Resisting the Neo‐liberal Poverty Discourse: On Constructing Deadbeat Dads and Welfare Queens

This article describes the impact of both neo‐liberal and conservative discourse upon poverty policy and welfare reform. In it, I summarize the discursive construction of welfare queens and deadbeat dads and the influence upon welfare reform while incorporating globalization in the discursive critique. This paper also describes the resistance to the discourse evidenced by those most affected by the poverty or welfare reform discourse. I suggest ways of critically examining our own discourse as well as the welfare reform discourse and our participation in it or resistance to it. The conclusion questions assumptions about dependency, welfare receipt and justice.     

Neoliberal Globalization and Heightened Perceptions of Class Division in Iceland

This article uses the case of Iceland to study how neoliberal globalization impacts class discourse in the political field and broader perceptions of class division. Analyzing a leading newspaper and parliamentary debates from 1986–2012, I show how neoliberal globalization—especially by increasing economic inequality—created a disjuncture between an increasingly differentiated social space and a national habitus cultivated in a small, homogeneous, and egalitarian society. This undermined taken‐for‐granted assumptions of relative classlessness and heightened perceptions of class division during a neoliberal ascendancy period from 1995 to Iceland's economic collapse in September 2008.     

Rearticulating Black Mixed-Race in the Era of Globalization

Since the mid-2000s, the term multiculturalism has entered the Korean lexicon as migration has become more and more prevalent due to globalization. The cornerstone of this multicultural explosion was a 2006 visit by American football star Hines Ward, born to an African-American father and a Korean mother. As a black mixed-race sports celebrity, he suddenly became an emblematic media figure in the Korean televisual landscape, signifying a broader racial reconfiguration in Korean society. This media event – what I shall call ‘the Hines Ward moment’ – created and opened the discursive space for racial politics and multicultural issues in Korean society. Hence, this article aims to look at what this discursive explosion of multiculturalism and mixed-race means in the context of globalization. Reading the Hines Ward moment as a symbolic media text, the paper examines how the media discourse on Hines Ward articulates the issues of national identity and racial politics in contemporary Korean society. For analysis, newspaper articles, television programmes and television commercials that deal with the Hines Ward case are examined. By analyzing the modes of articulation of the Hines Ward moment, this study deconstructs the image of a ‘global, multicultural Korea’ shaped by the Korean media and examines the struggle for Koreanness in the televisual area of contemporary Korean media.     

‘Intercourse in every direction’: America as global phenomenon

In news magazines and scholarly journals a wide‐ranging ‘globe‐talk’ has arisen since the 1970s in response to recent transformations in the world. Much of the discourse reflects a growing international concern about U.S. dominance of the world’s economy and cultural production. Understandably, the discourse is about agency. The United States has dominated global affairs since the Second World War and especially since the end of the Cold War ‐ militarily, economically, and culturally. It is sometimes forgotten, however, how much America is a product of the internationalizing processes it has come to symbolize. This essay argues that the United States is as much a product as an agent of globalization and that, if we accept the logic of globalization, the United States as a national culture is being undermined in much the same ways as other countries. The title of the paper is borrowed from the Communist Manifesto, an ironically prescient document that 150 years ago outlined the processes of globalization that characterize America’s global history and forecast the transformations we experience worldwide today.     

Firefighters across frontiers: two fire brigades cooperating in the Dutch–German borderland

This article focuses on boundaries as symbolic constructs to overcome structural impediments to cooperation in a borderland constituted by two nation states – Germany and the Netherlands – that, from a global perspective, may be regarded as close cultural neighbours. Empirically, the vicissitudes of cross‐border cooperation are analysed at the level of a Dutch and a German fire brigade in adjacent borderland villages. The diminishing visibility of borders does not necessarily lead to more openness, but gives rise to the emergence of socially constructed symbolical boundaries, which has major effects on issues of national identity and loyalty within organizations operating in trans‐border spaces. Cultural differences can complicate processes of transnational coordination, harmonization, and negotiation. However, cooperation and trust, based on an affinity with a local culture in borderlands, may provide a more stable fundament for successful common ventures than do regulations enacted by state authorities. Addressing the question of how processes of transnationalization affect inter‐organizational cooperation, this article describes and analyses the ways in which European integration, national bureaucracies and cultural similarities and differences form partly converging and partly conflicting forces in cooperative efforts in the Dutch–German borderland.     

