bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Digital Divide
Authors: Drori Gili S.
Published: March 2012

The phenomenal global diffusion of digital technology, whose rate surpassed the spread of any other technology in human history, has resulted in staggering global gaps in access to, and use of, this newest of social resources. These gaps, which mark the uneven distribution of information and communication technology (ICT) both internationally and intranationally worldwide, came to be known as the “global digital divide.” Internationally, digital divides differentiated between developed and developing nations, setting them on diverging trajectories of social development and global integration. In addition, digital divides differentiated among groups within countries, setting further apart rich from poor, educated from illiterate, and residents of urban areas from rural residents. The confluence of such international and intranational digital divides exacerbates social inequalities and thus has done little to offset the great advances in economic prosperity and integration and the great spread of information that ICT enable. With that, the global digital divide is widening over time, dampening hopes that ICT will serve as a liberation technology to advance democracy and as a leapfrogging technology to advance social development.
Drug Trafficking
Authors: Pasko Lisa
Published: March 2012

Drug trafficking is another term for the illegal drug trade and refers to the unlawful process by which narcotic drugs (cocaine, cannabis, opium, hallucinogens, barbiturates, amphetamines, and tranquilizers) are produced, distributed, and possessed outside strictly controlled medical and scientific channels. At the turn of the twenty‐first century, the global trade in illegal drugs remained a vast enterprise, estimated at more than $300 billion a year, with the United States as the largest single retail market. Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia remain the world's main exporters of cocaine, with the Golden Triangle and the Golden Crescent countries (Burma, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Laos, and Thailand) as the world's chief suppliers of opium. Currently, Morocco is the world's biggest distributor of cannabis, with Mexico a close second.
Eco‐labels
Authors: Eden Sally
Published: March 2012

Eco‐labels provide information about a product's environmental attributes, such as whether it was organically grown or sustainably harvested. This is often done through standardized logos or symbols on the packaging, but also through explanatory text.
Ethics, Global
Authors: St. Clair Asuncion Lera
Published: March 2012

Global ethics can be defined as the moral reflection on the many public issues arising from an increasing connected world and the ethical dilemmas posed by the negative effects of many aspects of globalization on people and the planet. Questions related to global development, consequences of economic globalization, global finance and transnational businesses, large inequalities in income, services, or power across countries and groups, migration and displacement,citizenship, disparities in access to health or education, multiculturalism, beliefs, values, and religious faiths, as well as the role of multilateral and non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) have all been the subject of literature on global ethics. Reflection on ethics and globalization often also refers to an increasing sense of connectedness, consciousness, or citizenship at the global scale, a revival and reframing ofcosmopolitanism, and a strengthened role of global normative frameworks such ashuman rights. This leads to further development and reflection on the scope of ethical obligations and responsibilities beyond the boundaries of nation‐states and new ways of understanding the role of being human and civil in a global world. Global ethics overlaps with other fields such as global justice, international ethics, development ethics, and a large set of applied ethics fields (such as business or medical ethics).
European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students
Authors: Smith Margaret Austin
Published: March 2012

The Erasmus Programme was launched in 1987 to promote exchange and openness among institutions of higher education in the European Community by facilitating the mobility of university students and teaching staff. Named to honor the humanist scholar and theologian Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, who worked and studied broadly throughout Europe, the acronym ERASMUS stands for European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students.
European Society
Authors: Krossa Sophie
Published: March 2012

Speaking about European society implies a rejection of the idea that it is only possible to speak about European societies– for example, France, Italy – in the plural because, it is claimed, “a society” can only be founded on “a nation (‐state).” The conventional understanding of both these categories has been that they are constituted by a people that is distinguished by certain cultural criteria – prime among them the principle of homogeneity.
Everyday Life
Authors: Ray Larry
Published: March 2012

