The rhetoric of globalization: What's in a wor(l)d?

International Journal

Volumn 51, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 603-616

  Sjolander, Claire Turenne ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0042357331     PISSN: 00207020     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/002070209605100401     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. Richard J. Barnet and John Cavanagh, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster 1994), 13-14.
2. François Chesnais, La mondialisation du capital (Paris: Syros 1994), 14. Chesnais makes particular reference to Kenichi Ohmae's The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York: HarperCollins 1990) and to Business Week's promotion of the concept 'stateless' when describing the evolution of transnational firms in the 1990s.
3. François Chesnais, La mondialisation du capital (Paris: Syros 1994), 14. Chesnais makes particular reference to Kenichi Ohmae's The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York: HarperCollins 1990) and to Business Week's promotion of the concept 'stateless' when describing the evolution of transnational firms in the 1990s.
4. François Chesnais, La mondialisation du capital (Paris: Syros 1994), 14. Chesnais makes particular reference to Kenichi Ohmae's The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York: HarperCollins 1990) and to Business Week's promotion of the concept 'stateless' when describing the evolution of transnational firms in the 1990s.
5. The paradox, of course, exists only for those who present globalization as a linear, homogenizing process. If globalization is understood - as it is here - as a dialectical process, homogenizing forces inevitably bring with them a new emphasis on difference.
6. Daniel Drache and Meric S. Gertler, 'Preface,' in Daniel Drache and Meric S. Gertler, eds, The New Era of Global Competition: State Policy and Market Power (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 1991), xi.
7. James H. Mittelman, 'The dynamics of globalization,' in James H. Mittelman, ed, Globalizalion: Critical Reflections (Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner 1996), 3.
8. See Richard Higgott, Some Alternative Security Questions for Australia (Canberra: Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University 1989), 26-30 ; and Robert Cox, Production, Power and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History (New York: Columbia University Press 1987), 244-53.
9. See Richard Higgott, Some Alternative Security Questions for Australia (Canberra: Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University 1989), 26-30 ; and Robert Cox, Production, Power and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History (New York: Columbia University Press 1987), 244-53.
10. See Lynn Krieger Mytelka, 'Knowledge-intensive production and the changing internationalization strategies of multinational firms,' in James A. Caporaso, ed, A Changing International Division of Labour (Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner 1987).
11. See for example, Lynn Krieger Mytelka, 'Stats, strategic alliances and international oligopolies: the European ESPRIT programme,' in Lynn Krieger Mytelka, ed, Strategic Partnerships: States, Firms and International (Competition (London: Pinter 1991).
12. On the investment triad, see the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), World Investment Report 1994: Transnational Corporations, Employment and the Workplace (New York: United Nations 1994), 17.
13. Service agreements in the World Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Agreement illustrate this trend.
14. 'Nothing to lose but its chains: a survey of world trade,' Economist, 22 September 1990, 36.
15. Chesnais, La mondialisation du capital, 14.
16. Ibid, 25. Robert Cox makes a similar argument when he discusses the totalizing connotation of globalization as 'a world increasingly homogenized,' and its dialectical response found in the affirmation of difference. See Robert Cox, 'A perspective on globalization,' in Mittelman, Globalization, 30, n 1.
17. Ibid, 25. Robert Cox makes a similar argument when he discusses the totalizing connotation of globalization as 'a world increasingly homogenized,' and its dialectical response found in the affirmation of difference. See Robert Cox, 'A perspective on globalization,' in Mittelman, Globalization, 30, n 1.
18. Robert W. Cox, 'The global political economy and social choice,' in Drache and Gertler, The New Era of Global Competition, 337.
19. Chesnais, La mondialisation du capital, 24. The emergence of a regional triad, concentrating economic activity within and between three world trading/ investment 'blocs' (North America, Europe, and Asia) has, as mentioned earlier, been a key feature of the world economy since the mid-1980s. While certain developing economies, notably Mexico in the North American context, might thereby share, if only partly, in the reorganized production of globalization, others outside the geographic triad are further marginalized by it.