Creating intentional spaces for sustainable development in the Indian trans-Himalaya: reconceptualizing globalization from below

In an era of globalization, multifaceted and complex changes have increasingly interconnected geographically dispersed places. A central question of globalization studies concerns whether top-down forces of globalization are forging a global culture or whether processes of globalization from below are able to push back against homogenization by appropriating global forces rather than simply being overwhelmed by them. In this paper, I develop the concept of intentional spaces to show how ideas move globally and how local communities appropriate these ideas, revealing the actual practices that happen in the middle of top-down and bottom-up processes of globalization. I identify three types of ‘intentional spaces’ – physical, pedagogical, and ideological – to document the middle: where top down global forces meet local responses, and how these processes unfold. These intentional spaces enable processes of globalization from below, particularly the development of a mode of critical education that is both political and anti-hegemonic. This critical education empowers local people to adapt global/Western perspectives and influences to indigenous perspectives and practices, creating its own discourses of globalization. I use the context of the trans-Himalayan region of Ladakh to consider how national and international forces intersect with the local, and how local communities re-envision their participation in a modern, global economy.     

Cultural Imperialism Versus Globalization of Culture: Riding the Structure‐Agency Dialectic in Global Communication and Media Studies

This article discusses and analyzes the dialectic between so‐called cultural imperialism and globalization of culture perspectives in global communication and media studies. At an extreme, cultural imperialism is cast as the international extension of the long‐discredited hypodermic needle theory which views cultural consumers as passive automatons. At the other end of the extreme, the globalization of culture perspective is cast as a wildly postmodern standpoint in which free‐floating individuals are said to be able to make an infinite set of localized meanings from cultural products. There has been a growing trend among many global communication and media scholars to locate a productive middle ground between cultural imperialism and globalization of culture. In this author’s view, the most effective melding of the two perspectives would situate local, creative appropriation of cultural objects against the backdrop of larger, hegemonic regional and global macro‐forces. This approach ought also to acknowledge the many complexities that characterize the intersections among globalization, culture, and media, including the ways in which the local, national, regional, and global constitute one another and the ways in which resistance to local hegemony can paradoxically fuel national or global hegemony.     

Keeping open by re‐imagining laughter and fear

Speaking to the debate on the nature of critique, this article is about the struggle to produce an account when listening to and retelling stories. It begins with the disconcertment over listening to a coherent story that emerges in interviews about the development of performance indicators for Dutch hospital care. The indicators are presented as solutions to the problem of unruliness in the healthcare world. Drawing on Helen Verran's work on generative critique I slow down the ‘problem‐solution‐found’ plot. Instead of contrasting the apparently coherent stories with the complexities of an ‘underlying’ practice of healthcare, I hold on to my initial disconcertment so that ‘fleetingly subtle’ interruptions become entry points for generative critique. Taking Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's understanding of the relation that fear and laughter have to alterity, I show how fear and laughter permit generative critique within seemingly coherent stories. In the case of indicator development, the interviewees ‘laugh away’ what they consider alter from quality and safety in healthcare: having no control over what is going on, polyglotism instead of a common language, and inaction as opposed to taking one's time. Paying attention to disconcerting interruptions generates sensitivity and questions rather than yet another set of (critical) problem‐solution‐found answers. How can ridiculed (laughed away) subjectivity be acknowledged as important entry points for including alterity in supervision? And how to position the acknowledgement, not as an antidote, but as a way of rendering the fear of alterity generative? Nurturing sensitivities is crucial for keeping open, which means resisting both the sticky tendency of normalizing accounts and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. I conclude that keeping open by re‐imagining critique resonates with the creativity of collective life in actual times and places. Thereby it offers a promising potential for doing worlds differently.     

