartered in the United States. This has communicated the message that the Academy is U.S.-centric, and, indeed, many aspects of its operations have confirmed this U.S.-centric perspective. However, this has not been the intent of AHRD. What has been done, and what more is needed, to change this view? The Solution We examined the historical efforts to expand internationally through membership, conferences, relationships with other associations, journals, and special interest groups (SIGs). In addition, we offered suggestions for other actions that might enhance global perspectives in overcoming existing challenges in the future. The Stakeholders All members of the Academy should be interested in this article, as the Academy continues to stress the importance of internationalizing (used interchangeably with globalizing) the Academy, whether they be academics, practitioners, or students. Other professional organizations, not just those headquartered in the United States, but throughout the world, should be interested in the Academy’s successes and challenges in this arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cardiovascular disease (CVD), a global epidemic, is responsible for about 30% of all deaths worldwide. While mortality rates from CVD have been mostly declining in the advanced industrialized nations, CVD risk factors, including hypertension, obesity, and diabetes, have been on the increase everywhere. Researchers investigating the social causes of CVD have produced a robust body of evidence documenting the relationships between the work environment and CVD, including through the mechanisms of psychosocial work stressors. We review the empirical evidence linking work, psychosocial stressors, and CVD. These work stressors can produce chronic biologic arousal and promote unhealthy behaviors and thus, increased CVD risk. We offer a theoretical model that illustrates how economic globalization influences the labor market and work organization in high-income countries, which, in turn, exacerbates job characteristics, such as demands, low job control, effort-reward imbalance, job insecurity, and long work hours. There is also a growing interest in “upstream” factors among work stress researchers, including precarious employment, downsizing/restructuring, privatization, and lean production. We conclude with suggestions for future epidemiologic research on the role of work in the development of CVD, as well as policy recommendations for prevention of work-related CVD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political theory of migration has largely occurred within a paradigm of methodological nationalism and this has led to the neglect of morally salient agents and causes. This article draws on research from the social sciences on the transnationalism, globalization and migration systems theory to show how methodological nationalist assumptions have affected the views of political theorists on membership, culture and distributive justice. In particular, it is contended that methodological nationalism has prevented political theorists of migration from addressing the roles of non-state agents and of transnational economic, social and political structures. These agents and structures contribute to the asymmetrical distribution of goods and opportunities and thus have important implications for debates about migration and distributive justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognition, or scientific knowledge, is the fulcrum of Gellner’s philosophy of history. Science, for Gellner, is central to understanding the rise of the West and also to his defence of Enlightenment rationality against postmodernism and other forms of relativism. This way of thinking has recently been challenged, first, by global historians who locate the ‘great divergence’ in the 19th century rather than earlier, and second, by those who assign to the Enlightenment a pernicious role and argue that rationality and scientific knowledge are inextricably bound to particular social contexts, for good or ill. Gellner’s ideas can be defended against these challenges, but this requires, first, distinguishing between rationality and science and, second, tracing the course of science and technology outside of the West. Once this defence is in place, Gellner’s ideas about the relation between cognition on one side and production and coercion can also be re-examined: here, too, his account requires revision since the idea that rationality ‘trumps’ the other two orders needs to be specified on the ground: in everyday life, for example, scientific knowledge is rather remote, and so often does not supersede other social dynamics. This also relates to other tensions in the relation between science, technology and everyday life: as Gellner noted, technology yields rubber as well as iron cages, but consumer technologies are now in some respects on a path towards unsustainable growth. Separating this problem from cognition is a further task. These refinements to Gellner’s ideas provide a basis for rethinking the connection he makes between liberalism and modern cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the impact of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) on the U.S. labor markets. Topics include the employment of immigrants, the research on informalization which examines the impact of high immigration on construction industry workers in Texas, and the immigrant ethnic economy in Los Angeles, California and New York.

