Global Market System Research Articles

Material Innovations in Alternative Energy - Collaboration, Systems and Opportunities

In today’s global market system innovation is the driver for economic development and wealth creation. Developing a competitive advantage now requires a business culture of rapid innovation, collaborative strategies, a systematic methodology, and a culture of concurrent change. This is the reality in today’s innovation economy and particularly relative to developing alternative energy systems and materials. With the ever-increasing requirements for energy in a growing economy and the political, environmental, and resource constraints prevalent in today’s world, new, more efficient energy systems are mandatory. The U.S. has experienced inadequate energy generation capacity in key geographic regions further emphasizing the need to enhance our energy generation capacity through a multitude of energy sources. A viable capacity additive to this supply and demand dilemma is the development of alternative energy sources such as fuel cells, photovoltaics, and wind. To achieve this capacity additive will require significant advancement in key engineering materials combined with innovation stimulants to leap-frog the current performance and cost barriers for competitive energy producing alternatives. The energy demand curve experienced globally over the past few years illustrates unmet market needs where opportunity exists to develop innovative key materials to enable the projected growth for renewable and biomass markets. To accelerate advanced materials to market in the energy arena requires a system of enabling innovation combined with the development of a collaborative approach to optimize available resources. Collaborative partnerships between multiple companies incorporating technology, market/distribution, and financial investors are essential to optimize innovation and successful commercialization of technology. Higher value disruptive innovations meet new market needs while pushing a company to new technology and/or capability requirements. Competitive success for innovative technology increasingly depends on speed to market and speed to profits.

Foreign market entry and expansion - Directions for strategic organizational growth based on a global system perspective

The paper discusses motivations for international business expansion and its benefits to support an organization's global market system integration efforts. Combinations of domestic business divers...

Peter Klatzow: Perspectives on context and indentity

This article explores, through Peter Klatzow's work, issues surrounding identity that are central to the work of a creative artist in post-colonial, post-apartheid, South Africa. A brief overview of Klatzow's international activities is followed by an attempt to locate his work within a broader frame of reference. This introduces problematic issues raised by composing in South Africa today, which leads to a brief consideration of the construction of compositional identity in South Africa. The article concludes that Klatzow's work could be read as simultaneously reactionary in the way it looks back aesthetically to an older, decaying system, and subversive in refusing to engage in the current global market system and rejecting narrow nationalisms.

Local modes of practice in an age of globalization: renegotiating national identity as enacted in South Korean advertising

This article examines broad discursive strategies as exemplified in South Korean advertising and how those meanings are produced within contemporary Korean society through cultural production and everyday practices. The central theme of this article is to discover the possibility of resistance and negotiation through the production and consumption of popular culture and to discover the field of cultural interpretations that are not yet integrated in the global market system and global culture. This article suggests that cultural power and autonomy are crucial in this age of globalization. One role of media representations in the process of constructing and articulating the national identity of South Korea is to make public those specific processes of negotiation and indigenization involving tensions between Korean identity and western influence. I argue that media (ads) can be central to this activity.

Ordered Communities

Ordered Communities

Experiences of Globalization and Health in the Narratives of Women Industrial Workers in Sri Lanka

In the late 1970s, Sri Lanka entered the global market system by facilitating multinational enterprises to invest in industries located in export processing zones (EPZs). Subsequently, a large number of young rural Sri Lankan women have gained access to paid work and come to experience economic and social independence. Literature identifies the rapid distribution of medical technologies, the international development of public health systems and overall increases in per capita income as indicators of health benefits of globalization processes. This article explores how women workers in EPZs in Sri Lanka experience their health status since accessing economic opportunities, various forms of health care services and information relating to health and the opportunity to purchase nutritious food. Their narratives provide evidence of occupational health problems, mental health problems, malnutrition, abortion and the increased risk of sexually transmitted diseases. Most women workers do not spend their increased income on health benefits for themselves, but instead give priority to saving for their futures and helping their poor families. Consequently, a majority are unable to enjoy the benefits of globalization. Only a few women are able to increase their potential for empowerment by participating in organizational activities and raising women’s own awareness on workers’ rights and health related issues.

