Anthropology and the Global Factory: Studies of the New Industrialization in the Late Twentieth Century

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The world is fast becoming a global factory in which workers, entrepreneurs, and multinational corporations find themselves producing for the world capitalist market. This collection of essays explores in concrete anthropological detail the ways that people throughout the world have been drawn into this new international labour web. Broad in scope and far-reaching in their analyses, the chapters in this book offer numerous examples of this new world order. The case studies focus on industrialization in small-scale workshops and informal work-at-home situations as well as multinational corporations. Undertaken in every continent, in "core" as well as "peripheral" regions, the studies cover the perspectives of the workers, the entrepreneurs and the corporations. In this systematic view of the "capitalization" of the world economy, the authors show how new economic linkages are being formed between world markets and small-scale entrepreneurs and home-based local producers and how late-developing regions attempt to gain economic sovereignty through the marketing of local product specialities. At the same time, the authors' investigations provide concrete evidence of local efforts to create culturally distinct and socially equitable lives and show how the spread of the world capitalist economy changes the everyday lives of people. They point to ways in which people use their local traditions of kinship, culture, and community to resist and shape economic change to more satisfying local ends.

Author Bio

FRANCES ABRAHAMER ROTHSTEIN is Professor of Anthropology at Towson State University. She has worked extensively in the areas of development and industrialization for many years and is the author of Three Different Worlds: Women, Men, and Children in an Industrializing Community (Greenwood Press, 1982). MICHAEL L. BLIM is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Northeastern University. He is the author of Made in Italy: Small-Scale Industrialization and Its Consequences (Praeger Publishers, 1990).