This book investigates Central America's political economy seen through the lens of its powerful business groups. It provides unique insight into their strategies when confronted with a globalized economy, their impact on development of the isthmus, and how they shape the political and economic institutions governing local varieties of capitalism.
While most of the popular and academic debates explore ideas of globalization, The Transnational Capitalist Class goes one step further and provides theoretically informed empirical research to explain and deconstruct the process of globalization as seen by the corporations themselves. Using personal interviews with executives and managers from over eighty Fortune Global 500 corporations, as well as already published sources, Sklair demonstrates how globalization works from the perspective of those who control and oppose the major globalizing corporations and their allies in government and the media. The book explores two major crises of globalization - class polarization and ecological sustainability - and shows how the transnational capitalist class attempts to resolve these crises and evaluates its own success and failure. Sklair's unique approach brings a fresh perspective to what has become a key debate of our time.
The beautiful Caribbean basin is fertile ground for a study of capitalism past and present. Transnational corporations move money and labor around the region, as national regulations are reworked to promote conditions benefiting private capital. Globalizing the Caribbean offers a probing account of the region’s experience of economic globalization while considering gendered and racialized social relations and the frequent exploitation of workers. Jeb Sprague focuses on the social and material nature of this new era in the history of world capitalism. He combines an historical overview of capitalism in the region with theoretical analysis backed by case studies. Sprague elaborates upon the role of class formation and the restructuring of local states. He considers both U.S. hegemony, and how various upsurges from below and crises occur. He examines the globalization of the cruise ship and mining businesses, looks at the growth of migrant labor and reverse flow of remittances, and describes the evolving role of export processing and supranational associations. In doing so, Sprague shows how transnationally oriented elites have come to rule the Caribbean, and how capitalist globalization in the region occurs alongside shifting political, institutional, and organizational dynamics.
Does the concept of nationality apply to the economic elite, or have they shed national identities to form a global capitalist class? In Rooted Globalism, Kevin Funk unpacks dozens of ethnographic interviews he conducted with Latin America's urban-based, Arab-descendant elite class, some of whom also occupy positions of political power in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Based on extensive fieldwork, Funk illuminates how these elites navigate their Arab ancestry, Latin American host cultures, and roles as protagonists of globalization. With the term "rooted globalism," Funk captures the emergence of classed intersectional identities that are simultaneously local, national, transnational, and global. Focusing on an oft-ignored axis of South-South relations (between Latin America and the Arab world), Rooted Globalism provides detailed analysis of the identities, worldviews, and motivations of this group and ultimately reveals that rather than obliterating national identities, global capitalism relies on them.
2009 Best Book, International Political Economy Group of the British International Studies Association This ambitious volume chronicles and analyzes from a critical globalization perspective the social, economic, and political changes sweeping across Latin America from the 1970s through the present day. Sociologist William I. Robinson summarizes his theory of globalization and discusses how Latin America’s political economy has changed as the states integrate into the new global production and financial system, focusing specifically on the rise of nontraditional agricultural exports, the explosion of maquiladoras, transnational tourism, and the export of labor and the import of remittances. He follows with an overview of the clash among global capitalist forces, neoliberalism, and the new left in Latin America, looking closely at the challenges and dilemmas resistance movements face and their prospects for success. Through three case studies—the struggles of the region's indigenous peoples, the immigrants rights movement in the United States, and the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela—Robinson documents and explains the causes of regional socio-political tensions, provides a theoretical framework for understanding the present turbulence, and suggests possible outcomes to the conflicts. Based on years of fieldwork and empirical research, this study elucidates the tensions that globalization has created and shows why Latin America is a battleground for those seeking to shape the twenty-first century’s world order.
This edited volume studies the relationship between big business and the Latin American dictatorial regimes during the Cold War. The first section provides a general background about the contemporary history of business corporations and dictatorships in the twentieth century at the international level. The second section comprises chapters that analyze five national cases (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Peru), as well as a comparative analysis of the banking sector in the Southern Cone (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay). The third section presents six case studies of large companies in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Central America. This book is crucial reading because it provides the first comprehensive analysis of a key yet understudied topic in Cold War history in Latin America.
“One of the definite merits of this book is to cleverly mix a theoretical breakthrough with a meticulous historical and empirical account of the transformations of some key Latin American countries. First, it is at the frontier of a research agenda initiated back to the end of the 1970s, second it clearly distinguishes between an ideal-type approach and the complexity of any specific national configuration and its transformation in history. Furthermore, the author provides decisive arguments against a pure economic determinism too frequently supposed to govern institutions building and reforms. Last but not least, the book culminates by an impressive analysis of the crises that quite any Latin America society experiences at the end the 2010s.” -Robert Boyer, Institut des Amériques, Paris, France. This book defends the idea that there are significant structural and institutional differences between the countries in Latin America. Building off the results of a four-year research project, Bizberg argues against the idea that in Latin America there is one single type of capitalism—a hierarchical one—that is entangled in a vicious cycle. Rather, there are clusters of countries that have had similar historical trajectories, analogous structures, or comparable reactions to changes to the world economy, but have not all followed the same mode of development. Just as analysts have found a variety of capitalisms in developed countries, it is possible to identify the emergence of different types of capitalism in Latin America since the 1980s debt crisis. These varieties of capitalism are defined according to categories—including the articulation to the world economy, the role of the State, the structure of the political system and the action of civil society—which give rise to distinct wage relations, comprising the industrial relations system and the welfare regime.
Capitalism has disrupted the conventional pattern of revolutionary upheaval, civil wars, and pacification in Central America; William Robinson maps the shape of change in the region.
Development economists and practitioners agree that close collaboration between business and government improves industrial policy, yet little research exists on how best to organize that. This book examines three necessary functions–-information exchange, authoritative allocation, and reducing rent seeking–-across experiences in Latin America.