(Virtual) Myths

The historical emergence of time as it relates to capitalism and labor has been well documented and theorized, particularly in the Marxist tradition. The relationship between space, spatial representation and capitalism has only more recently received significant attention. Moving through a series of extended meditations, this essay inquires into the naturalization of space and its various representations as related to capitalism, colonization and the body. As evidenced in early modern maps of Europe and the Americas, techniques of spatial representation were central to both commerce and conquest, where cartographers effectively rendered disparate lands uniform, under the rubric of an objectifying gaze. Such a gaze allowed for the representation of space as existing outside the realm of human affairs, where land lay in wait of discovery. This myth of discovery, and the techniques which accompany it, have historical parallels in the mapping of the human body, where mapping renders space both “natural” and ultimately amenable to capitalism. In these parallels, the mapping of land and of the body have moved in the twenty-first century into the realm of digitized informatics, where space is discursively reduced (through speed) and expanded (through technology) in an ever emerging global market system. Reflecting on apparently quite disparate histories of spatial representation, the essay concludes with the naturalization of space in its current logic, cybernetics and the management of information, where the discourses of health and security meet the digital gaze of the human genome and the satellite.

Ghosts in the City: Mourning and Melancholia in Zhu Tianxin's The Old Capital

Today, it seems to be out of fashion to talk about history and memory when the dominant discourse has already acknowledged the prevalence of the postmodern and the triumph of global capitalism. In response to the devolution of the Soviet Union and the defeat of communism, Francis Fukuyama proposes that the liberal democracy operating a capitalist system is the end point of human history and mankind.1 Accordingly, we have all happily reached the Promised Land where pluralistic democracies and market capitalism reign supreme, where the past human yearnings for freedom and emancipation have all been fulfilled and thereby questions of politics and revolutions now turn out to be redundant, where the pure presence of the global market system liberates human beings from previous errors and mistakes, including the burden of history, memory, and responsibility. Is this all true?

Economic globalisation versus social justice? Rosa Luxemburg and the ‘frontier of control’

Abstract The paper addresses the claim that globalisation results in greater economic and social justice. It introduces a distinction between ‘horizontal’ globalisation (the integration of states into a global market system) and ‘vertical’ globalisation (the social effects of the diminution of public sectors within the lives of individuals). Vertical globalisation has been felt in terms of the growing incorporation of people's lives into market conditions. This argument is clarified with reference to Rosa Luxemburg's concept of the ‘frontier of control’ between capitalism and non-capitalist environments. Luxemburg is used to explain a situation in which all economies have been integrated for many years into a global pattern of commodity exchange, even while individuals' lives have been left to a certain extent exempt, and yet this individual freedom has more recently come under threat.

L'établissement des règles du marché mondial :

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF RULES FOR A GLOBAL MARKET : FROM OPENING TERRITORIAL MARKETS TOWARDS COMMON RULES FOR GLOBALIZED MARKETS The elements of a « legal order » for the « world market » consist of private law rules as well as public law rules and rules of international law to the extent that these rules are pertaining to international economic transactions. All these rules together are necessary for the establishment of an institutional framework for a globalised market. The design of this institutional framework must be derived from the functional properties and requirements of a market economy. A market system requires, first of all, the existence of private law rules (most importantly relating to property and contracts) that make economic transactions among market participants possible. Private laws are generally part of national legal orders. However, due to the rules of private international law (conflicts of law rules), national rules of private law also form the basis for international (transborder) transactions. A market system requires, secondly, rules relating to the correction of market failures (such as collective goods, external effects, or asymmetries of information). Such rules (like sanitary laws, environmental or consumer protection laws) are typically part of national public (administrative) legal systems and they imply State interventions into international economic transactions. To the extent that such interventions are limited to the correction of market failures, they are supportive of the establishment of market economy, although on a global level, differences between national regulations may nevertheless operate as barriers to international economic transactions. Another type of public law rules is deliberately designed to establish such barriers in order to protect domestic producers against foreign competition. Such rules are not supportive, but rather destructive of establishing a globalised market, because they imply State intervention for the restriction of international economic transactions. Thirdly, the establishment of a global market system requires the opening of national markets and their integration into a worldwide market. This implies the restriction of State interventions in international economic transactions. Such restrictions are the main objective of international economic law rules. They reflect the self-limitation of sovereign nation-states for the benefit of international economic exchange based on private law rules. This self-limitation therefore enhances private legal subjects to use their freedom of contract internationally. Since the implementation of all the different sets of legal rules forming the institutional framework for the world market is based on the executive powers of States, the establishment of a world market is far from removing the powers of nationstates. The contrary is true : like any market economy, also the world market is dependent upon the (proper) exercise of State powers for the enforcement of the rules of law which are part of its institutional framework. The opening or closing of national markets may be interpreted in terms of a political power play within nation-states between those who profit and those who lose by either strategy. From an economic point of view, normally the consumers benefit most from an opening of markets, because their range of product choices is increased and their purchasing power is enhanced due to international price competition. Those who may lose from an opening of markets are domestic producers whose products are less competitive than foreign products. Which group prevails, depends on the political process. Since producers are much less numerous than consumers, they are much better able to organize political pressure which may drive governments towards protectionist trade policies at the expense of consumers. Such pressure can only be curbed by international legal commitments. This explains the existence of a mutually agreed body of international economic law rules (especially within the framework of the WTO) restricting nation-states’ powers to close their national markets for goods or services. There is no equivalent body of rules (and no equivalent to the WTO), however, as far as global financial and capital markets are concerned. Here we observe that nation-states open their markets unilaterally, because global de-regulatory competition forces them to do so and because the internal balance of economic interests that determine the political power play in nation-states is just different.

Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System. Dan SchillerOne Market under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy. Thomas Frank

<i>Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System</i>. Dan Schiller<i>One Market under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy</i>. Thomas Frank

Trade policy and the politics of access to drugs

This article explores the relationship between trade policy and access to drugs, using the ARV drugs as an example. It begins by noting the moral problem of inequality in access to drugs. It goes on to explore the political problem in terms of the discrepancy between what is legal/permissible under WTO rules, and what is permissible/desirable under the terms of US trade policy. Finally, it explores the problem of credibility for global health governance and the global market system in terms of access to drugs.

The Political Economy of Class Struggle in Modern Thailand

The 1997 economic crisis in Thailand was a crisis of modern capitalism. The predominant relations of production and the state in Thailand have been capitalist for over a century. Today, Thailand has a population just slightly larger than Britain, with a working class and peasantry each making up approximately 40% of the working population. Politically, Thailand has a bourgeois-democratic system comparable with the West and, just like in the West, rights and freedoms have been attained by continuous class struggle from below. Marxism allows the political developments in modern Thailand to be understood as the result of struggle between the working class and the bourgeoisie. Marxism can also explain the causes of the Thai economic crisis which were not fundamentally different from those of any other capitalist crisis: a declining rate of profit and overproduction in an unplanned global market system. Finally, a Marxist analysis can both explain the current ruling-class structural offensive, which is taking place against the interests of the working class in the aftermath of the crisis, and point the way forward in resisting this offensive.

Book Review: Bruce M. Owen, The Internet Challenge to Television and Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System

Book Review: Bruce M. Owen, The Internet Challenge to Television and Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System

The WTO and Market-Supportive Regulation: A Way Forward on New Competition Technological and Labor Issues

