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The world is fast becoming a global factory in which workers, entrepreneurs, and multinational corporations find themselves producing for the world capitalist market. This collection of original essays explores in concrete anthropological detail the ways that people throughout the world have been drawn into this new international labor web. Broad in scope and far-reaching in their analyses, the chapters in this book offer numerous examples of this new world order. The case studies focus on industrialization in small-scale workshops and informal work-at-home situations as well as multinational corporations. Undertaken in every continent, in core as well as peripheral regions, the studies cover the perspectives of the workers, the entrepreneurs, and the corporations.
In this systematic view of the capitalization of the world economy, the contributors demonstrate how new economic linkages are being formed between world markets and small-scale entrepreneurs and home-based local producers and how late-developing regions attempt to gain economic sovereignty through the marketing of local product specialties. At the same time, the contributors' investigations provide concrete evidence of local efforts to create culturally distinct and socially equitable lives--showing how the spread of the world capitalist economy changes the everyday lives of people. They point to ways in which people use their local traditions of kinship, culture, and community to resist and shape economic change to more satisfying local ends.
List of contents
Introduction: The Emerging Global Factory and Anthropology by Michael L. Blim
Global Production and the Mobility of Capital and LaborWhat Happens to the Past? Return Industrial Migrants in Latin America by Frances Abrahamer Rothstein
Capitalist Production in a Socialist Society: The Transfer of Manufacturing from Hong Kong to China by Alan Smart and Josephine Smart
Nonresident-Indian Investment and India's Drive for Industrial Modernization by Johanna Lessinger
The New Industrial DiversitySmall-Scale Industrialization in a Rapidly Changing World Market by Michael L. Blim
Spanish Galician Industrialization and the Europe of 1992: A Contextual Analysis by Hans C. Buechler and Judith-Maria Buechler
The Unexpected Entrepreneurs: Small High-Technology Firms, Technology Transfer, and Regional Development in Wales and Northeast England by Douglas Caulkins
Rural Industrial Enterprise and "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" by Eugene Cooper and Xiong Pan
Informal Sectorization of Egyptian Petty Commodity Production by Kristin Koptiuch
Industrial Decentralization and Women's Employment in South Africa: A Case Study by Georgina Jaffee
Worker Struggles and Survival in the New Industrial WorldLabor-Managed Systems and Industrial Redevelopment: Lessons from the Fagor Cooperative Group of Mondragón by Davydd J. Greenwood
Tobacco, Textiles, and Toyota: Working for Multinational Corporations in Rural Kentucky by Ann E. Kingsolver
Women as Political Actors in Rural Puerto Rico: Continuity and Change by Ida Susser
Women Workers and the Labor Movement in South Korea by Seung-kyung Kim
Conclusion: New Waves and Old--Industrialization, Labor, and the Struggle for a New World Order by Frances Abrahamer Rothstein
Bibliography
Index
About the author
FRANCES ABRAHAMER ROTHSTEIN is Professor of Anthropology at Towson State University. She has worked extensively in the areas of development and industrialization for many years and is the author of
Three Different Worlds: Women, Men, and Children in an Industrializing Community (Greenwood Press, 1982).
MICHAEL L. BLIM is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Northeastern University. He is the author of
Made in Italy: Small-Scale Industrialization and Its Consequences (Praeger Publishers, 1990).