Anthony Giddens (1999: 19) famously described globalization as a “runaway world,” emerging in an anarchic, haphazard, fashion, “carried along by a mixture of economic, technological and cultural imperatives.” This suggests a process out of control that crashes into everyday life from somewhere beyond. But globalization is also an accomplishment of everyday life involving human agents engaged in the active construction of global forms of sociality. Debates about globalization raise some central sociological questions about the extent to which social processes are indirect and self‐steering as opposed to constituted and sustained through the ways in which actors make choices and meaningfully construct social life. Some dominant approaches to globalization in contemporary sociology (e.g., Beck, Giddens, and Urry) emphasize the systemic properties of globalization as an emergent phenomenon, often suggesting how it undermines preexisting social bonds. But they have relatively little to say about how social life nevertheless “gets done.” In particular, theories of reflexive individualization contain the risk (so to speak) of being pre‐social in the absence of any account of how everyday life is sustained. They also lack a critique of how the ideology of individualism might belie a reality of more complex social bonds and interdependencies. It is true that globalization lifts forms of life out of specific contexts – for example through long‐distance monetary or institutional networks – and in the process previously tacitly organized capabilities become self‐conscious, codified knowledge on which actors reflect. The market is a prime example of this since it generates homogeneity, impersonality, and routinized exchanges over long distances. Nonetheless markets, even globally organized ones, require complex social, cultural, and institutional underpinning and even long‐distance social relations have a “stickiness,” a social connectedness, which is reinforced by the way participants often consolidate communications through face‐to‐face interactions. Further, social interactions that take place over long distances, just as much as those within immediate proximity, still presuppose shared norms, conventions, values, expectations, and routines arising from commonly experienced frameworks or institutions.
Film festivals
Authors: Vogel Ann
Published: March 2012

Film festivals are event‐centered organizations which operate temporal exhibitions of film. They usually do so on an annual or biannual basis, running typically over the course of one or two weeks in cinemas and other screening venues in a concentrated location. By a rough estimate, there are at least 3000 such organizations in the world and most are arts nonprofit organizations with small budgets and disproportionately large numbers of volunteer workers. Festivals aim to show new films unless they are committed to specific themes and retrospectives. How many new films are screened depends heavily on the organization's budget and its standing in the film festival hierarchy, as art work travels from one festival to another and organizers compete for product. The film festival population is highly differentiated into organizations with international programs, by movie length, by film type (e.g., short film), and by genre (e.g., women, human rights, science fiction, etc.). While there are recognized exhibition formats for festivals, a multitude of informal events exist, with some even just playing a weekend session.
Fordism, Post‐Fordism
Authors: Bonanno Alessandro
Published: March 2012

Fordism refers to the twentieth‐century phase of capitalism (c.1918–1978), characterized by the centrality of bureaucratized firms, an interventionist state, national unions, and the coordination of mass production and mass consumption. This system reached its peak in the first two post–World War II decades, and entered its final crisis in the 1970s. By the 1980s, pertinent literature described the contemporary socio‐economic conditions as
post‐Fordist
.
Foreign Direct Investment and Development
Authors: Moran Theodore H.
Published: March 2012

Foreign direct investment (FDI) takes place when a corporation in one country establishes a business operation in another country, through setting up a new wholly‐owned affiliate, or acquiring a local company, or forming a joint venture in the host economy. Foreign direct investment flowing to developing country economies takes at least four distinct forms: FDI in extractive industries; FDI in infrastructure; FDI in manufacturing and assembly; and FDI in services. Each has distinctive contributions to make to host country growth and welfare. Each offers distinctive dangers or harmful threats to host country growth and welfare. Each poses distinctive policy challenges to host authorities, to enhance the positive contributions and minimize or avoid the potential damages (Moran 2011).
Frictions
Authors: Tsing Anna
Published: March 2012

The termfrictionis derived from descriptions of the physical world, where it refers to the resistance to relative motion between bodies in contact. Considerations of friction entered studies of globalization as a counterpoint to stories of “friction‐less” transnational flows of goods, ideas, people, and money. Such stories were popular in the 1990s among scholars and pundits caught up in the excitement of globalization who thus imagined a new world without boundaries. In contrast, friction‐based approaches show how global trajectories come into being through specific histories of engagement and encounter. Thefrictionis the engagement and encounter through which global trajectories take shape. Moving beyond stereotypes of the “global” as everything new, powerful, and trendy, friction draws attention to the unpredictable heterogeneity of worlds coming into being.
Gates Foundation
Authors: Vogel Ann
Published: March 2012

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (hereafter Gates Foundation) is an independent grant‐making foundation with its headquarters in Seattle, Washington, USA. It is currently the largest private foundation in the world. By 2008, it had an asset trust endowment of over US$34 billion and had made grants of $21 billion since its inception (in 1994). The Foundation combines two separate legal entities: a foundation for grant‐making, and a trust that manages the foundation's endowments assets. The Foundation's trustees are Microsoft co‐founder Bill Gates (William H. Gates III), his wife Melinda French Gates, and the investor and entrepreneur Warren Buffett. The Foundation's leadership team for nearly 800 employees comprises three family members (Bill and Melinda Gates, and Bill Gates's father, William H. Gates), the CEO (currently Jeff Raikes), the Presidents of the Foundation's three program entities, various principal officers, and the senior advisor to the three trustees, Patty Stonesifer, who was the first CEO for the Gates Foundation until 2008. The Foundation has offices in Washington, DC, London, Delhi, and Beijing. Its grant‐making operations extend to all US states and over 100 countries worldwide.
Globalism
Authors: Steger Manfred B.
Published: March 2012

