Everyday Politics of the World Economy

Cambridge University Press, 11/15/2007
EAN 9780521877725, ISBN10: 0521877725

Hardcover, 264 pages, 23 x 16 x 2.2 cm
Language: English

How do our everyday actions shape and transform the world economy? This volume of original essays argues that current scholarship in international political economy (IPE) is too highly focused on powerful states and large international institutions. The contributors examine specific forms of 'everyday' actions to demonstrate how small-scale actors and their decisions can shape the global economy. They analyse a range of seemingly ordinary or subordinate actors, including peasants, working classes and trade unions, lower-middle and middle classes, female migrant labourers and Eastern diasporas, and examine how they have agency in transforming their political and economic environments. This book offers a novel way of thinking about everyday forms of change across a range of topical issues including globalisation, international finance, trade, taxation, consumerism, labour rights and regimes. It will appeal to students and scholars of politics, international relations, political economy and sociology,

1. Introducing everyday IPE
decentring the discipline - revitalising the margins John M. Hobson and Leonard Seabrooke
Part I. Regimes as Cultural Weapons of the Weak
2. The agency of labour in global change
reimagining the spaces and scales of trade union praxis within a global economy Andrew Herod
3. The agency of peripheral actors
small state tax havens and international regimes as weapons of the weak J. C. Sharman
4. Southern sites of female agency
informal regimes and female migrant labour resistance in East Asia Michele Ford and Nicola Piper
Part II. Global Economic Change From Below
5. The everyday social sources of imperial and hegemonic financial orders Leonard Seabrooke
6. Everyday investor subjects and global financial change
the rise of Anglo-American mass investment Paul Langley
7. Peasants as subaltern agents in Latin America
neoliberalism, resistance, and the power of the powerless Adam David Morton
Part III. Bringing Eastern Agents In
8. Eastern agents of globalisation
oriental globalisation in the rise of Western capitalism John M. Hobson
9. Diasporic agents and trans-Asian flows in the making of Asian modernity
the case of Thailand Ara Wilson
10. The agency of subordinate polities
Western hegemony in the East Asian mirror Shogo Suzuki
11. Conclusion
everyday IPE research, teaching and policy agendas John M. Hobson and Leonard Seabrooke.

'Hobson, Seabrooke and the contributors to this volume join a select group of scholars who are reconceptualizing the study of the global political economy from the bottom up. The result is a unique set of readings with sophisticated conceptual, policy-relevant and pedagogical implications. This is the most innovative and useful collection of essays to be published in a very long time.' Robert A. Denemark, University of Delaware