Solidarity Across Borders: The Transnational Anti-Apartheid Movement

This paper focuses on what from a global perspective must be seen as one of the most significant social movements during the post-war era: the transnational anti-apartheid movement. This movement lasted for more than three decades, from late 1950s to 1994, had a presence on all continents, and can be seen to be part of the construction of a global political culture during the Cold War. The paper argues that the history of the anti-apartheid struggle provides an important historical case for the analysis of present-day global politics—especially in so far that movement organizations, action forms, and networks that were formed and developed in the anti-apartheid struggle are present in the contemporary context of the mobilization of a global civil society in relation to neoliberal globalization and supra-national political institutions such as the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank.     

Climate justice and sustained transnational mobilization

ABSTRACT

Samir Amin’s final essay called for the creation of a new international organization of progressive social forces. Here I review evidence from twenty-first century transnational movements germane for understanding the likelihood of the emergence of such an international organization and the issues and sectors most likely to facilitate coalitional unity. More specifically, the ecological crises identified by Amin in the form of global warming and climate change have created an unprecedented global environmental threat capable of unifying diverse social strata across the planet. The climate justice movement has already established a global infrastructure and template to coordinate a new international organization for confronting neoliberal forms of globalization. Pre-existing movement organizing around environmental racism, climate justice in the global South, and recent intersectional mobilizations serve as promising models for building an enduring international organization that will represent subaltern groups and have a substantial impact on world politics.     

Transnational social movements and changing organizational fields in the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries

Recent decades have seen dramatic changes in the global political arena, including shifts in geopolitical arrangements, increases in popular mobilization and contestation over the direction of globalization, and efforts by elites to channel or curb popular opposition. We explore how these factors affect changes in global politics. Organizational populations are shaped by ongoing interactions among civil‐society, corporate and governmental actors operating at multiple levels. During the 1990s and 2000s, corporate and government actors promoted the ‘neoliberalization of civil society’ and the appropriation of movement concepts and practices to support elite interests. Not all movement actors have been passive witnesses to this process: they have engaged in intense internal debates, and they have adapted their organizational strategies to advance social transformation. This article draws from quantitative research on the population of transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) and on qualitative research on contemporary transnational activism to describe changes in transnational organizing at a time of growing contention in world politics. We show how interactions among global actors have shaped new, hybrid organizational forms and spaces that include actors other than states in influential roles.     

Networking for women’s rights: academic centers,regional information networks,and feminist advocacy in southern Africa

Women’s rights advocates, in southern Africa as elsewhere, have challenged gender inequality to advance the status of women in society and as a means to also address related, cumulative issues of disadvantage. As communication technologies and neoliberal globalization alter forms of communication, the potential for organizing, coalitions, and advocacy work across time and space, such as through transnational feminist networks (TFNs), has grown. Understanding the rise of TFNs has largely relied on historical narratives and case studies, and the literature has tended to emphasize transnational over regional dimensions. Our approach, however, finds that regional connections not only play an important role in linking TFNs to local women’s rights initiatives in southern Africa, but that information-rich academic institutes focusing on gender studies bring structure to local and regional information networks in the region and act as bridges between the local, regional and global. Methodologically, we employ an innovative approach to visibly capture the work of regional and local activists by taking a meso-level snapshot of website links among 70 women’s rights organizations operating in southern Africa. We pair the network visualization with a case study of our central academic center, the African Gender Institute, to demonstrate the work of this critical hub in the local and regional communication network.     

Local Armed Uprisings and the Transnational Image of Claim Making: The Kurds of Turkey and the Zapatistas of Mexico in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to explore why and how some local armed uprisings are able to go global with a transnational image of ‘social justice’ while others fail to build such image despite becoming transnational. The cases to be analyzed in the article are the pro-Kurdish mobilization in the leadership of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey and the pro-Mayan Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) movement in Mexico. In explaining the relative success of the latter, the study seeks to make connections with the globalization literature in general and the transnational social movement literature in particular. Particularly, the article focuses on the ability of social movements to market their causes in international arena with a good image. Overall, this study lays out several key strategic differences between the two movements such as the holding and the use of arms, duration of armed resistance, and the leadership and organizational structure to unpack why some social movements are more successful to market their causes as a just cause within ‘global civil society’ and why others fail to do so ending with being listed as a terrorist organization.     

The gendered frontiers of globalization

Women are rarely to be found in the elite international corporate structure of the globalizing economy. They are, however, an important component of the new mobile global labor force. This article examines the pros and cons of economic globalization for women; in particular, why so many women are disproportionately disadvantaged by the globalizing forces associated with the neoliberal international economy. It also outlines some ways in which women's organizing at the grassroots, national and international levels is working toward efforts to diminish gender hierarchies which have the effect of disempowering women and contributing to economic inequalities more generally.     