“Globalism” is a ubiquitous term often used in an imprecise manner to describe general globalizing trends as well as particular systems of ideas and values connected to various globalization processes. It is useful to distinguish between
globalism
– a political ideology that endows globalization with certain norms, values, and meanings – and
globalization
– a multidimensional set of social processes that extend and intensify social connections across the globe. This distinction helps to foreground the considerable role played by various globalisms to shape the conditions of our interconnected world.
Glocalization
Authors: Richard Giulianotti and Roland Robertson
Published: March 2012

The concept of glocalization has been widely deployed by social scientists to examine diverse types of interrelationship and interdependency between local and global processes. The concept has been used to explain the impact of globalization upon, for example, transnational crime, Asian beauty pageants, Chinese cinema, environmental governance, British television, South African cricket, social risk in Romania, the world car industry, community care, the status of citizenship, Italian radio, and European civic policies.
H
induism
Authors: Abrutyn Seth
Published: March 2012

Like the other world religions born during the so‐called Axial Age (c. 800–200
bce
) Hinduism is a complex religious system, with tremendous regional variation. So much so, that past critics have argued that there is no real Hindu religion. Despite these assertions there are shared elements that comprise a core we can call Hinduism. This entry delineates a brief history of Hinduism, followed by an elucidation of the most central tenets, texts, and rituals. It concludes by examining the ways in which Hinduism has been a conduit facilitating larger economic and geopolitical forces, as well as how it has reacted against these universalizing, convergent global forces.
Hunger
Authors: Thompson Gretchen H.
Published: March 2012

At one point or another almost everyone has experienced hunger, either the accidental skipping of a meal or the more wrenching inability to obtain enough food for days, weeks, or months. Hunger is ubiquitous, complex, and varied. It is estimated that on a daily basis over 24 000 people die of hunger (Vernon 2007). The recent global food crisis of 2008 brought to light untenably high and worsening international levels of food deprivation across a multitude of nations and millions of people. Academic and scientific researchers most often study the global manifestation of hunger, and this will be the focus of much of this entry. Hunger has been linked to global social, economic, and political processes. As a global social problem, hunger is complex and an important indicator of human well‐being and societal development that is closely linked to processes of power and inequality across the global system. Macro‐comparative research within sociology has emphasized these relationships and promises to be fertile ground for future scientific inquiry. But first, a general discussion of hunger, including its physiological manifestations, historical origins, and broader global patterns, is offered.
Hybridity
Authors: Pieterse Jan Nederveen
Published: March 2012

Cut “n” mix experiences in consumption, lifestyles and identities are common, for example in food and menus. Hybridity refers to the mixture of phenomena that are held to be different, or separate. Hybridization is defined as “the ways in which forms become separated from existing practices and recombined with new forms in new practices” (Rowe & Schelling 1991: 231).
Imagined Communities
Authors: Roudometof Victor
Published: March 2012

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalismis the title of a book originally published in 1983 by anthropologist Benedict Anderson. In the book, the phrase “imagined communities” was used to convey the nature of nationalism in the modern world. The book was so successful that it was reissued in 1991 with two additional chapters. The success of Anderson's conceptualization has been so extensive that the very phrase or notion of a group as an imagined community has become a powerful conceptual tool used widely in numerous areas and fields.
Indigenous peoples
Authors: Cole Wade M.
Published: March 2012

At first blush, the terms “globalization” and “indigenous peoples” seem contradictory. To be indigenous is to have a deep historical, cultural, and spiritual connection to a particular locale, whereas globalization refers to the process by which disparate localities become integrated into a global economy and polity. Yet indigenous peoples have been implicated by globalization for centuries. Indigenous peoples, indeed, are theproductsof globalization, insofar as indigeneity is defined by a group's relationship with colonizers and settlers who arrived from distant places. But while globalization commenced with the wholesale confiscation of indigenous peoples' land and the destruction of their traditional societies, it has culminated in the enumeration, expansion, and implementation of their rights.
Individualism
Authors: Beck Ulrich
Published: March 2012