I this paper I argue that certain of the “new issues” in global trade negotiations belong there quite naturally. I label these conformable issues “marketsupportive regulation.” I believe that wise incorporation of market-supportive regulation into the World Trade Organization (WTO) is the key to generating a new wave of “gains from trade”—and to widely disseminating those gains within and among societies. I call this my thesis, for lack of an accurate, but humbler, term. My illustrations of market-supportive regulation include a subset of principles and practices from the domains of competition policies, technology policies, and labor-relations policies. ...But only a subset. Only those regulatory principles that conform most closely to the market system belong on the WTO negotiating agenda. The rest would hold back its progress. My thesis begs several questions. Why the title’s emphasis on “a way forward” in WTO negotiations? Obviously because forward momentum is slow, and was slow even before the Seattle debacle.1 Less obviously, because it’s still worth going forward for all WTO members, including the United States. Last and least obviously, because going forward on three specific new issues has unappreciated value. It is a way to do two urgently needed things: To further empower the global market system and, simultaneously, to increase its constituency and thus enhance its broad legitimacy. What “privileges” the market system to lead me to recommend its further empowerment? First, I will argue that it is a remarkable social mechanism for reaching objectives of all kinds—necessary and noble, individual and communal, monetary and intangible— noncoercively. Second, and more important, I believe that the current market system needs an incentive to negotiate on issues of its own legitimacy, limits, and regulation. Its gains from negotiating new issues, standing side-by-side with procedural and material gains for labor unions, technology users, and nascent and small firms, are what make my proposed way forward viable—because it is mutually beneficial.2 Why any new issues at all? Why not WTO business as usual? Why not just say no to new issues?3 I maintain that business as usual no longer is an option. The broad backlash against it is here to stay. There will be no results from multilateral negotiations this way, no chance to enjoy the new gains from global integration without some broadening of the beneficiary base beyond business as usual. Why the WTO for my proposal—there are alternative forums and mechanisms? Part of my answer is that the WTO already oversees a market-supportive body of regulations; indeed that is its main purpose. Another part of my answer is that the WTO has already started implementing market-supportive new issues in the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) Agreement, and in telecommunications and other services. The last part of my answer is that alternative forums have proved incapable of handling new issues effectively (e.g., the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on investment) and unable to broaden the constituency of beneficiaries (e.g., the North American Free Trade Area’s failed attempt to draw in labor and environmental communities). I begin below with a very brief discussion of what’s to be gained in a new round of WTO negotiations. In Section 3, I describe what I mean by market-

The Agricultural Marketscape: A Framework for Sustaining Agriculture and Communities in the Northeast

ABSTRACT This paper examines ways in which rural landscapes and communities in the Northeast have been, and continue to be, impacted by global and local food marketing systems. We provide a historical overview of globalization in agriculture and the food system and the relationship of these changes to other economic, technological and social changes. We present two food system models–“global” and “local”–representing contrasting socioeconomic paradigms, or understandings of the true and proper relationship between economy and society. Finally we explore some of the theoretical and real-life impacts of global and local food systems on landscapes in the Northeast, and discuss implications for achieving long-term agricultural sustainability.

GEM: A global electronic market system

The emergence and growing popularity of electronic commerce in general and Internet auctions in particular, has raised the challenge to explore scalable global electronic markets, involving both human and automated traders. While centralized auctions are believed to provide better economic results in conventional markets, a single auction server over the public Internet is not scalable and not reliable, due to the potential for very high load and because of the unpredictable and generally low network bandwidth, and it may not be feasible due to local autonomy constraints, which demand some degree of control over local trading policies. GEM is a Java based generic framework for decentralized Internet-based markets. It strives to balance the single-market abstraction, which is important for economic efficiency, with a geographically distributed physical market, which is essential for system efficiency, scalability and autonomy. This is done through the introduction of wide-area-oriented yet consistent distributed trading methods, and a scalable distributed architecture. The second main contribution of GEM is in the design of an individual (local) auction market. GEM provides a flexible architecture that delineates the abstract components of a generic market and specifies control and dataflow constraints between them, but allows variations in the concrete implementation of components with minimal or no impact on the implementation of other components. In addition, GEM provides dynamic (re)configuration and pluggability of policy components at runtime, which enables to adapt market policies to variations in trading patterns or system behavior, adding another level of flexibility to market designers and administrators.

Digital capitalism: networking the global market system

From the Publisher: Cyberspace not only exemplifies but spearheads the greater political economy of which it has become such a critical part. The networks that comprise cyberspace were originally created at the behest of government agencies, military contractors, and allied educational institutions. However, over the past generation or so, a growing number of these networks began to serve primarily corporate users. Under the sway of an expansionary market logic, the Internet began a political-economic transition toward what Dan Schiller calls capitalism. Schiller traces these metamorphoses through three critically important and interlinked realms. Parts I and II deal with the overwhelmingly neoliberal or market-driven policies that influence and govern the telecommunications system and their empowerment of transnational corporations while at the same time exacerbating exisiting social inequalities. Part III shows how cyberspace offers uniquely supple instruments with which to cultivate and deepen consumerism on a transnational scale, especially among privileged groups. Finally, Part IV shows how digital capitalism has already overtaken education, placing it at the mercy of a proprietary market logic.