Polanyi’s two transformations revisited: a ‘bottom up’ perspective

ABSTRACT

In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi offers a ‘top-down’ analysis of the rise and demise of Europe’s unregulated market system. He assumes that changes in the organization of the international economy provide particular kinds of opportunities for states to act which, in turn, shapes the extent to which social forces will be able to influence state policy. Consequently, his analysis focuses, first, on the international institutions created by the self-regulating market system; then on the ‘liberal state’ which these made possible; and finally on how the system impacts ‘society as a whole’. The account which this analysis produces systematically underplays the social struggles which propelled and emerged from the rise of Europe’s nineteenth century system and which ultimately led to its demise. In revisiting the two periods that are the focus of Polanyi’s analysis, this article assumes that states and interstate systems reflect the interests of powerful social forces. Thus, working from the ‘bottom up’, it focuses on the class interests that produced Europe’s market system, the state and international structures which reflected and supported them, and the social struggles that ultimately brought about the collapse of the system. What this ‘bottom up’ account reveals is the centrality of a ‘double movement’, not of market expansion and a protective countermove on the part of ‘society as a whole’, but of dominant classes monopolizing economic opportunities from global expansion, and a rising ‘red tide’ of disaffected workers. This double movement, it argues, better explains the demise of the system and the changes that ensued from it.     

The Globalization of Self: Role and Identity Transformation from Above and Below

The process of globalization is transforming society with unprecedented speed and scope. Along the way, social roles are being altered and identities are being transformed. How do the forces of globalization shape the self? How do changes to the self affect social relationships and alter larger social structures? This paper offers a conceptual framework for addressing these questions. The ‘role‐as‐resource’ perspective is employed as a tool for differentiating between two opposing processes. On the one hand, top down forces associated with technocapitalism serve to colonize the self by sustaining roles associated with global consumption and production, while disrupting or erasing traditional roles. On the other hand, bottom‐up forces associated with local grassroots organizations and democratic social movements facilitate resistance by providing resources for a more agentic political self.     

Invisible labor,invisible bodies: how the global political economy affects reproductive freedom in the Philippines

ABSTRACT

Feminist scholars have critically demonstrated the links between the global political economy, social reproduction and gender-based violence. This article builds on this scholarship by investigating restrictions to reproductive freedom and their connection to the depletion of women’s bodies in the global political economy. Specifically, I use the Depletion through Social Reproduction (DSR) framework to reveal how the work of social reproduction is harnessed to service economic activity at the cost of rights to bodily integrity with the aid of religious fundamentalist ideologies that (re)inscribe discourses of female altruism such as the “self-sacrificing mother” ideal. Drawing on the case of the Philippines, I argue that the control of women’s bodies is integral to the Philippines’ economic strategy of exporting care workers in a competitive global political economy. This strategy is abetted by local Catholic religious fundamentalists who challenge reproductive rights reform at various levels of policy-making and legitimize the lack of investment to sustain social reproduction in the household, community and country as a whole. This article suggests that the neoliberal global economy is increasingly reproduced through women’s labor at the cost of their bodily integrity and reproductive freedoms.     

Science and neoliberal globalization: a political sociological approach

The political ideology of neoliberalism is widely recognized as having influenced the organization of national and global economies and public policies since the 1970s. In this article, we examine the relationship between the neoliberal variant of globalization and science. To do so, we develop a framework for sociology of science that emphasizes closer ties among political sociology, the sociology of social movements, and economic and organizational sociology and that draws attention to patterns of increasing and uneven industrial influence amid several countervailing processes. Specifically, we explore three fundamental changes since the 1970s: the advent of the knowledge economy and the increasing interchange between academic and industrial research and development signified by academic capitalism and asymmetric convergence; the increasing prominence of science-based regulation of technology in global trade liberalization, marked by the heightened role of international organizations and the convergence of scientism and neoliberalism; and the epistemic modernization of the relationship between scientists and publics, represented by the proliferation of new institutions of deliberation, participation, activism, enterprise, and social movement mobilization.     

New insights in reproducing transnational corporate elites: the labour market intermediation of executive search in the pursuit of global talent in Singapore

In this article, I provide new theoretical and empirical insights into the reproduction of transnational corporate elites through the process of people moving between firms’ internal labour markets rather than from expatriation. Theoretically, the article advances understandings of the reproduction of transnational corporate elites by drawing on a pioneering engagement with global talent, transnational elites and labour market intermediary discourses. I generate these new theoretical insights through an original case study of how global executive search firms in Singapore create pipelines for the recruitment of transnational corporate elites between firms’ internal labour markets. The findings also highlight the vital role of Singapore's neoliberal labour market practices, as well as its foreign talent programme to ‘win the war for talent'. By situating this research on the agency of executive search in reproducing Singapore's transnational corporate elite, the article's key contribution is to decentre North American and Western perspectives on the reproduction of knowledge on transnational corporate elites.     

The politics of a socialist harmonious society in the aftermath of China's neoliberal development

In the aftermath of China's ICT-driven and mass-mediated neoliberal development, the need to reduce China's economic vulnerability to transnational market volatility and to pacify class tensions by improving social justice and redistributing social resources has become urgent. The “socialist harmonious society” concept marks a more sophisticated and socially-oriented mode of governance. By examining two state projects under the auspices of constructing a socialist harmonious society, i.e., the state-endorsed surge of charity activities and the state-subsidized increase of vocational education targeting exclusively rural migrants, this paper argues that these emerging sites of governance, often responding to and defined by China's ICT-driven and mass-mediated neoliberal development, mark the neoliberal restructuring of state activities, and that what distinguishes this new mode of governance is the neoliberal notion of redistribution, which is central to the quasi-inclusive social institutions discussed in this paper.     