In the remote past individualism was a merely nominal value, an idea, an ideology. But more recently it has been consolidated and has crystallized into an
institutionalized morality
that powerfully and effectively establishes the foundations of what Eric Hobsbawm has called the twin revolutions of the nineteenth century: European First Modernity, the revolution that led to the modern, democratic nation‐state, and the other revolution that produced what Max Weber called the “spirit of capitalism,” which emerged from the Protestant work ethic. Both the democracy of the nation‐state and entrepreneurial capitalism are based on the principle of the free individual who represents his own enlightened self‐interest, while simultaneously claiming the right to make his political views known (and of course his right to private property), and who defends these rights in the arenas of the democratic polis. Individualization, closely bound up with the ethos of Christianity and modernity, signifies the cultivation of the autonomous will of all human beings without distinction.
Industrialization
Authors: Kiely Ray
Published: March 2012

Debates on the relationship between globalization and industrialization essentially focus on the changing international division of labor, and how this has been altered by the so‐called globalization of production in recent years. At its most basic, the argument is about the shift from a manufacturing to a postindustrial society in the developed countries, and the rise of manufacturing in the developing world. This new international division of labor is said to have replaced the old, colonial division of labor whereby industrialization was concentrated in the developed world, and primary goods production in the developing world. The debates around these issues focus on two areas: first, the extent to which this is an accurate representation of international divisions of labor, both old and new; and second, whether the new international division of labor is leading to convergence or divergence between the rich and poor world.
Inequality
Authors: Beck Ulrich
Published: March 2012

The conception of inequality as limited by the nation‐state collapses as ever more children in Europe are growing up in poverty. Millions of people risk their lives fleeing from the poverty of their native lands in order to share in the supposed wealth of Western countries. In Europe as in the United States, but also in China, Brazil, Russia, and India the gap between rich and poor is widening. Reports like these are founded on a conception of inequality among the world's inhabitants that arose in the transition to modern society. Now, at the beginning of the twenty‐first century, in the age of globalization and climate change, its foundations are being shaken. To understand this transformation of a worldview it is necessary to locate it historically, in outline.
Informationalism
Authors: A. Aneesh
Published: March 2012

Informationalism refers to a technological paradigm that replaces and subsumes the previous paradigm of industrialism (Castells 1996). From metallurgy to transportation, industrialism was marked by a revolution in materials engineering triggered by the Industrial Revolution. Informationalism, on the other hand, is connected with the information revolution that begins after World War II, covering developments associated with computer science and its various expressions in electronics and telecommunication networks. Informationalism manifests itself in the added importance of knowledge, information, and communication in the globalized world where human labor is increasingly involved in the production of
immaterial goods
(Hardt & Negri 2000). However, the rise of informationalism as the new paradigm does not suggest that industrialism disappears as a material fact; it only suggests that industrialism loses centrality in discourses of technology; indeed, informationalism subsumes and transforms industrial technologies from within. For example, the automobile, an important industrial artifact, does not become less important; it retains its role and appearance while undergoing an informational transformation whereby the automobile becomes an assemblage of computers and data‐communication networks that begin to mediate its basic functions, including acceleration, breaking, and steering.
Intellectual property rights
Authors: Blakeney Michael
Published: March 2012

The first consideration of the possibility of an international intellectual property (IP) regime was a conference on patent law, convened on the occasion of the 1873 Vienna International Exposition. At the time that plans for the Vienna Exposition were announced, US inventors and manufacturers had threatened a boycott of the event unless the Austrian Patent Law could be improved to provide more satisfactory protection to foreign inventors. These discussions were taken further on the occasion of the Paris Universal Exposition in 1878, and in a diplomatic conference in Paris in 1880. The conference proposed the establishment of a “Union for the Protection of Industrial Property.” The term “Industrial Property” was defined broadly to include not only the products of industry, but also agricultural products. A convention was finally adopted at a second diplomatic conference in March 1883.
International criminal courts
Authors: Schabas William , McDermott Yvonne
Published: March 2012