Cosmopolitan political science

Until recently, the term cosmopolitism could rarely be found in modern political science literature. It was only in the 1990s that the term was rediscovered by political scientists in the critical discourse on globalization. In this article, I will explore the full potential of cosmopolitism as an analytical concept for empirical political science. I will argue that the concept of cosmopolitism should not be restricted to the analysis of global politics. Indeed, cosmopolitism has much more to offer for political scientists. Properly understood, it enables--and necessitates--a re-invention of political science in the age of globalization, comparable to the behavioural revolution in political science in the 1950s. Such a paradigmatic shift should be based on a twofold transformation of existing disciplinary boundaries: A removal of the boundary between national (and comparative) and international politics on the one hand; and a re-definition of the boundaries between empirical and normative approaches on the other. As a result, cosmopolitism may serve as a new, critical theory of politics based on the integration of hitherto separated fields and sub-fields.     

The pivotal role of news agencies in the context of globalization: a historical approach

The global media play a fundamental role in contemporary globalization, making possible instant communication and promoting an experience of global connectedness. The globalization of media communications has deeply shaped the modern journalistic field in the last 150 years and, at the same time, global news organizations have been instrumental in creating the very conditions that have made globalization possible. In this article I explore the relationship between globalization and the media and trace the historical development of the field of global news, examining in detail the role and trajectories of its most important players, the global news agencies, and highlighting significant parallels between nineteenth‐century globalization and the processes that have led to increased global connectedness in the past decades. I also devote some attention to the more recent developments in the field of global news and the appearance of new types of media organizations.     

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.     

Schooling a European Identity: ethno‐cultural exclusion and nationalist resonance within the EU policy of “The European dimension of education”

This article aims to explore how the role of education as an aide in the process of “European” identity formation is being articulated in the European Union's (EU) policy of “The European dimension of education”. After having located the EU's views on education in the context of the neo‐liberal discourse on economic globalization, the article goes on to trace EU discussions of the European dimension of education historically. Subsequently, it deliberates on the understanding of European culture and identity which the European dimension of education endeavours to advance. Here a critique is developed of the policy's ethno‐culturalism, thereby excluding delineation of a collective identity in the EU. Basing itself on a notion of cultural identity which, implicitly, includes only those who fit certain versions of European historical “roots” and cultural “heritage”, the policy, it is argued, impedes a discussion of how a trans‐ethnic identity formation could be created in today's EU. Towards the end of the article, a scrutiny of the European dimension's perception of the so‐called “language diversity” in the EU seeks to illustrate this issue further.     

Migrants as strategic actors in the European Union's Global Approach to Migration and Mobility

The European Union's discourse of ‘partnership’ in the Global Approach to Migration and Mobility and the widely expressed critique of this discourse as a process of ‘externalization’ of EU policy both depend on unitary accounts of the main policy actors involved. Two separate literatures contest such unitary accounts. Within political science and international relations, institutional approaches identify a range of strategic actors involved in policy development; in anthropology, there is a well‐established interest in the strategic behaviour of disempowered actors. In this article, I set out to link these two approaches with an examination of undocumented migrants as strategic actors. I use a case study of events at the borders between Morocco and the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in late 2005, which have proved extremely influential in the continued development of the EU's global approach, to identify the ways in which even highly marginalized migrants were able to develop transnational social organizations.     

Gendered Rationality? A Genealogical Exploration of the Philosophical and Sociological Conceptions of Rationality,Masculinity and Organization

Although feminist organizational theory frequently refers to the association between rationality and masculinity, this association tends to be stated rather than argued for. This article examines, from a philosophical and sociological perspective, how these two concepts have become genealogically so closely and inseparably intertwined. It proposes that it is the early philosophical and sociological interpretations of reason and rationality that linked masculinity and rationality. To explore the connection between rationality and masculinity that is so fundamental to management and, more broadly, organizational discourse, is the purpose of this article. Commencing with a brief overview of pre‐Cartesian concepts of rationality, the main focus of the article is on modern conceptions of rationality, starting with the philosophy of Descartes. It examines the influence of the ideas of Francis Bacon, Enlightenment interpretations of rationality and the influence of Weberian rationality and subsequent interpretations of this concept of rationality by early organizational theorists. Finally, it demonstrates, via a case study of strategic management, how contemporary organizational discourse continues to reflect many of the assumptions about masculinity and rationality that are deeply embedded in more traditional organizational discourse. The article concludes with a number of suggestions for a way forward for critical gender studies that moves beyond the standard feminist critique of organizational discourse and practice.     