Research Highlights and Abstract Globalization and US higher education., Theorizing the global imaginary ( Charles Taylor and Manfred Steger)., Althusser and the imaginary., Universities and the production of knowledge., I argue that 'globalization' is not simply a concept describing the world but rather an imaginary; a mental practice which renders multiple, often competing, social relationships into a meaningful, coherent whole. While some scholars have made similar arguments, none has laid out a theoretically rigorous understanding of the global imaginary. I first draw upon the work of Charles Taylor and Manfred Steger to better understand globalization as an imaginary, but find their work unable to explain how the global imaginary is produced. To ameliorate this deficiency, I turn to the work of Louis Althusser to theorize globalization as socially produced within particular material apparatuses that organize daily practices. I conclude by applying this theory to examine how the apparatus of the US university has transformed from an institution designed to produce a national imaginary to one producing the global imaginary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the U.S. comprehensive immigration reform from 2013, known as Senate Bill 744. Attention is paid to the immigration quotas, the impact of immigration on U.S. workers, and the point system that would assess the economic qualities of the prospective migrants, such as academic degrees or position availability in their field of occupation. The author suggests that the U.S. government tends to accept the migration as an economic tool instead of a human right.

In this study, we analyze the determinants of total, private, and public sector union density among 191 U.S. metropolitan statistical areas in 2003. In particular, we examine the effects of globalization and labor market transformation on metropolitan union density while controlling for labor market structure, the business cycle, and the political climate. Our analysis demonstrates that (1) globalization and labor market transformation have crosscutting but, on balance, negative effects on union density; (2) there are both similarities and differences in determinants of private and public sector unionism; and (3) business cycle and labor market structure variables are weak, but political climate variables are strong determinants of union density. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1967 Dr Martin Luther King Jr began organizing a "Poor People's Campaign" in an effort to bring 3000 families to Washington, DC to address widespread poverty in the US. King's efforts were the culmination of a political transformation that he underwent in the middle of the 1960s concerning his views on Vietnam and US global hegemony. I argue that by focusing on King and the US Poor People's Campaign we can better understand the changing coordinates of the US political economy, what has been termed the "state mode of production" or SMP. Associated with the gradual decline of the Keynesian state, the SMP refers to new kinds of politicospatial arraignments that emerged during the 20th century and continue the process of capital accumulation. I maintain that in the United States the political-economic transformations encapsulated through the growth of the SMP are inseparable from the USA's racial legacy. Hence the failure of the US civil rights struggle to remake economic processes demonstrates the limits of social democratic movements to fully critique capitalism. For this reason King's efforts at leading the Poor People's Campaign are a model of social and political engagement that has purchase in the wake of current economic and political crises and is transforming contemporary economic processes across the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the intersection of the topics of migration and diversity in higher education lies the experience of people who grow up overseas, or who go overseas for education or military service, and then return as college students. This article addresses their experience, drawing from a series of exploratory interviews conducted—as part of a broader distributed research process on diversity—at one particularly diverse American university. The overseas experience, as would be expected, generally broadens student perspectives but also individuates them by first removing people from existing personal networks and established cognitive routines, then inserting them into new networks and cognitive patterns overseas, and finally reinserting them back into a “home” situation in the United States that is both familiar and now newly alien. The legacies of return thus include a resorting and reconfiguration of notions of self and identity as well as those of family, community, and nation. Overall, the process suggests a useful parallel between the student as traveler and the traveler as student. There is also a warning in this material that much human diversity involves very individualized experiences that may be overlooked in the more generalized literatures on education (especially higher education) and human mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that there is a need for higher education researchers to become aware of methodological nationalism (MN) and take steps to reframe their scholarship in new ways. It illuminates two characteristics of MN prevalent in higher education research and suggests that although a few researchers have attempted to move beyond MN in the higher education globalization literature, most remain encapsulated in a view of nation-state equates society. The authors address this gap by arguing for the expansion of analytic approach to some of the common phenomena studied within U.S. higher education (such as college student experience, diversity, and governance) and highlight how these typical objects of study would transform once we overcome MN. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on experiences in the global south and western Europe, this commentary identifies 3 focal points of precarity politics that a singular focus on the United States may have eclipsed: (a) In the global south, precariousness at work creates a crisis not just of job-quality but also of social reproduction; (b) precarious employment is often an integral part of the development strategies of states and international financial institutions, rather than the natural corporate response to global market competition; and (c) popular movements have insinuated alternative imaginations of work, rights, and life. These developments serve as the point of departure for any national, regional, or global policy deliberation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Globalization is taking place in unprecedented ways, with unprecedented consequences, including large-scale sudden contact between human groups. Sudden inter-group contact without adequate pre-adaptation is sometimes resulting in catastrophic evolution, with radicalization and terrorism arising as (dysfunctional) defense mechanisms among some groups experiencing threatened collective identities. The main traditional policies for managing relations between diverse groups, assimilation and multiculturalism, are critically reviewed and found wanting. Omniculturalism is considered as an alternative policy; in stage one, the omnicultural imperative demands that during interactions with others we give priority to human commonalities; in stage two, group-based differences are recognized. A cross-national survey shows support for omniculturalism within the United States, but less so among minority group members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The enforced opening of Thailand’s cigarette market to imports in 1990 has become a cause celebre in debates about the social and health impacts of trade agreements. At the instigation of leading US-based cigarette manufacturers, the US Trade Representative (USTR) threatened trade sanctions against Thailand to compel the government to liberalize its domestic cigarette market. Thailand’s challenge to the USTR led to referral to General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) arbitration. While GATT ruled in favour of the USTR on market access, it also found that Thailand could subsequently enact non-discriminatory tobacco control regulation without contravening the GATT agreement. This article contributes to existing literature via its analysis of tobacco industry documents that highlight not only USTR responsiveness to lobbying from tobacco corporations, raising concerns about the drivers of globalization and the limited protection afforded to public health concerns in trade agreements. Significantly, the documents also indicate that USTR support of the tobacco industry was not unconditional, being subject to wider pressures of global trade negotiations. Such qualification notwithstanding, however, ongoing governmental willingness to advance the international interests of tobacco corporations remains a concern from a public health perspective, particularly given the failure of the US to ratify the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The successes and failures of Internet Internationalization reveal struggles between two systems: the network political (oriented around the machinic) and the geopolitical (oriented around the social). The frames through which this conflict are understood, and the technical decisions that enacted such frames, were put in place during the first decade of the network design process, 1969–79. Analysis of the technical document series that records the history of that process provides evidence of internationalization processes that include extension of the network outside of the United States, international participation in the design conversation, the influence of international organizations and associations, support for internationalization in the design criteria that serve as policy principles, and attention to issues raised by internationalization within the course of technical decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay uses critical transnationalism to place planning in the world. It examines two types of transnational practices: the enforcement of the global border in the Americas, and the transnational traffic of “fast” policy that increasingly characterizes the global nature of planning. The essay suggests counterpractices, “technologies of crossing” and forms of “slow learning,” that puncture such forms of dominance and hegemony. It presents critical transnationalism as a way of inhabiting borders and as a way of “seeing from the South.” Critical transnationalism, it argues, presents planning thought and practice with new spatial imaginations and thereby with new ethical frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

By emphasizing contextualization between the film industry and government cultural policies in association with FTAs, this article historically examines the set of social relations and the interplay of power between the US and other countries (mainly non-western), as well as between the commercial interests of Hollywood and the critical political ideology of domestic film industries. It analyses whether the US, supported and lobbied by Hollywood, has hampered cultural diversity and sovereignty in other countries, particularly through the use of FTAs in the midst of neoliberal globalization. The article maps out how the US government has intensified its state power in the global cultural market. It articulates the consequences of FTAs in the realm of culture in several countries in order to determine the crucial influence of FTAs on domestic film and cultural markets. It is not an easy task to establish an exact correlation between FTAs and the deleterious consequences of signing FTAs for domestic film industries, therefore, the article discusses the more general, causal relationship between FTAs and consequences in domestic film industries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay is a critique of the scientific and policy rationales for transnational standardization. It analyzes two examples of policy export: early childhood standards in one of North America’s oldest Indigenous communities and the ongoing development of international standards for university teaching. It examines calls for American education to look to Finland, Canada, and Singapore for models of reform and innovation, focusing on the complex historical, cultural, and political settlements at work in these countries. The author addresses two affiliated challenges: first, the possibility of a principled understanding of evidence and policy in cultural and political-economic context, and second, the possibility of a mediative educational science that might guide policy formation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the possibility that US rural amenity destinations are affected by ‘linked migration’ streams similar to ones connecting the fate of high-wage professionals and low-wage immigrants in global cities. To date, the possibility of such a linkage has not been considered in the vast literature on migration and social transformation in rural America, a literature that has treated the arrival of these two groups (high-wage professionals and low-wage immigrants) in rural spaces as separate processes. We explore the possibility that these two groups, in a particular set of US rural amenity communities, are structurally linked. We focus on the theoretical implications of documenting such linkages, arguing that the presence of linked migration dynamics in rural areas would transform scholarly debates on: (1) Latino immigrants in the