International criminal courts are tribunals established outside of the domestic legal systems of states, although they may depend upon national justice mechanisms for enforcement. There have been seven international criminal courts, with varying modes of creation: the two tribunals established by the Allied powers after World War II, at Nuremberg and Tokyo, threead hoccriminal institutions established by resolution of the UN Security Council for the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Lebanon, and a fourth by agreement with the Government of Sierra Leone; and a permanent International Criminal Court, established by international treaty and open to all states for ratification. The seven international courts also vary in terms of the crimes they were established to prosecute: Most have been confined to so‐called “atrocity crimes” of an international nature, namely genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace (otherwise known as “aggression”). The Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) had jurisdiction over a combination of international and domestic crimes, while the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) was granted jurisdiction only over crimes under Lebanese law. Genuinely international criminal tribunals are often associated with what have sometimes been labeled hybrid courts, such as the War Crimes Chamber in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the Regulation 64 Panels in Kosovo, and the Serious Crimes Panels in the District Court of Dili (East Timor). These institutions have an international dimension, to the extent that judges and other personnel are designated in part at the international level and in part at the national level, and because they too have jurisdiction over international crimes.
International Monetary Fund
Authors: Lee Susan Hagood
Published: March 2012

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a multilateral organization that safeguards the stability of the international monetary system, the network of exchange rates that enable countries to buy goods and services from one another. It provides advice to its 186 member states on policies to promote economic growth, reduce poverty, and prevent financial crises. The IMF offers short‐term lending to governments experiencing balance of payments problems with insufficient funds to meet their international obligations. The IMF's member states agree to follow fiscal and monetary policies conducive to international financial stability and to allow IMF supervision of their national policy regimes. IMF membership is a precondition for membership in its sister organization, the World Bank, the world's leading source of development funding, and IMF loans typically open access to bilateral and commercial loans. The IMF thus serves as gatekeeper to the international financial system for developing countries. IMF loans typically carry policy conditions such as reductions in government spending, lower trade barriers, elimination of government subsidies, and high interest rates to curb inflation. Critics have charged that these policies hurt the poor, precipitate financial crises, and protect the interests of Western financial institutions at the expense of impoverished nations.
International Union for Conservation of Nature
Authors: Bhandari Medani
Published: March 2012

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is an international organization and the world's largest and arguably most important conservation network. It was founded in Fontainebleau, France in 1948 and its headquarters is located in Gland, Switzerland. IUCN has offices in more than 45 countries and runs hundreds of projects around the world, including a multilateral office located in Washington, DC that serves as a global embassy for IUCN. It plays a critical role in the conservation of nature as a knowledge‐producing organization (IUCN, UNEP & WWF 1980, 1991).
Internet
Authors: Powell Jason L.
Published: March 2012

The Internet is a global electronic system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to serve computer users worldwide. It is a “network of networks” that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks, of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic and optical networking technologies (Hine 2005). The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the interlinked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web and the infrastructure to support electronic mail. The Internet has accelerated new forms of human interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking. Online shopping has increased for both major retail outlets and small artisans and traders. Business‐to‐business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries (Kling 1997).
Interregionalism
Authors: Söderbaum Fredrik
Published: March 2012

In a generic sense, interregionalism can be defined as the interaction between two specified regions (region‐to‐region relations). It is not a new phenomenon. There is, for instance, a long history of loose region‐to‐region relations between the EU and the African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) group of countries, which has been revised and developed under the new Cotonou Agreement and other recent EU–Africa frameworks. The EU's interregional cooperation with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has also been operational over a long period, dating back to the early 1970s. Still, in the context of the regionalist movement on a global scale since the early 1990s, interregional cooperation has been further developed as a key feature of international relations, albeit not consistently.
Islam, Political
Authors: Sayyid Salman
Published: March 2012

Political Islam or Islamism is not a specific ideology, in the sense of being a set system of beliefs and values. Nor is it best understood as a perennial or persistent feature of Islamic societies and histories. Rather, Islamism is a discourse that seeks to re‐center Islam within the public sphere of Muslim communities. Islamism emerges in the context of the
de facto
(and often
de jure
) displacement of Islam from the public to the private sphere. This displacement of Islam was most effectively pioneered by Mustafa Kemal (1881–1938) and his followers who in series of interventions transformed the remains of the Ottoman state into Turkey following their victory in the Greco‐Turkish War (1919–1922). These reforms included banning the fez by the Hat Law (November 25, 1925). Veiling of women was discouraged; Western clothing for men and women encouraged. The Islamic Hegira calendar was replaced with the Western (Gregorian) calendar. In 1926 Ottoman and sharia law were replaced with a legal system based on the Swiss Civil Code. In 1928 the New Turkish alphabet (in a modified Latin form) was adopted. In the same year the state was declared to be secular (April 10); and the constitutional provision establishing Islam as the official religion was deleted. In 1933 the Islamic call to worship was required to be in Turkish rather than Arabic. In 1934 the Law of Surnames was adopted, forcing Turks to adopt arbitrarily chosen surnames by administrative fiat. In 1935 Sunday was adopted as the legal weekly holiday rather than Friday.
Knowledge Societies
Authors: Stehr Nico
Published: March 2012