Introduction to the special theme: theorizing transnational labour markets

In this introduction to the special themed section, ‘Theorizing transnational labour markets: economic‐sociological approaches’, I introduce the reader to the topic and give an overview of the four contributions. The terms ‘global labour market’ and ‘transnational labour market’ are broadly used to account for contemporary social phenomena as diverse as the ever‐closer integration of China or India, with their huge labour forces, into the world economy, the off‐shoring of specific operations of MNCs to countries with cheap labour, or cross‐border labour migration. In most of these cases, the existence of global or transnational labour markets is taken for granted by the media, consulting agencies and other economic actors. However, scholars in labour market research and cross‐border migration alike have largely ignored the categories of global or transnational labour markets. Thus far, it remains unclear what these terms really mean and how we should address them theoretically. The aim of this themed section, therefore, is to view cross‐border labour migration through an economic‐sociological lens and thus bring into dialogue migration and labour market scholarship. By introducing a transnational perspective into labour market research, we hope to make a useful contribution towards theorizing on cross‐border labour markets and thereby overcome the methodological nationalism that seems to have crept into this area of scholarship.     

Labor after Neoliberalism: The Birth of the Insecure Class in South Korea

Abstract

This article examines the rise and fall of organized labor in post-democratization, neoliberal Korea and traces the process through which a new labor underclass has been created since the late 1990s. Under the sweeping implementation of neoliberal policies, Korean labor has become increasingly fragmented, stratified, and marginalized both in the market and political arena. In this polarizing process, an ‘insecure class’ was born, consisting of irregular workers and the low-income self-employed. These working people are characterized by precarious labor conditions, bare social protection coverage, and frail organizational–political representation. This study explicates such a drastic restructuration of the Korean working people from the interaction of chaebol-centered economic structure, labor unions' organizational narrowness, and unrepresentative political parties devoid of programmatic competition. The examination of the insecure class in Korea casts light on the significance of class issues in neoliberal political economy and the analytical importance of rethinking social class in contemporary capitalist societies.     

The insufficient imagery of top-down,bottom-up in global movements analysis

Scholars have shown various ways in which new types of transnational interdependence influence conflicts and resistance. Conventional conceptualization often depicts movements as emerging from the ‘bottom-up’ efforts of distinctive, individual collectives to challenge the ‘top-down’ hegemony of bureaucratic states, multinational corporations, and some international civil society organizations. But globalization scholars, and particularly those developing a framework of world society studies, place interactions among different levels of action and orientation at the center of conflict analysis and show how mobilization and change occurs across complex, interdependent relationships. In this article, I interrogate the different and often contradictory ways that dimensions of mobilization and social change are commonly denoted in this usage. I then explore alternative global theoretical frameworks that give greater explanatory power to the dynamic global–local interface. To move beyond the constraints of binary thinking in global movements analysis, I suggest that future scholarship clearly specify significant attributes of mobilization, identify how attributes vary and co-mingle, and locate social processes among a host of global–local relationships.     

Transnational social capital: the socio‐spatialities of civil society

Civil society remains a contested concept, but one that is widely embedded in global development processes. Transnationalism within civil society scholarship is often described dichotomously, either through hierarchical dependency relations or as a more amorphous networked global civil society. These two contrasting spatial imaginaries produce very particular ideas about how transnational relations contribute to civil society. Drawing on empirical material from research with civil society organizations in Barbados and Grenada, in this article I contend that civil society groups use forms of transnational social capital in their work. This does not, however, resonate with the horizontal relations associated with grassroots globalization or vertical chains of dependence. These social relations are imbued with power and agency and are entangled in situated historical, geographical and personal contexts. I conclude that the diverse transnational social relations that are part of civil society activity offer hope and possibilities for continued civil society action in these unexpected spatial arrangements.     

Logistics labor: Insights from the sociologies of globalization,the economy,and work

This article identifies the origins of the rise of the logistics industry to highlight the powerful structural position that this endows on the industry and its workers. I begin by analyzing an often‐neglected aspect of globalization by describing the logistics, or goods movement industry, and identifying the role that the “logistics revolution” plays within the contemporary capitalist system. Then, synthesizing insights from global, economic, and labor sociology, I argue that the structural “brokerage” position of logistics workers in the global economy offers them key advantages on which labor and political movements might capitalize in struggles for economic justice and worker rights. I examine empirical research regarding labor organizing within logistics to determine if workers leverage this powerful position into concrete gains. Finally, I argue that more attention needs to be paid to how logistics workers recognize, articulate, and utilize their potentially powerful position in globalization flows. Future research should endeavor to understand how this can be achieved among wide groups of logistics workers to achieve the most success in labor and political movements.