Face Of Globalization Research Articles

Opportunities and Challenges to Capturing the Multiple Potential Benefits of REDD+ in a Traditional Transnational Savanna-Woodland Region in West Africa

The REDD+ scheme of the United Nations intends to offer developing countries financial incentives to reduce the rates of deforestation and forest degradation for reducing global CO2 emissions. This is combined with building carbon stocks in existing wooded ecosystems and fostering other soil, biodiversity and water conservation objectives. Successful application of REDD+ to the Xylophone Triangle of West Africa faces substantial challenges and risks to both meeting REDD+ objectives and to the local people's rights and livelihoods. The transnationality of the culturally coherent area requires collaboration of three national governments. The opportunities, however, are great to capitalize on the region's biodiversity, the well-developed traditional ecological knowledge and the use of local medicinal plants as an integral part of the agro-ecosystem. Possibilities open to, not only sequester carbon, but also to increase the resilience of the ecosystem and of independent rural livelihoods in the face of climate change and globalization.

A Rabi, an Imam, and a Priest Walk into a Bar … Or, What can Music Education Philosophy Learn from Comparative Cosmopolitanism?

In the face of globalization, speed communication, and the mashing up of once clearly drawn borders, it seems both pertinent and constructive that music education philosophers make use of comparative frameworks to make sense—and make new sense—of educational and musical events, products, and interactions. However, comparison that is merely analytical, self-centered, and attempts to valuate, categorize, and create hierarchy or contradistinction, might be not only scholastically inept but also politically irresponsible. Philosophical investigation based upon “comparative cosmopolitanism” is interested in “difference that remains different” as a positive element and attentive to the ways in which we come to understand said differences. Therefore, this view is committed to philosophic enterprises that consider creativity, risk, and difference to articulate “forms of fundamental critical self-reflection that extend to the ‘scaffolding of our own thought.’” The goal of this article is to present an introductory reasoning for placing a comparative approach side-by-side a cosmopolitan framework, exemplifying its usefulness to philosophical work in and for music education.

Responding to Globalization: Impacts of Certification on Colombian Small-Scale Coffee Growers

Eco-certification of food and other agricultural products has been promoted as a way of making markets work for sustainability. Certification programs offer a price premium to producers who invest in more sustainable practices. The literature on the impacts of certification has focused primarily on the economic benefits farmers perceive from participating in these schemes. These benefits, however, are often subject to price variability, offering only a partial explanation of why farmers join and stay in certification programs. We evaluated the potential of the Rainforest Alliance certification program to foster more resilient social-ecological systems in the face of globalization. Using the case of Santander, Colombia, and a pair-based comparison of 86 households to effectively produce a robust counterfactual, we showed that certification provides important environmental benefits, while improving the well-being of farmers and their communities. Furthermore, the study showed that price premiums are only one of many elements defining the success of certification, particularly important for motivating farmers to join, but less so to explain retention and upgrading. The case of Colombian coffee growers illustrates how the connections between local social-ecological systems and larger global forces can produce more sustainable livelihoods and land uses.

Conjuring the Close from Afar

After more than 60 years of military occupation, 30 of these under violent military practices, a social movement forced the U.S. Navy from the island of Vieques. This victory would not have been possible without the highly effective organization of civil disobedience carried out on the island. But the sum total of the actions that eventually forced out the U.S. Navy, neither happened exclusively within the boundaries of Vieques, nor was carried out by Viequense residents alone. In this article we want to suggest that this amazing victory—a testament of people's will in the face of globalization—is also a border-crossing tale. Drawing from interviews with key activists currently based in Puerto Rico and New York, this article will explore the myriad routes of connections enacted, maintained and negotiated within and beyond territorial and ethnic boundaries. It will particularly look at how various activists conjured networks of solidarity, kinship, political affiliation, and friendship, among others, in their quest to liberate the island from the U.S. military occupation. Under the backdrop of Obama's post-racial discourse, this paper illustrates how the Vieques movement circumvented the politics of Empire through creative maneuvers and negotiations.

