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Title: Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money by Saskia Sassen ISBN: 1-56584-518-8 Publisher: New Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.25 (4 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Warning: Contents Older than Globalization
Comment: What purports to be a book on globalization is actually only peripherally about globalization writ large. Sassen is interested in more specific aspects of globalization: its impact on migration (the huge theme of this book), its place-specificity, and its resultant dispersal of powers that used to belong solely to the nation-state. Her points are good, but you don't need this book to get them, since she's made them all elsewhere and ages ago; in brief, the occasional new insights are not worth it.
Sassen's biggest contribution to the theorization of globalization is her attention to the global city, which she posits as a site of the physical infrastructure that enables the more diffuse projections of the world market. In these cities (like New York, L.A., Tokyo, London, Rio, etc.), high-wage, white-collar workers brush against the low-wage, largely immigrant diasporae that keep the global city running; immigrants form blocs that see a certain degree of enfranchisement and force adjustments in transnational immigration law; and globalization marches on. It's interesting stuff, but it's not new. Sassen's own book on "The Global City" scoops these chapters. And that's pretty much true of the rest of the book.
The two chapters on gender and globalization are much more valuable (and more recent) here, as she starts in on what she calls "the unbundling of sovereignty," the appropriation of political punch from nation-states and the relocation of it into the hands of NGOs and the global market. Unfortunately, while she opens up a great area of inquiry, she doesn't take it very far at all, "since the effort here was not to gain closure but to open up an analytic field." As they stand, these chapters are frustratingly suggestive but ultimately not very thorough or useful. Hopefully she'll revisit the theme later.
The stylistic question is a thorny one; several reviewers have already blasted Sassen for the way she writes. She's certainly not the easiest read, and her incessant neologisms are annoying. ("Operationalizing"? Can we not say, "making operational"?) You can fault her for that. But you can't fault her for writing like a sociologist, and that is largely how she writes. It's dry, there are charts and facts and figures, but the prose is economical and fairly clear (fake words aside!).
By and large, though, this isn't a must-read. If you're really interested, check out her books, "The Global City" and "The Mobility of Labor and Capital." They treat the same subjects, but in more useful detail.
Rating: 1
Summary: Muddled and Confused
Comment: This book suffers from the kind of obfuscated language that a growing number of scholars seem to be able to get away with. Don't get me wrong: there are some interesting ideas in here. But their rewards do not outweigh the costs of sifting through the jargon-laden prose. The author should take a basic writing course.
Rating: 1
Summary: Globalization and Its Disappointments
Comment: I had much hope for this book. I was expecting a work which would shift debates about globalization in a new direction. What we get, on the other hand, is poorly written, badly argued, and repetitive work that offers very little in the way of substantive theory or analysis.
The book is a collection of essays that Sassen has published elsewhere between 1984 and 1997. Except for the introduction, there is no new material here. Furthermore, in many cases the content of one article is reproduced in another article in the book. Rather than reinforcing important arguments, it seems clear that Sassen is trying to get as much mileage possible out of her work. It doesn't work.
The book contains hundreds of endnotes (in many cases they contain the most important information) which should have been incorporated into the text. Furthermore, she offers no conclusion to her analysis and the last chapter itself is quite unsatisfactory.
In short, this book is poorly written, tedious, and unoriginal.
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Title: Guests and Aliens by Saskia Sassen ISBN: 1565846087 Publisher: New Press Pub. Date: April, 2000 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. by Saskia Sassen ISBN: 0691070636 Publisher: Princeton University Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Globalization and Its Discontents by Joseph E. Stiglitz ISBN: 0393324397 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Public Worlds, V. 1) by Arjun Appadurai ISBN: 0816627932 Publisher: University of Minnesota Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 1996 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Losing Control? by Saskia Sassen ISBN: 0231106084 Publisher: Columbia University Press Pub. Date: 15 April, 1996 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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