rural USA; (2) amenity migration and rural gentrification, not only in the USA but in a range of postindustrial economies; and (3) theories of globalization and mobility, as well as the place of the rural in globalization dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The scholarship nexus between education and globalization provides limited insights into how global education has been framed and rendered. The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it seeks a better understanding of the nature of the mission of preparing citizens for the global age and what it entails in the context of learning and teaching social studies in the United States. Second, it aims at describing and characterizing the discourse community of social studies education as it relates to educating about and for globalization. Specifically, this article asks: What educational proposals are suggested in this discourse to prepare the students to meet the demands of globalization? What perspectives, skills, and values are emphasized? And what we can learn from this discourse’s selectivity of content and emphasis? All in all, the article reveals the enclosure of global education within the language and practices of multicultural education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the number of American students studying abroad increasing each year and the expected passage of a federal law that would increase and diversify study abroad participation and locations, U.S. colleges and universities likely will have to make changes related to curriculum, faculty involvement, institutional leadership, programming, and resources (both financial and human) to meet the mandate. Therefore, it is imperative that colleges and universities understand how the characteristics and backgrounds of their students influence intent to study abroad. This study examined factors that may affect U.S. student participation in study abroad, including parental income and education, gender, race, intended major, attitudes about other cultures, and distance of college from home. Data were collected from a large, public northeastern university in the United States that participated in the 2007 Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) survey, which provides information about incoming students’ backgrounds, academic and career expectations, personal goals, and opinions on a wide range of political and social issues. The results indicate that being female, attending school more than 100 miles from home, and expressing an interest in improving one’s understanding of other cultures and countries have a positive influence on American students’ intent to study abroad. Planning to pursue a master’s degree or higher, living with family while attending school and majoring in engineering and professional areas such as architecture and medicine negatively affect U.S. student intent to study abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the aftermath of the financial crash of 2008, commentators speculated that the relative buoyancy of China’s economy signaled the onset of an epochal shift of world power from West to East. This article considers the evidence by reviewing the state of the Sino-American economic relationship against the backdrop of the urgency of action on climate change. The lead established by Chinese companies in the clean technology sectors underpins the PRC’s primacy in the alternative fuel economy, but political and social need for a high GDP growth rate is irreconcilable with the demand for decarbonization. By contrast, U.S. efforts to jumpstart a green industrial revolution are stymied by political resistance from oil and gas lobbies, and the longterm recovery of its economic dominance as a trade super power is in doubt. The initiative lies with Beijing, thrust, once again, into the role of making history under conditions not of its own making. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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This study explores how much the concept of globalization via the internet is transforming the occupation of journalists. This research relied on the expertise of online journalists from Latin America, North America and Europe through their participation in three sets of online focus groups. Our findings pointed to a perception by these specific online journalists of a compressed social distance between themselves and the audience, as well as a more compact time dimension impacting the news cycle. This study supports similar findings of the roles, responsibilities and resources of media workers in other digital occupations, where requirements of multitasking and adaptability are necessary. This exploratory study aims to serve as a foundation to explain how this online medium is evolving and how online journalists perform and operate within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a good deal of scepticism about the prospects for regionalism in East Asia. There are, however, grounds for supposing that the outlook for regional integration in East Asia is brighter than it has ever been, partly as a consequence of the rise of China. This article explains why an earlier attempt to integrate the region under Japanese imperialism failed, why US foreign policy has effectively foreclosed any possibility of East Asian integration up to now and why it may be accelerating as a consequence of China's growing economic and political impact on the region. To explain these different historical experiences I draw on a form of critical geopolitics which has recently emerged in economic and political geography and which can usefully be incorporated into international relations scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This exploratory study examines corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the lodging industry by measuring the contributions to communities made by lodging properties throughout the United States. This work is significant for two reasons: (a) It attempts to develop a theoretical foundation for CSR within the U.S. lodging industry; (b) it signifies one of the first attempts to quantify one component of CSR, corporate giving, within the U.S. lodging industry. A random sample of lodging properties in the United States was surveyed, and they were asked to report their various contributions to community. Although a limited response prevented generalizability, based on 421 responding properties, regression analysis suggested that the industry made various contributions worth more than $815 million or 3.6% of total industry profits in 2005. The results also showed that a number of structural variables affected the quantified social component of CSR among lodging properties as well as the existence of CSR written policies, processes, and principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]