ISBN: Ostalo
Godina izdanja: 2000
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

U dobrom stanju


Wiley, Feb 3, 2000, 192 pages

Review
`The primary virtue of Beck`s book lies in its helpful and comprehensive mapping of the various contours of the broad debates about globalization ... As would be expected from a sociologist of the stature of Beck, this is a fascinating , eclectic book where an illuminating empirical example is never very far away.`
Democractization

`This introduction to the thorny path of the globalization debate aims to clarify the ambiguities of the debate, distinguish between the various types of globalization, and warn the reader of conceptual traps.` Business Horizons

From the Back Cover
This important new book offers an engaging and challenging introduction to the thorny paths of the globalization debate. Beck aims to clarify the ambiguities of the debate, to distinguish between the various types of globalization and to warn the reader of conceptual traps. Most importantly, however, he opens up the horizon for political responses to globalization.

Beck focuses on two main questions: what does globalization mean? and how can it be moulded politically? He begins by examining the ambivalences and paradoxes of globality and globalization, with regard to society, economics, politics, ecology and culture. He sets out the rival perspectives in the globalization debate and assesses the prospects for a transnational state. Central to the book is Beck`s argument that a decisive critique of globalism is necessary to make space for the primacy of politics. In the last section, he offers a series of constructive proposals to counter the current paralysis of politics, suggesting ten ways of addressing and answering the challenges of the global age. The book concludes by conjecturing that if our politicians do not respond creatively to the challenge, we will experience what Beck calls `the Brazilianization of Europe`.

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WHAT IS GLOBALIZATION?
Ulrich Beck
Patrick Camiller (Translator)
Polity Press: Cambridge, UK

Ulrich Beck argues here that globalization has transformed the old categories of political action away from the national state. This transformation is possible because the multinational corporation has recaptured the power it lost in the development of democratic capitalism and the welfare state. This is made possible by its ability to withhold material resources from the state. Thus, they can change not only the economy of a nation but society itself. Globalization policies, he argues, are intended to sever the power of both trade unions and the state itself. The `final aim” of such policies is to dismantle the state to achieve the “market utopia” of the minimal state, which is the implementation of the ideology of neoliberalism.
The power to achieve the above is created by the transnational corporations ability to export jobs from uncooperative states, to develop a global division of labor, and to play countries off against one another. This leads to the development of `subpolitics` in which the TNC has power beyond established political systems. Thus, in the new modernity, politics recedes before the expansion of the economic realm. Globalization undermines the nation-state because its effects cut across traditional boundaries. Ironically, as politicians court the TNC with incentives, they undermine their own political authority and the public good. Rather than enhancing social justice as the rhetoric of globalization suggests, globalization increases injustice even further. The framework for balancing the conflicts between rich and poor no longer exist at the time when the gulf between them is widening at alarming rales. Thus. Beck concludes that neoliberals who present themselves as the reformers of the West are ultimately its destroyers.
Beck distinguishes between globalism, globality, and globalization. Globalism is the ideology of neoliberalism, which demands rule by the world market. It effectively negates the political, resulting in complete economic rcductionism. Globality suggests a world society in which closed spaces of the past have become illusory. Rather, social relationships are not determined by national state politics. Its essence is “multiplicity without unity.” Finally, globalization denotes the processes by which the nation-state is undermined by transnational actors. He argues within this framework that globality in the new modernity is irreversible fora number of reasons. Among these are density of international trade, the
revolution in information technology, the global culture industry, and growing power of transnational actors to name a few. Unlike global homogenization theorists, world society is conceived here as multiplicity and nonintegration. It also means no world state or world society without a world state or world government. Globalization thus leads to `globally disorganized capitalism” unconstrained by external control.
Noting that the discourse of globalization is fuzzy at best, Beck argues that there arc multiple dimensions of globalization that need to be considered. These include information, ecological, economic, production, and cultural globalization. Within these contexts, the fundamental premise of modernity has been that the various contours of society coincide with national borders. It is within the context of globality that the identification of society with the state is becoming less meaningful. It is thus a negation of the “container theory of society” that has informed social theory to date and made the nation-state the unit of analysis. How this has played out in various theories is demonstrated by an examination of several prevalent approaches to globalization. The progressof globalization is characterized as a somewhat dialectical process between the nation-state and the transnational corporation. In consideration of transnational civil society. Beck suggests that new` transnational spaces open for transnational actors who have no legitimate power.
Several theorists are examined. These range from Wallerstein’s (1979) world system that suggests that the global logic of capitalism dominates the process, to Gilpin and Gilpin (2000). who argue that the development of transnational social spaces requires a permissive political structure making globalization contingent. Beck then often* his own `world risk society” based on global ecological risks dial know no boundaries. He sees a new cosmopolitan consciousness predicated on the notion that global threats create global society. Here the TNC is not a direct agent of change as it is in other approaches. It is lied indirectly, however, in the consequences of its actions caused by both affluence and poverty.