The foundations for the transformation of modern societies into knowledge societies continue to be – as was the case with the industrial society – changes in the structure of the economies of advanced and developing countries. Economic capital – or, more precisely, the source of economic growth and value‐adding activities – increasingly relies on knowledge. The transformation of the structures of the modern economy through knowledge, conceived of as a productive force, constitutes the “material” basis and justification for designating advanced modern society as a “knowledge society.”
La Vía Campesina
Authors: Desmarais Annette Aurélie
Published: March 2012

La Vía Campesina is currently the world's most politically significant international peasant movement. Its actions have contributed to, among other things, slowing global trade talks and securing moratoriums on genetically modified seeds (Edelman 2003), putting agrarian reform back on the global agenda (Borras 2008), placing peasants and small‐scale farmers at the forefront of defining rural development alternatives (Desmarais 2007), and the formation of a transnational food sovereignty movement. Many national agrarian organizations in the Global North and Global South have joined La Vía Campesina because of its non‐violent resistance to the globalization of a neoliberal, industrial, and corporate‐led model of agriculture.
Landscapes
Authors: Puleo Thomas J.
Published: March 2012

Landscapes are assemblages of objects and spaces arrayed on the surface of the earth. As influenced by Dutch landscape painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the term came to mean the scenic aspect of an area, particularly as it was viewed from a single vantage point. In a global context, landscapes are the material and symbolic sites of agglomerated economic, political, social, cultural, and environmental phenomena that functionally and symbolically mediate global processes.
Late Capitalism
Authors: Smart Barry
Published: March 2012

The term
capitalism
has its roots in the nineteenth century and received its most influential analytic clarification in the respective works of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895). Karl Marx in a series of analyses, some in collaboration with Engels, delineated the distinctive features of capitalism as a mode of production and provided a powerful analysis of its logic and an influential critique of its social and economic consequences. Capitalism is an economic system that has “transformation” in its DNA, it is constantly mutating and changing, perpetually in the process of becoming, a form of economic life for which a “steady state” is anathema. As Marx and Engels (1968: 83) succinctly note in
The Communist Manifesto
, capitalism is “constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”
League of Nations
Authors: Ostrower Gary B.
Published: March 2012

Following World War I, the League of Nations became the first collective‐security organization designed for the purpose of preserving international peace. It lasted until the United Nations took over its responsibilities and its machinery at the end of World War II.
Liberalization
Authors: Williford Beth , Subramaniam Mangala , Whitlock David
Published: March 2012

Liberalization refers to a relaxation of government regulations typically in social and economic policy. Economic liberalization thus refers to fewer government restrictions in economic matters and a heightened importance placed on the participation of private companies. Economic liberalism is a philosophy that supports laissez‐faire capitalism, striving for economic freedom and limited government. It was developed during the Enlightenment in Western Europe and the Americas.
Malaria
Authors: Hall Jason K.
Published: March 2012

Malaria is a potentially life‐threatening disease that impacts on poor and vulnerable populations across the developing world. The World Health Organization (WHO) reported almost 250 million cases of malaria in 2008, resulting in 863 000 deaths. Of these deaths, 85 000 were children under the age of 5. The disease is consistently one of the leading global causes of death among children. Almost half of the world's population lives in countries with some incidence of malaria, with those living in Africa, Southern Asia, and equatorial regions of South America at greatest risk. While a focus of the global health community for decades, the recent emphasis placed on malaria by the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) initiated a renewed effort toward the elimination of this disease.
Marine Pollution
Authors: Burns Thomas J.
Published: March 2012

Marine pollution refers to a disruption to the natural ecology of water systems, particularly oceans, as a direct or indirect result of human activity. While some pollution is caused by directly identifiable sources, such as an oil spill, the preponderance of marine pollution is “nonpoint source,” or stemming from a variety of possible diffuse causes. By‐products of extensive agriculture such as herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers constitute major causes of marine pollution.
Market Externalities
Authors: Banerjee Tarun
Published: March 2012