Traditional Industrial Districts in the Face of Globalization: The Case of the Marche Footwear District

This paper studies the case of the Marche footwear districts. Statistical evidence and interviews with entrepreneurs suggest that the traditional inter-firm relationships within these districts have significantly changed during the past decade. Some leading firms have been building up more exclusive relations with their suppliers, including those abroad, along buyer-driven value chains. Moreover, firms have been adopting different strategies, following two main paths: the first is a focusing-on-quality strategy, based on upgrading the quality of the goods and investing in brands, RD the second is a focusing-on-costs strategy, which aims at minimizing the production costs of a medium-quality range of goods, including outsourcing abroad. This study shows that firms which focused on quality did better than others, both in the years before the crisis of 2008-09 and during the recession.

A Comparative Study on Timber Productivity by Timber Firms in Ghana as Influenced by Ownership

Some of the major problems that confront the timber industry in Ghana are: The industries inability to diversify value-added products for export as well as decline in export volumes, prices, and number of sawmills which are actively engaged in the production and exportation of wood products especially the locally-owned. Furthermore, the capacity of forest sector has also reduced. These developments present a challenge to the local entrepreneurs in the face of globalization; and for that matter, the need to conduct an empirical comparative study into the issues to find solutions to mitigate them is now. The average number of products exported ware 3 and 4 by the locally- and foreign-owned firms respectively. In general, both categories of firms showed declines in eight low export prices of wood products from 2000 to 2008. Air-dried and kiln-dried lumber were the dominant products exported by both categories of firms. The foreign-owned timber firms exported ten high-priced timber products and eight by their counterparts; this makes the foreign-owned firms more diversified than the locally-owned firms. It is also worthy of note that, more than half (59%) of the foreign-owned firms exported between 4 and 6 products while less than one-fourth (23%) of the locally-owned firms exported the same number of products. Only one foreign owned firm exported products of 10 and above. Again the foreign owned - firms concentrated more on value added products while the locally-owned - firms specialized on primary products. This suggests that the foreign-owned firms are more efficient than their local counterparts.Statistical analysis conducted on all the products using (Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test) indicated that the differences were not statistically significant. Finally, the timber firms in Ghana should take innovative measures to diversify and maximize the recovery rate of volume and value of timber products especially the locally owned–firms so that they can compete globally.

Views, events, and debates

Here we are profiling the highly respected and highly influential organisation, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era, better known as DAWN. For over a quarter of a century DAWN has researched and advocated on economic and gender justice in the South in the face of globalisation, and ever-more polarised degrees of wealth and poverty across the globe. In 1987, DAWN authors Gita Sen and Caren Grown published their groundbreaking book, Development Crises and Alternative Visions, which remains a fixture on gender and development studies reading lists everywhere A lot of readers will be familiar with the work of Women in Development Europe (WIDE) and may well have attended one or more of their dynamic and inspiring annual conferences, a regular date in the calendar for many of us. Hit by a funding crisis last year, WIDE is now regrouping, and here Wendy Harcourt, WIDE Chair from 2004 to 2008, talks about the network as it plans for the future

Culture, Product Advertising, and Advertising Agency Operations

Advertising is a means through which products, services and ideas of organizations are brought to the public knowledge. As a means of telling the market about a new product, advertising persuades and reminds the audience of their continuous support of the advertised item. In the face of globalization, varying cultures are shown to have impacted enormously on product advertising. The more companies undertake to market their products and services, the more linguistic and cultural challenges they come across. These cultures create some hurdles which an advertising agency must encounter before a successful advertising is recorded. This study adopts qualitative approach to examine the fusion between culture and production marketing, especially with regards to operations of advertising agencies. It concludes that advertising is very essential and for a product, service or idea to survive and sustain itself in these rough tidings, the advertiser should always embark on meaningful research to understand the market and marketing environment with a view to achieving advert objectives.