China's Economic Future—Challenges to U.S. Policy (review)

154 China Review International: Vol. 6, No. ?, Spring 1999© 1999 by University ofHawai'i Press formation and additional sources. They amplify and enrich the letters so that in tandem they give us a rare glimpse of China on the eve ofthe Pacific War. Phyllis Zimmerman Phyllis Zimmerman is an associateprofessor ofhistory atBall State University specializing in U.S. Military History. Joint Economic Committee, Congress ofthe United States, editor. China's Economic Future—Challenges to U.S. Policy. Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997. xvii, 545 pp. Hardcover $68.95, 1SBN 0-7656-0126-5. Paperback $29.95, isbn 0-7656-0127-3. This reviewer's first exposure to a study ofthe Chinese economy compiled under the auspices of the JEC was as a student in Carl Riskin's Chinese Economy class at Columbia in 1983. Riskin adopted the most recent volume at that time as one of the assigned course texts. It was an excellent introduction to the early reforms, their recent historical context, and varying assessments oftheir direction. Since that first exposure, I have looked forward to the publication ofperiodic successor volumes as concise, comprehensive analyses ofthe current state of China's political economy. Having just used China's Economic Future as one of the required texts in a class that I teach on Doing Business with China at the University of Kansas, I am happy to report that this most recent entry in the series accomplishes the same purposes in excellent fashion. The Committee chair's letter of transmittal identifies the volume's target audience as "the JEC, Congress, and the public." It goes on to characterize the present as "an important time in the history ofUS-China relations" and expresses the hope that the study "will provide to the U.S. Congress and other interested parties a useful tool in guiding foreign and economic policy toward China." In view ofthe wealth ofinformation contained in this volume, one hopes that more than a few members of Congress will read it. The design and organization of the study are the handiwork ofthe Congressional Research Service, and the more than five hundred pages of text embody the thinking ofAmerica's leading China specialists in each of the areas surveyed. The executive overview penned by John P. Hardt and Robert Motrice lays out the key themes ranging across a spectrum from "optimistic projections" on the one hand to the "formidable constraints" to progress on the other. They note the stimula- Reviews 155 tion ofgrowth in domestic output and commerce occasioned by China's "significant integration into Asian trade and investment . . . and increasing commercial relations with the global market system." But they also identify the key problem sectors: "agricultural productivity and marketing, large scale industry, all elements ofinfrastructure outside die special coastal areas, and sectors ofthe economy unable to compete in the global market widiout subsidies, protection and reliance on very low wages." Early on, they note a key tension (which resonates throughout the volume) between economic improvement as a basis for political legitimacy and continued reliance on populist authoritarian solutions to maintain political stability and popular support. The authors' contributions are organized under four headings: (1) key themes ofthe context for assessing China into the twenty-first century; (2) domestic economic modernization and reform (constituting the bulk ofthe volume); (3) external economic relations; and (4) Sino-U.S. economic relations into the twenty-first century. The two lead authors, Barry Naughton and Kenneth Lieberthal, summarize key themes from their recent book-length studies ofChinese economics and politics. Naughton identifies a number ofrespects in which China's approach to reform has differed from other countries' transitional strategies. In contrast to the "rationalizing reforms" tried in Eastern Europe during the 1960s, China's reforms have "involved the injection ofmarket forces and market prices into the economy from the earliest stages." Key to China's approach has been a "dual track" system in which a traditional plan and a market channel have coexisted for the allocation ofgiven goods, with economic growth concentrated in the latter. Successive sectors of the economy have been separated from the planned core, not through an intentional strategy, but by virtue ofthe nature ofChina's policy process. The process...

Traditional society and modern teaching

Since modernity is a Western project, Western forms of education have been important in promoting successful progress towards modernity and economic success in many societies. Such forms may, however, exist with varying degrees of uneasiness alongside traditional culture, as in the Middle East, so that alternative worldviews are available. Yet the global capitalist market system requires modernized producers and consumers everywhere. What if beneath the consumerist trappings of Westernism a non-Western traditional worldview persists and influences the conduct and outlook of large social groups? Its cultural meanings are significant for many aspects of education – choices, motivations, gender, perceptions of success and failure, commitment, and more. How do receiving cultures experience Western educational patterns, structures, curriculum, forms of evaluation? Some key aspects of traditional culture and education are discussed. It is argued that school systems and teachers need to be more carefully prepared to handle the intimate mesh of traditional and modern in countries such as the Middle Eastern ones, and find their own authentic solutions.