Externalities are costs of an activity that impact actors external to the activity. Applied to markets, they can be understood as the cost of goods or services that are not reflected in the price, but placed outside the exchange relationship. Externalities may be positive, such as research put in by a firm that benefits its competitors; or negative, for example injury to workers sustained during the manufacture of a product. In the former case, the efforts invested by the initial firm create a positive externality for future firms, who are able to offer similar products at costs that do not reflect the resources, labor, time, or risk of this firm. Similarly, production under unsafe conditions creates a negative externality for society when the manufacturer does not have to factor in the cost of injury to workers in the cost of the good. In both cases, the cost or benefit accrues to parties external to the transaction. Externalities may occur in many forms: some, such as injuries sustained, may be clearly visible and have immediate effects; while others, such as transnational water pollution, may be less visible and more long‐term in effect. Further, although market externalities can often be understood as purely economic costs and benefits, they are not always so easily viewed and can be wide‐ranging, such as mental health effects, job security, or urban overcrowding.
Media culture
Authors: Adolf Marian
Published: March 2012

Media culture (MC) refers to a historical process whereby the cultural sphere of modern, Western societies becomes increasingly permeated and shaped by the content and forms of the modern mass media. In the narrower sense, MC describes the patterns of communication and prevalent mediated themes of social discourse of a certain time or place (“the US media culture of the 1950s”). In a wider, conceptual use, MC can be understood as a contemporary approach to popular, mainstream culture in Western consumer societies that continues the tradition of previous centuries' mass culture debates. Much of the current media culture research has its roots in the tradition of the Birmingham tradition of cultural studies. Culture is seen as global, contested terrain as it constitutes the realm of societal discourse concerning ideals, values, identities, and meanings.
Media Imperialism
Authors: Ritzer George
Published: March 2012

Media imperialism is a subcategory under the broader heading of cultural imperialism. The conventional view for quite some time was that it was the Western (especially US) media, and the technologies associated with it, that was imperialistic and that dominated less developed nations and their cultures. Thus, it was television programs created in the United States, movies from Hollywood (Cowen 2002), books by American authors and published originally in the United States, US media conglomerates such as Fox and Time Warner, and so on, that were seen as imposing themselves on less developed nations and playing a key role not only in their media, but in shaping their culture. For example, the idea that American movies have dominated not only less developed nations, but much of the world as a whole, is supported inGlobal Hollywood 2: “Los Angeles–New York culture and commerce dominate screen entertainment around the globe, either directly or as an implied other, and the dramatic success of US film since World War I has been a model for its export of music, television, advertising, the Internet, and sport” (Miller et al. 2005).
Mediascapes
Authors: Kuipers Giselinde
Published: March 2012

The term “mediascape” was coined by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai in his widely cited and anthologized article, “Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy” (1990; 1996). Mediascape denotes both “the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information” and “the images of the world created by these media.” The spatial “scape” metaphor highlights the fluid and fragmented nature of people's (media) surroundings as a result of intensifying global flows.
Megachurches
Authors: Peria Michelle
Published: March 2012

“Megachurch” is a term used to refer to a type of church, often defined as having 2000 or more people in attendance at a typical weekly service. As a significant development in Protestant Christianity, megachurches are part and parcel of an increasingly globalized world. While scholars dispute the nature and impact of globalization, a globalized world is readily recognized as one of increased acceleration of flows of people, things, and ideas across borders driven by the tools of modern technology and the free‐market economy. Arguably, the openings created by this process have facilitated the development and growth of a globally inclined Christian mission and impacted the flourishing of megachurches in recent decades.
Migration
Authors: Faist Thomas
Published: March 2012

Migration as a form of spatial mobility implies the crossing of the boundary of a political or administrative unit for a certain minimum period of time. It includes the movement of refugees, displaced persons, and uprooted people as well as economic migrants. Internal migration refers to a move from one area (a province, district, or municipality) to another within one state. International migration is a territorial relocation of people between nation‐states. Spatial mobility as migration and social mobility form a tightly interrelated set. Often migration is a strategy to improve livelihood, thus increasing social mobility, and has implications for social inequalities in regions of emigration and immigration. It also affects social ties of membership on the level of kinship, voluntary associations, and citizenship.
Migration and the State
Authors: Hollifield James F. , Jacobson David
Published: March 2012