Sustaining Cultures in the Face of Globalization

Arguments for the preservation of culture are based on an extremely problematic essentialist conception of culture as a fixed entity. The inadequacy of the essentialist conception has received increasing recognition, but an adequate positive conception has yet to take its place. This essay reframes the debate about cultural preservation by proposing a new conception of culture as conversation. The new conception acknowledges the fluidity and internal contestation that occurs within actual cultures, and the agency of a culture’s members in creating, transmitting and revising that culture. We make this new conception our basis for proposing that a proper concern for the value of a culture should be realized in enabling its members to sustain it, not to preserve some pre-existing essence. Adopting this more viable notion of culture also changes our conception of what needs to be done to sustain it, and allows us to acknowledge and better deal with the complex arguments for and against sustaining culture.

The Sea Stacks Project: Enhancing the Use of Regional Literature in Atlantic Canadian Schools

Research over the past two decades has amply demonstrated the importance of literature to the formation of both regional and national cultural identity, particularly in the face of mass market globalization of children’s book publishing in the 21st century as well as the predominance of non-Canadian content from television, movies, books, magazines and internet media. However, Canadian children appear to have only very limited exposure to Canadian authors and illustrators. In Atlantic Canada, regional Atlantic Canadian authors and illustrators for children receive very limited critical attention, and resources for the study and teaching of Atlantic Canadian children’s literature are few. Print and digital information sources on regional children’s books, publishing, authors and illustrators are scattered and inconsistent in quality and currency. This research project directly addresses these key concerns by summarizing the findings of a survey of Atlantic Canadian teachers on their use of regional books. In response to survey findings, the paper concludes by describing the creation of the Sea Stacks Project an authoritative web-delivered information resource devoted to contemporary Atlantic Canadian literature for children and teens.

Education policies and practices to address cultural diversity in Malaysia: Issues and challenges

The 1969 racial riot in Kuala Lumpur served as a historical landmark in the development of Malaysian education, as it raised concerns about the state of national unity in the country. Subsequently, education was coupled with the socioeconomic restructuring of Malaysian society in line with the New Economic Policy (NEP) that commenced in 1970. However, the changes delivered under the NEP also deepened the natural divides in a multiracial society. Conditions became more challenging in the face of globalization and the need for continued economic development. In the past decade, specific policies have been put forth to foster racial unity at the school level, including the Vision School, the Student Integration Plan for Unity, and Civic and Citizenship Education. But it is becoming obvious that they will produce positive results only if a concerted effort is made to incorporate inclusivity and multiculturalism into the national education agenda.

Kiwiana goes upmarket: Vernacular mobilization in the new century

Kiwiana refers to popular cultural items that distinctly reference New Zealand. This research focuses on the interplay between the material and social worlds, as attitudes to traditional items have evolved to a new, highly commercial, phase. The makers and consumers of new items that draw on the old kiwiana references, ignore, defy, or have simply moved on from the hazardous debates about cross-cultural appropriation. In the face of globalization and the flood of mass consumer items into local markets, the revival and recasting of kiwiana can be explained as an eager search for items that express a bicultural localism. This research demonstrates how nostalgia, creativity and design entrepreneurship can amalgamate to convey a confident nationalism. The revised versions of kiwiana have claimed a unique space in the expression via materiality of some of the cultural accelerations of post-colonialism. This article concludes that a significant and visible part of national identity construction and expression is being actively and consciously undertaken by the creative industries, and by the purveyors and purchasers of their creations.

The human house in the 3rd millennium

Human house achieves various human needs ( natural, spiritual , social , cultural and economic ) and the Islamic religion respect human aspects , reflecting on the achievement of the Islamic architecture of human needs so it did not deal with the house as a machine but as the achievement of occupants rest besides beauty . The researches that study architecture in Egypt in the era of globalization has concluded the necessity of attention to architectural heritage because it is the key to maintaining identity in the face of globalization , and the need to search for design values in the Architectural Heritage Searching for values in the Architectural Heritage is not by re-drawing the same visual architectural image , so the research will analyze the human needs achieved by housing in the Islamic period in Egypt and how to achieve them in the home of the third millennium .

