Globalization and Beyond

The enormous turnout in Washington, DC, for Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration and the worldwide rejoicing at this signal of change offered a tangible demonstration of people’s desire for a new world order. In the waning months of the Bush administration, crushing global recession dealt a critical blow to the neoliberal project. The hegemony of the United States and of the international institutions it has used to maintain its economic dominance has been in decline for some years now, suggesting the need to explore alternative ways to carry out globalization’s imperatives. In Globalization and Beyond, leading scholars take up the challenge of examining the current state of economic crisis and the variety of ways in which different countries (as well as different groups) are responding to it.

“In this book, a distinguished array of scholars assess recent changes in the structures and processes of capitalist globalization, and their effects on the states and peoples in Latin America and Asia. Their focus is on the diminishing power of the United States, and the rising power of others. The overwhelming conclusion of the theory and research presented here is that the best solutions for the present crisis of neoliberalism will lie in the search for alternative, post-neoliberal strategies and that these will probably take different forms in different places. The volume will provide plenty of food for thought for those in corporate boardrooms, seats of political power, and academe alike.”—Leslie Sklair, London School of Economics, “Many books deal with the state of contemporary globalization. Most present globalization—for good or ill—as an inevitably determined condition. As the contributors to Globalization and Beyond demonstrate, however, there are alternatives—and agency is not dead. There are indeed many ways to be ‘globalized.’”—Miguel Angel Centeno, Princeton University

Jon Shefner is Professor and Head of the Sociology Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the author of The Illusion of Civil Society: Democratization and Community Mobilization in Low-Income Mexico (Penn State, 2008).Patricia Fernández-Kelly is in the Sociology Department and the Office of Population Research at Princeton University. She is the author of For We Are Sold, I and My People: Women and Industry in Mexico’s Frontier, and with Jon Shefner she edited Out of the Shadows: Political Action and the Informal Economy in Latin America (Penn State, 2006).