Today tens of millions of people cross borders on a daily basis. International mobility is part of a broader trend of globalization, which includes trade in goods and services, investments and capital flows, greater ease of travel, and a veritable explosion of information. While trade and capital flows are seen as the twin pillars of globalization, migration often is overlooked, especially among scholars of international relations (Hollifield 2008). Yet migration is a defining feature of the global era in which we live. Although it is linked in many ways to trade and investment, it is profoundly different. Some clever person once observed that “people are not shirts,” which is another way of saying that labor is not a pure commodity. Unlike goods and capital, individuals can become actors on the international stage, whether through peaceful transnational communities or violent terrorist/criminal networks. Migration and mobility can be a threat to the security of states, as we have been reminded daily since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; but migrants also are an asset. Immigrants bring human capital, new ideas and cultures to their host societies and they often come with a basic package of (human) rights that enables them to become members of society, if not citizens, of their adoptive countries. Conversely they may return to their countries of origin where they can have a dramatic effect on economic and political development (Hollifield et al. 2007). And lest we forget, not all migration is voluntary – in any given year millions of people move to escape political violence, hunger, and deprivation, becoming refugees, asylum‐seekers, or internally displaced persons. In 2007, UN estimates put the global refugee population at 11.4 million – down considerably from the turbulent decade of the 1990s but trending upward. The total population of concern to the UN High Commission for Refugees, including internally displaced persons, stands at almost 33 million. Because it is so complex and multifaceted, migration poses an enormous regulatory challenge for states and the international community.
Modern Imperialism
Authors: Berberoglu Berch
Published: March 2012

Imperialism has been practiced by empires, old and new, for several thousands of years, ever since the formation of despotic states going back to the Greeks, Romans, the Incas, the Moguls, and the Chinese Dynasties, through the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Ottoman empires, as well as others, up to the dawn of the twentieth century when many European states had reached their zenith (see “Imperialism” in this volume).
Money
Authors: Dodd Nigel
Published: March 2012

Money's relationship with globalization is complex and dynamic. Although the state is still the major site of money's definition and administration, its power and control over money is being increasingly eroded from above and below, and a number of empirical trends stand out that are pertinent to this (Gilbert & Helleiner 1999):
Multicultural Education
Authors: Rizvi Fazal
Published: March 2012

The concept of multicultural education emerged in the late 1960s. It prescribed a set of pedagogic principles associated with the broader liberal notion of multiculturalism. Over the years, multicultural education has taken several forms – focusing on the teaching of those regarded as culturally different, as a way of enabling them to integrate into mainstream educational settings; as an attempt to help students of different cultural backgrounds to communicate and work together in a more harmonious manner; as a strategy for promoting ethnic studies designed to raise consciousness about oppressive structures and take social action; as a way of celebrating cultural diversity, together with a commitment to equal opportunity; and as an approach to restructuring teaching–learning contexts and, ultimately, society itself (Sleeter & Grant 2007). Common to these approaches is an attempt to teach students to become critical thinkers and work, more generally, towards the social good. In this sense, multicultural education is viewed as a process which consists of policies, programs, and practices employed in educational institutions to reject racism and affirm pluralism.
Neoliberal as Political Technology
Authors: Ong Aihwa
Published: March 2012

Neoliberalism has been viewed as an economic force involved in structuring a new planetary economy, and in the process transforming the political economy of a country. “Neoliberalism” is often reduced to a fixed set of marketizing criteria that one can check against in order to qualify or disqualify a particular country as “neoliberal.” Underpinning this view is the broader assumption that the spread of a cluster of economic coordinates (private property, free trade, free markets, etc.) will everywhere produce the same kind of political‐economic transformation (Harvey 2005). But the very conditions associated with the neoliberal – extreme dynamism, mobility of practice, responsiveness to contingencies, and strategic entanglements with politics – require a nuanced and situated approach, not homogenizing claims about the rise of a new global order. Indeed, the 2008 economic crisis showed how the selective use of neoliberal logic allowed centralized Asian states to rebound much faster than the United States, where risky financial practices nearly brought down Wall Street.
Network Society
Authors: Tatarchevskiy Tatiana
Published: March 2012

In his trilogy
The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture
published in the 1990s, Manuel Castells elaborated the term “network society” to capture the essence of social changes powered by new information technologies that have taken place since the 1970s (Castells 2000a). The intellectual heritage of the theory of the network society may be traced to the social theories attempting to account for the perceived growing qualitative role of information and communication in the second half of the twentieth century. It numbers among its precursors Daniel Bell's account of the postindustrial information society, Anthony Giddens's conceptualization of reflexive modernity, and Alain Touraine's theorization of new social movements. Unlike other scholars of the information age who were accused of utopianism and technological determinism at the expense of overlooking other factors (Kumar 1995; Webster 2006), such as power, nation‐state, and capitalist accumulation, the theory of the network society attempts to be more precise in discerning the new features in a society dominated by information.