20. Daniel Leblanc, 'Le post-fordisme et la marginalisation des pays les moins avancés: la réaction des acteurs économiques et institutionnels dominants à la crise du fordisme.' Unpublished MA thesis, Department of Political Science, University of Ottawa, 1995.
21. Claire Turenne Sjolander, 'Multilateralism, regionalism, and unilateralism: international trade and the marginalization of the South,' in Gerald Dirks et al, The State of the United Nations, 1993: North-South Perspectives, Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS), Reports and Papers No 5, 1993.
22. Claire Turenne Sjolander, 'Multilateralism, regionalism, and unilateralism: international trade and the marginalization of the South,' in Gerald Dirks et al, The State of the United Nations, 1993: North-South Perspectives, Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS), Reports and Papers No 5, 1993.
23. By his own admission, Reich's categories are not exhaustive, but do make up roughly 75 to 80 per cent of labour in industrialized countries. In addition to his categories, one must add labour involved in natural resources production and extraction (farmers and miners, for example), and public sector employees (including teachers), both of which cut unevenly across his three functional categories. See Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st-Century Capitalism (New York: Knopf 1991).
24. See Drache and Gertler, 'Preface,' xi. The extent of this growing wage gap, and the way in which it has affected Western economies differently, is most strikingly illustrated in a comparison of the ratio of the pay of a 'typical' worker to that of a chief executive officer in various industrialized countries. In Japan, the average CEO earns 16 times the salary of the typical worker; in Germany, the ratio is 21:1; in Britain, 33:1; while in the United States, the political pioneer of globalization, the ratio is 120:1. Harper's magazine reported that the after-tax compensation for the average CEO in the United States had risen by more than 300 per cent, adjusted for inflation, since 1974, whereas the average worker's pay fell 13 per cent over the same period. (See 'Harper's forum: does America still work?' Harper's, May 1996, 46).
25. See Drache and Gertler, 'Preface,' xi. The extent of this growing wage gap, and the way in which it has affected Western economies differently, is most strikingly illustrated in a comparison of the ratio of the pay of a 'typical' worker to that of a chief executive officer in various industrialized countries. In Japan, the average CEO earns 16 times the salary of the typical worker; in Germany, the ratio is 21:1; in Britain, 33:1; while in the United States, the political pioneer of globalization, the ratio is 120:1. Harper's magazine reported that the after-tax compensation for the average CEO in the United States had risen by more than 300 per cent, adjusted for inflation, since 1974, whereas the average worker's pay fell 13 per cent over the same period. (See 'Harper's forum: does America still work?' Harper's, May 1996, 46).
26. See Drache and Gertler, 'Preface,' xi. The extent of this growing wage gap, and the way in which it has affected Western economies differently, is most strikingly illustrated in a comparison of the ratio of the pay of a 'typical' worker to that of a chief executive officer in various industrialized countries. In Japan, the average CEO earns 16 times the salary of the typical worker; in Germany, the ratio is 21:1; in Britain, 33:1; while in the United States, the political pioneer of globalization, the ratio is 120:1. Harper's magazine reported that the after-tax compensation for the average CEO in the United States had risen by more than 300 per cent, adjusted for inflation, since 1974, whereas the average worker's pay fell 13 per cent over the same period. (See 'Harper's forum: does America still work?' Harper's, May 1996, 46).
27. Mittelman, 'The dynamics of globalization,' 3.
28. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press 1992).
29. 'Annotation: the demands of capital,' Harper's, May 1995, 67. I am grateful to Larry Peck for bringing this article to my attention.
30. Ibid.
31. Confidential interview, Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, 19 June 1995.
32. Mittelman, 'The dynamics of globalization,' 18.
33. For a lengthier discussion of the opportunities for resistance to globalization, see Wayne S. Cox and Claire Turenne Sjolander, 'The state, production and agency: on the construction of the globalizing international political economy,' in Kurt Burch et al, eds, The Constitution of the International Political Economy (Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner forthcoming 1997).
34. Cox, 'A perspective on globalization,' 27 (emphasis added).
35. L.H.M. Ling, 'Hegemony and the internationalizing state: a post-colonial analysis of China's integration into Asian corporatism,' Review of International Political Economy 3 (spring 1996), 2.