Search results

Purpose – The main objective of this research is to explore the impacts of globalization on gender empowerment.

Methodology – This research uses a design that combines lagged cross-sectional and cross-sectional analyses. We have used ordinary least square regression. The sample size for this research is 48–70 nation-states. We have used gender empowerment measurement as an indicator of decision-making power that women in a society gain in decision making as a group.

Findings – Our findings illustrate variable effects of global economy on gender empowerment. Higher commodity concentration significantly lowers women's access to the formal and informal labor force and women's decision-making power after controlling for economic development, culture, and state's location in the global economy. Foreign direct investment lowers women's share in both the formal and informal labor force and women's decision-making power, while increasing women's share of secondary education. Thus, this research examines wider dimensions of women's experiences. We also find that some policies have positive effects, whereas others have negative effects on gender empowerment.

Originality/value of the chapter – Previous research on globalization and development has discussed the impacts of globalization on women's empowerment. However, researchers have either used women's access to formal work or education or gender development scores as an indicator of women's empowerment. Researchers have not captured women's empowerment completely. We have overcome this limitation by defining empowerment as a complex of access to resources (access to education, formal and informal labor force) and decision-making power (gender empowerment scores).

Purpose – To understand women's participation in domestic and global sex (entertainment) industries in South Korea, this study proposes an integrative theoretical framework of political economy with three analytical dimensions: position in the world-system, local patriarchy, and the state policies.

Method/approach – The theory that seeks to understand the South Korean government's policy on prostitution is formulated based on reviews of transnational and global research on gender and sex work, local patriarchy, and political economy of world-system. Two historical examples of the sex industry, businesses near U.S. military camps on the Korean peninsula and Korean prostitutes in several cities of Japan, are used to illustrate the theory. The data for these cases were collected from a variety of sources including government and nongovernment documents, newspaper articles, film, and demographic information.

Findings – The application of the theoretical frame makes it possible to understand the socioeconomic and political contexts in which South Korean society, as a semiperipheral nation, has produced a vast number of women in the sex industry.

Practical implications – When the government's policy emphasizes rapid economic growth viewing women as a source of revenue, it will be difficult to understand marginalization of women's status in informal sectors and massive production of prostitutes in domestic and transnational scale.

Value of study – Using a macro and structural perspective, this study sheds light on the transnational/global nature of the prostitution industry, and specifically the role of the state, and local patriarchy in the globalizing South Korean sex industry.

One of the concepts most commonly evoked in order to characterize and explain the zig-zag trajectory of political dynamics in the Islamic Republic of Iran has been the “middle class.” Yet there is no scholarly consensus on a fundamental approach to identification and measurement of the middle class. Rather, the category of the middle class is both a category of analysis – long debated within social theory – as well as a category of practice – routinely deployed in political behavior and social distinction. In order to better conceptualize and understand the formation and role of Iran's middle classes in the country's sociopolitical dynamics, theories of class formation in the global South should be rearticulated away from a reified notion of the middle class as a transhistorical subject. To do so, this chapter is divided into four sections. First, internal debates over the role of Iran's middle classes in the country's recent political history are assessed and data from the 2016 Iran Social Survey is used to test a long-standing demographic assumption on the class dynamics of electoral behavior. Second, the tradition of theorizing the social power of middle classes is reassessed, drawing on the growing scholarly attention to the heterogenous origins and differentiated internal composition of middle classes across the global South. Third, a typology is proposed of four middle classes across the twentieth century shaped by varying state attempts at “catch-up” development. These types are then applied in a revisionist telling of the making and unmaking of middle classes in postrevolutionary Iran. Finally, implications of this framework beyond Iran are sketched out for global waves of protest in the twenty-first century.

The transformations in the existing forms of governmentality and power regimes are deeply rooted within the political economy of advanced neoliberalism, having profound implications in the governance matrix. The new rationalities and instrumentalities of governance involve ‘governing without government’ (Rhodes, 1996) following the delegitimisation and deconstruction of the Keynesian Welfare State and the gradual enactment of what Jessop (2002) calls the Schumpeterian Competition State. This chapter throws open the play field for competing standpoints on governing the mega corporates. Various theorists consider that there is emptiness within the existing global regulatory armoury concerning the operational activities of TNCs. The convolution of ‘steering’ in this poly-centred, globalised societies with its innate uncertainty makes it tricky to keep an eye on the fix of ‘who actually steers whom’ and ‘with what means’. There also appears to be huge disinclination to spot systemic technical description of the evolving modern institutional structure of economic regulation in a composite and practical manner. Thus, the complexity of international issues, their overlapping nature and the turmoil within the arena in which they surface defy tidy theorizing about effective supervision.

This brings in the wider questions dealt with in the chapter – Is globalisation then a product of material conditions of fundamental technical and economic change or is it collective construct of an artifact of the means we have preferred to arrange political and economic activity? The new reflexive, self-regulatory and horizontal spaces of governance are getting modelled following the logic of competitive market relations whereby multiple formally equal actors (acting or aspiring to act as sources of authority) consult, trade and compete over the deployment of various instruments of authority both intrinsically and in their relations with each other (Shamir, 2008). The chapter also looks into these messy and fluid intersections to situate the key actors at the heart of processes of ‘rearticulation’ and ‘recalibration’ of different modes of governance which operates through a somewhat fuzzy amalgamation of the terrain by corporates, state hierarchy and networks all calibrating and competing to pull off the finest probable’s in metagovernance landscape. Unambiguously, this chapter seeks to elaborate on an institutional-discursive conceptualization of governance while stitching in and out of the complex terrain a weave of governances for modern leviathan – the global corporates.

To identify points of similarity and differences of emphasis between internalisation theory and global value chain (GVC) theory and to highlight how the latter’s particular approach is useful in analysing the impact of private sustainability standards.

Review of some key texts and reviews of internalisation theory combined with author’s reflections on GVC theory based on his contributions to its development.

GVC theory shares much common ground with the internalisation theory of international business, but their different starting points lead to different strengths and weaknesses. Internalisation theory is strong on the logic of decisions by transnational companies to internalise or externalise their activities. GVC theory is strongest in its consideration of how and why companies manage externalised activities in different ways, and its theory of network governance focuses on how governance challenges change in response to market requirements, shifts in the break point between enterprises, the role of codification in simplifying governance and the control of activities across multiple links in value chains. These factors explain how private and public–private standards in the field of sustainability are both a response to new external demands on value chains and, simultaneously, a means of reducing the complexity of governance challenges that such demands create.

Few attempts have been made to compare the two theories, and value chain theorists have not engaged with the international business literature. The chapter highlights the scope for a continuing and more systematic comparison of the two literatures.