Broken Promises of Globalization: The Case of the Bangladesh Garment Industry analyzes the consequences of the latest wave of globalization within the context of the Bangladesh garment industry's integration into world markets and production chains. Shahidur Rahman has found that although globalization has created opportunities, the process of globalization has also triggered a deformed development leaving Bangladesh increasingly vulnerable to shifts and tensions within the world trading regime. Bangladesh’s vulnerability, experienced as a constraining framework by all the major actors in dependent industrialization, is of particular importance to the progress both of workers and of Bangladesh’s industrializing modernizers in the garment industry. This book intends to respond to three questions. First, has the garment industry been able to counteract the vulnerability that women garment workers had experienced in their villages? Second, is the formation of a welfare committee a substitute model for unions when it comes to protecting women’s rights? Finally, how is a Least Developing Country dealing with both domestic and external pressures in its response to globalization? Rahman argues that in spite of the opportunities created by the growth of the garment industry, the key actors such as workers, entrepreneurs, unions, and even the government have become vulnerable in the process of the global integration of this industry. This is an ethnographic study that tells the story of the rise, growth, and demise of a Bangladeshi garment company. From a broader approach, an internal force such as the government of Bangladesh is not alone in being responsible for pushing the workers into a vulnerable position; external pressure on the state is also responsible for intensifying the vulnerability of Bangladeshi institutions and actors. Broken Promises of Globalization exposes the crisis Bangladeshi garment companies face as a result of the momentous pressures emanating from the regime of neo-liberal globalization.This ethnographic study, exploring a wide range of contemporary and recent development issues, holds particular relevance for students and scholars of sociology, political science, political economics, labor, and development studies.

Product Description: Discussion questions developed by the authors can be found here.In the face of globalization’s massive social and economic transformations and the resulting persistent inequality, activists, labor organizers, and advocacy NGOs are seeking and creating change beyond the confines of formal state politics and across national borders...read more

Book by Borisovich, Yu G., Gliklikh, Yu E.

Product Description: At the end of the Cold War, commentators were pondering how far Western ideas would spread; today, the debate seems to be how far Chinese ideas will reach. This volume examines Chinese international relations thought and practices, identifying the extent to which China's rise has provoked fresh geo-strategic and intellectual shifts within Asia...read more

Due to globalization, cultural spaces are now developing with no tangible connection to geographical place. The territorial logic traditionally used to underpin architecture and envision our built environment is being radically altered, forcing the adoption of a new method of conceptualizing space/geography and what constitutes architectural practice. Construction techniques, design sensibilities, and cultural identities are being transformed as technology transports us to places that were previously unreachable. The resultant "globalized" architect must become more than just an artful visionary, but also a master of the art of the political nudge willing to act within multiple mediums and at the simultaneous scales of a chaotic new world disorder. Though fearless they must also be responsible, inherently understanding the necessity to align bold visions with the mundane details of the everyday in ways that are culturally flexible and accepting of change. The potential for what must be considered the legitimate practice of the architect must move from a purely material venue to one more directly engaged in the chaos of the larger economic, political, and social spheres of a globalizing world. The issues and possible interactions with globalization contained in this text exemplify ways that architecture is transforming into a more flexible and fluid interdisciplinary version of its traditional self in order to rise to challenges of this new international terrain. A theme runs throughout in the form of a call: that architects must conceptually re-construct their frames of reference to better align with the demands of a rapidly globalizing world.

Product Description: This book grew out of the work developed at the University of Warwick, under the supervision of Ian Stewart, which formed the core of my Ph.D. Thesis. Most of the results described were obtained in joint work with Ian; as usual under these circumstances, many have been published in research journals over the last two years...read more

This succinct yet comprehensive introduction is the first text to gear foreign policy analysis (FPA) theory toward advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students. Cogently written, clearly organized, and filled with illuminating examples, the second edition has now been thoroughly revised and updated. Beginning with an overview of this broad field of study, Valerie M. Hudson then considers theory and research at multiple levels of analysis, including personality and psychology of foreign policy decision makers and decision making, small group dynamics, the organizational process, bureaucratic politics, domestic politics, cultural and societal influences on foreign policy, national attributes, and system-level effects on foreign policy. In a new chapter, the author also examines the promise and frustration of theoretical integration in FPA and overviews promising new work by non–North American scholars. She concludes with an analysis of where the next generation of foreign policy scholars can make important contributions to the field.

Product Description: This book offers a modern introduction to the Hamiltonian theory of dynamical systems, presenting a unified treatment of all types of dynamical systems, i.e., finite, lattice, and field. Particular attention is paid to nonlinear systems that have more than one Hamiltonian formulation in a single coordinate system...read more

Product Description: This seminal study explores the significant changes in the global IT industry as production has shifted from the developed world to massive sites in the developing world that house hundreds of thousands of workers in appalling low-wage conditions to minimize labor costs...read more

As is well known, The Great Divide (a.k.a. The Continental Divide) is formed by the Rocky Mountains stretching from north to south across North America. It creates a virtual "stone wall" so high that wind, rain, snow, etc. cannot cross it. This keeps the weather distinct on both sides. Since railroad trains cannot climb steep grades and tunnels through these mountains are almost formidable, the Canadian Pacific Railroad searched for a mountain pass providing the lowest grade for its tracks. Employees discovered a suitable mountain pass, called the Kicking Horse Pass, el. 5404 ft., near Banff, Alberta. (One can speculate as to the reason for the name.) This pass is also used by the Trans-Canada Highway. At the highest point of the pass the railroad tracks are horizontal with mountains rising on both sides. A mountain stream divides into two branches, one flowing into the Atlantic Ocean and the other into the Pacific. One can literally stand (as the author did) with one foot in the Atlantic Ocean and the other in the Pacific. The author has observed many mountain passes in the Rocky Mountains and Alps. What connections do mountain passes have with nonlinear partial dif­ ferential equations? To find out, read on ...

This book gives an introduction to index theory for symplectic matrix paths and its iteration theory, as well as applications to periodic solution problems of nonlinear Hamiltonian systems. The applications of these concepts yield new approaches to some outstanding problems. Particular attention is given to the minimal period solution problem of Hamiltonian systems and the existence of infinitely many periodic points of the Poincaré map of Lagrangian systems on tori.

Product Description: This book investigates the geometry of complex subvarieties of compact Hermitian symmetric spaces, particularly the complex Grassmannians, which are central to Schubert calculus and its applications to enumerative algebraic geometry...read more