Changes in China's Wage Structure

Using a national sample of Urban Household Surveys, we document several profound changes in China's wage structure during a period of rapid economic growth. Between 1992 and 2007, the average real wage increased by 202 percent, accompanied by a sharp rise in wage inequality. Decomposition analysis reveals 80 percent of this wage growth to be attributable to higher pay for basic labor, rising returns to human capital, and increases in the state-sector wage premium. Employing an aggregate production function framework, we account for the sources of wage growth and wage inequality in the face of globalization and economic transition. We find capital accumulation, skill-biased technological change, and export expansion to be the major forces behind the evolving wage structure in China.

VANITY FAIR? Understanding Contemporary Links between Fashion, Museum and Nation

In this paper, fashion is analyzed as a complex system that synthesizes the provision of clothes with the production of symbolic value. Through a case study of Denmark, I question contemporary links between fashion, museum and nation, and introduce the concepts of “fashion nation” and “fashion museology”. I argue that the museum’s and nation’s longing for newness, appeal to attention, and adaptation to the commercial market do not merely constitute a shallow quick-fix; rather, deeper ramifications and potentials arise as fashion promotes cosmopolitan nationalism, one in which cultural heritage and national values are not reduced to defensive strongholds in the face of globalization, but cultivated as renewable resources that can be reinvented in interaction with global society.

Alien Connections: Recovering Contingency in Social Forms

Alien Connections: Recovering Contingency in Social Forms Sara Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010 Richard M. Doyle, Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011A modern centripetal force exerts something of a stranglehold on our ideas about the world or, more precisely, on what makes a world. With expansive and demanding hospitality - one born in a history of colonialism, empire, religious mission, and the snaking lines of networked communication technologies - Western moderns imagine forms of the world in which infinite connections offer a salvific unity. This is the myth of the Internet network as a herald of empowered voices everywhere. This is the myth of the spiritual fulfillment we will find in our interconnection with everything. However, these forms of the world have never escaped the persistent question of difference. The ubiquitous other - that personification of difference's possibilities - always again rises as other and repetitively refuses assimilation. Encounters with difference call forth worlds that do not acquiesce to the demand for smooth agreement, ready similarity, and easy unity. In the face of contemporary globalization, we are in desperate need for ways to think and create forms for worlds that do not demand a center to which we are all impelled.Sara Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness and Richard Doyle's Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere offer ways to think of such worlds but from radically different perspectives and with radically different effects. Both offer novel considerations of the possibilities of community and rich accounts of how communities and other social forms come into being and are sustained. Both texts offer arguments on the sources and limits of social forms. Both offer unique insights into the pleasures and desires that animate our relationships within such forms, whether as a migrant citizen-to-be set on a path to happy state membership or a psychonaut reading trip reports that promise the joyous realization of one's membership in dynamic ecological oneness. The question of social form can highlight some of the rich gifts these texts bring to broader conversations, taking hold of scholarship in a variety of fields about how our worlds are born and what sustains them. The question of social form can also hold a bright light to the ethical questions of how our figurations of the world make grave demands on their would-be inhabitants and discipline the kinds of people, relationships, and actions that can be contained within them.The Promise of Happiness is an extraordinary text that should become a mainstay of affect studies and that serves as a strikingly powerful model of astute cultural critique. Ahmed offers an insightful study of our preoccupation with and desire for happiness. From self-help books to pharmaceutical magic, we are infinitely equipped with tools that promise happiness. From political systems to social orders, we are regularly encouraged to find and maintain that happiness for the sake of family and the broader good. Happiness, Ahmed rightfully cautions, is pedagogic. Happiness teaches us what to want, how to want, and that we must share that orientation to those happy objects with others. That is, it directs us to a constellation of objects deemed to be happy - or, in the social elision between what causes happiness and what is good, deemed to be beneficial for us or our societies - and interpolates us into its demand. In this way, happiness is a form of worldmaking. However, because the objects and aims of happiness are figured before encounter with them, this world is made without any sense of contingency. Even happiness itself is prefigured; the causes, forms, and sensations of happiness are determined before we feel them. Happiness has lost its root in chance. Or, as Ahmed pithily puts it, happiness has lost its hap. …

