Global futures : migration, environment and globalization ; [derived from papers originally presented to the 1996 BSA annual conference held at the University of Reading

Providing critical assessment of the 'globalization thesis' through sustained analysis of the nexus of processes underlying social and cultural relations, this book examines, explores, and teases out the many contradictions embedded within different discourses of globalization. Together, the various chapters in the collection offer a wide-ranging critique of those accounts which represent globalization primarily, if not exclusively, as the classic story of European modernity with its attendant narratives of ostensibly unfettered movement of people, unmitigated economic growth and social progress. This book provides a critical assessment of the 'globalization thesis' through sustained analysis of the nexus of processes underlying social and cultural relations. It examines, explores and teases out the many contradictions embedded within different discourses of globalization. Together, the various chapters in this collection offer a wide-ranging critique of those accounts which represent globalization primarily, if not exclusively, as the classic story of European modernity with its attendant narratives of ostensibly unfettered movement of people, unmitigated economic growth and social progress. The authors make a careful and thoroughgoing analysis of such key issues as the social inequities governing the internationalized market in labour migration; the global politics of environmental and ecological governance; the `new orientalism' apparent in contemporary trade relations between the USA, Japan and East Asian NICs; the forms of `othering' apparent at the heart of certain academic discourses of globalization which seem to repress the formative influence of colonialism in the constitution of European modernity; the airport as a symbol of the political economy of migration; the complex ways in which ethnic and linguistic ties form an integral part of trade, investment and migration in the Central European region; and the impact of exile on East European intellectuals in Britain. As such, the book places questions of power at the centre of global processes. This book is unique in its bringing together all these themes in one volume, and in establishing connections across theoretical policy-oriented and political debates which normally take place in separate arenas Front Matter....Pages i-xi Front Matter....Pages 1-1 Introduction: Whither ‘the Global’?....Pages 3-26 Imagining Globalization: Power-Geometries of Time-Space....Pages 27-44 Front Matter....Pages 45-45 Risk, ‘Race’ and Global Environmental Regulation....Pages 47-69 Global Environmental-Change Discourse: the Southern Critique....Pages 70-82 Governance and the Postnational Policy Process....Pages 83-96 Front Matter....Pages 97-97 New Orientalisms, Global Capitalism, and the Politics of Synergetic Differences:....Pages 99-121 Reviewing the Western Spectacle: Reflexive Globalization through the Black Diaspora....Pages 122-143 Globalization, the Pope and the Gypsies....Pages 144-157 Front Matter....Pages 159-159 Analysing the Political Economy of Migration: the Airport as an ‘Effective’ Institution of Control....Pages 161-184 Crossing Borders: Mobility of Goods, Capital and People in the Central European Region....Pages 185-209 Migration and Globalization in Intellectual Life: a Case Study of the Post-1956 Exodus from Hungary....Pages 210-232 Back Matter....Pages 233-243 "This book provides a critical assessment of the 'globalization thesis' through sustained analysis of the nexus of processes underlying social and cultural relations. It examines, explores and teases out the many contradictions embedded within different discourses of globalization. Together, the various chapters in this collection offer a wide-ranging critique of those accounts which represent globalization primarily, if not exclusively, as the classic story of European modernity with its attendant narratives of ostensibly unfettered movement of people, unmitigated economic growth and social progress."--BOOK JACKET.