Strangers in a strange land: coping with imprisonment as a racial or ethnic foreign national inmate

A wide range of scholarship examining the global effects of neo‐liberalism draws attention to the precarious position of individuals who are not seen as part of the social body. While immigrants, racial minorities, and common criminals are central to this discourse, relatively little research has examined how the experiences of these individuals may vary based on statuses other than citizenship when they are imprisoned. Our research focuses on the interactions (between prisoners and between prisoners and correctional staff) of a racially diverse group of Dutch foreign national prisoners incarcerated in England. Although all of these prisoners clearly saw themselves as ‘outsiders,’ visible minorities faced a unique set of challenges relative to their White counterparts. We consider both the practical and theoretical import of these findings.     

The inclusion of the non‐European world in international society, 1870s–1920s: evidence from global networks

Abstract This article is envisaged as a contribution to the historical sociology of globalization. In it I investigate the idea that from the 1870s peoples beyond Europe were increasingly included into international society. The discussion explores theoretical issues around intercultural engagement, arguing against those who see inclusion in terms of simple co‐option into Western modernity, and in favour of a more subtle co‐production of modern processes and forms of difference. Attention then moves on to examine historical evidence drawn from some knowledge networks involving Africa and India. Inclusion is seen in terms of a very complex and shifting set of engagements, conflicts and modes of cooperation, circumscribed by both racial and elite forms of discourse under the shadow of the growing political instability of empire. The methodology of interpersonal network analysis is also commended as a way of opening up debates about the long‐term history of the dynamics and limits to the emergence of global public spheres.     

The Dialogue of Civilizations: How the I Ching Can Help Understand The Relationship Between Globalization and Anti-Globalization

I Ching, or the Book of Changes, is a kind of ancient classical philosophy in China, mainly consisting of Yin-Yang theory, five elements and 64 hexagrams, whose wisdom has influenced eastern Asian civilizations for more than 2000 years. The paper attempts to study the relationships between globalization and anti-globalization via its discourses. The interdisciplinary perspective does not challenge the dominant ideologies in current political study, but only attempts to open up a new avenue in studying international relations and to constitute the following codes for reference in international relations study: (1) as an analytical model to observe diverse global issues via the Chinese philosophy; (2) as a mirror or medium to understand global conflicts and to help to exchange ideas and achieve moral or ethical consensus; and (3) as a new discourse contributive to the global debates on the diversity and complexity of globalizations and anti-globalizations.     

Reprogramming Femininity? The Construction of Gender Identities in the Israeli Hi‐tech Industry between Global and Local Gender Orders

Based on the study of gender identities in the Israeli hi‐tech sector, this article sets out to explore the doing of gender in a context comprised of two cultural repertoires characterized by divergent and contradictory fundamental assumptions: the new masculine transnational economy and pro‐natalist Israeli society. The article demonstrates how, by manoeuvering and moving between these global and local cultural repertoires, privileged Israeli hi‐tech women enact and construct a ‘new femininity’ that simultaneously challenges both the discourse of the ‘ideal hi‐tech worker’ and that of traditional Israeli femininity. This new femininity, I argue, is grounded in a local translation of the ‘family friendly organization’ discourse.     

The Uses and Misuses of Globalization in the Study of Social Movements

On a general level this article seeks to improve our understanding of the relationship between the concepts of globalization and transnational mobilization; a question that is surprisingly rarely addressed in an explicit manner in the already extensive (and still growing) body of literature on these issues. The article proceeds from the assumption that globalization does not necessarily lead to transnational mobilization. The missing link between globalization and transnational mobilization is a process of social construction that seeks to link the local, the national and the global. Globalization, in this perspective, is both an objective process involving certain structural transformations and a subjective process intimately related to the way social actors interpret these changes and give them meaning. Proceeding from a critique of mono-causal and political economic approaches to transnational mobilization the main objective of this article is to outline an analytical framework able to encompass both of these dimensions; a task achieved by combining insights from the globalization literature and the social constructionist framing approach to social movements. This integration is captured in the concept of transnational framing.