'Brain drain' from Serbia: One face of globalization of education?

In this paper we point out the role of the practice and ideology of globalization in brain drain process from Serbia. The listed data are based on the large-scale departure of highly educated persons from Serbia to the counties of West Europe and the USA. The dynamics, proportions and tendencies are analysed the role of the educational system in the process of departure of highly educated people and the reasons and consequences of the departure of scientist and engineering experts. In this article, education policy as state financial support are critical analysed. For Serbia, as the relatively undeveloped country in the middle of the modernization processes, this process has far-reaching effects on the social development. So, here we implied the possible solutions for the problem of brain drain.

The Domestic Face of Globalization

This article applies a global perspective to immigration in the United States, focusing in particular on law’s role in the integration of immigrants into U.S. society. The global perspective illuminates the relationship of immigration to other forms of transnationalism, as well as to the situation of non-immigrant minorities and the working poor. We review the history of immigration law in the United States as well as the main elements of current debate. Drawing on the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection, as well as the preemption doctrine, we suggest specific ways in which immigration law might optimally evolve in the future. While information and communication technology are not discussed at length in the paper, we suggest the context in which media pluralism is relevant to a multicultural society.

Africa and the francophonie of tomorrow:an attempt to measure the population of theFrancophonie from now to 2060

Habib Bourgiba, Hamani Diori and Léopold Sédar Senghor are considered the fathers of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF), an international community created in the early 1960s that currently unites more than thirty countries where the French language is given a major role in public life, education, the arts, law, the media, etc. Some present the OIF as a neo-colonial organization, while others think of it as protecting the world’s cultural diversity in the face of globalization. Regardless, this assembly of countries around the world has played and should continue to play a significant role in international politics. However, the configurational changes this Francophone community has experienced since its inception in the 1960s are nothing compared with those we predict for the next 50 years. In fact, the most recent demographic trends outlined in the United Nations’ latest population projections are leading to a major reconfiguration of the demographic weight of the countries of the world, particularly in Africa. In this context, we were interested to try a forward-looking exercise based on these most recent projections from the UN that could allow us to define the Francophonie of tomorrow by exploring the evolution of Africa’s demographic weight. In the coming decades, what will be the size and the geographic distribution of the Francophone population? How has Africa’s demographic weight in the espace francophone evolved? And how will it evolve in the future? In this article, we try to better define the demographic outline of tomorrow’s Francophonie by drawing on different definitions of the espace francophone, while highlighting some of the political and social issues of this forward-looking exercise for the Francophone community in general, and for Africa in particular.

Is the Nation-State Declining in the Face of Globalisation?

The impacts that globalisation has had on the nation-state has been one of the most important concerns of our time in terms of not only academic discussions but also public debates. Accordinlgy, there are bourgeoning body of literature in social sciences emphasising on various aspects of the correlation between globalisation and the nation-state, employing different theoretical and methodological approaches. Some scholars put forth the argument that under the pressure of the forces of globalisation the sovereignty of the nation-state has declined while the others maintain that the nation-state has not affected by the globalisation. This paper examines the impact that globalisation has had on the nation-state, reviewing the ways the nation-state tackle both direct and indirect challenges posed by globalisation. It concludes that the nation-state as a rational actor in the international system has been very flexible to minimize the negative impacts of globalisation and reap its benefits, noting that the nation-state has not declined in the face of globalisation.