Global Inequality: A New Approach For The Age O...

If we really can get into this global mindset that he is asking us to adopt, then we might think more creatively, and perhaps less dogmatically, about a series of challenges that we face as citizens of individual nations. There are a number of examples in the last chapter, but perhaps the most striking deals with citizenship and migration, examples that cut at the very core of the approach.

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age o...

While the concept of global inequality is rather recent, inequalities among different peoples in different parts of the world of course date much further back. So do the attempts to think and to conceptualize these inequalities, even if national inequality was to become the most prominent theme in the twentieth-century social sciences. This anthology spans the historical development of research on global inequality to examine the current research field of global inequality, arguing that there is ample space for supplementing existing economic and statistical research. More specifically, it makes the case for drawing on more historical, qualitative, political, multidimensional, and actor-oriented approaches to global inequality, and to explore new, fascinating, and important themes.

There is a need for new approaches to expand contemporary research on global inequalities. This volume supplements the quantitative research literature with new qualitative case studies. Economists have mainly studied global inequalities using quantitative methods. By contrast, many studies from other branches of the social sciences and the humanities have often used qualitative methods, as when anthropologists have focused on intersections between the global and the local.Footnote 83 For example, the anthropologist June Nash has studied how the historic disadvantages of indigenous people in Chiapas, Mexico, were deepened by neoliberal economic policies in the 1980s.Footnote 84 Similarly, this book focuses mainly on qualitative studies of global inequalities. It does so mostly by assessing important actors, ranging from international organizations to economists to human rights activists, and from philosophers to statisticians to tea farmers.

Above all, of course, this book offers a historical approach to global inequalities. Recently, mapping and explaining the longer history of world economic development and inequality has been a key endeavour for bestselling economists such as Thomas Piketty and Angus Maddison and historian Walter Scheidel.Footnote 110 Geographers, anthropologists, and others have also taken on a historical approach to their mappings of global inequality.Footnote 111 They have done so with often very different results, readings, and assessments of the history of global inequality.

Bearing these reservations in mind, there are indeed a number of themes and analytical perspectives unique to a historical approach to global inequalities.Footnote 115 These include making international, transnational, and global comparisons, examining inequalities across national borders with a comparative perspective. They include studying international, transnational, and global entangled histories, that is, where inequalities are directly linked to one another. They include studying the use of particular concepts in addressing inequalities, and how specific actors operated with these concepts. They include studying past constructions of asymmetrical relationships between different cultures or groups, such as in studies of gender, race, and ethnicity. They include studying how inequalities were shaped, discussed, and conceptualized across a broad range of geographical areas, dimensions, and various kinds of literature and materials in order to unpack the many different dimensions and faces of global inequalities which cannot be covered by statistics and numbers.

The TxD approach also aligns with the views of leaders in the recent EY CEO Imperative Study. CEOs, boards and investors from around the world participated in this study and shared their thoughts on global challenges that would impact organizations over the next 5 to 10 years.

Political economy approaches tend to concentrate on three processes that make up the main starting points for political economy research on media technologies. Commodification is the process of transforming things valued for their use into marketable products that are valued for what they can bring in exchange. This can be seen, for example, in the process of turning a story that friends tell one another into a film or a book to be sold in the marketplace. Spatialization is the process of overcoming the constraints of geographical space with media and technologies. For example, social media surmounts distance by bringing images of world events to every part of the globe and companies use media technologies, now often comprised of cloud computing, big data analytics, the Internet of Things, and telecommunications networks, to build global supply chains. Finally, structuration is the process of creating social relations, mainly those organized around social class, gender, and race. With respect to social class, political economy approaches describe how access to the mass media and new communication technologies is influenced by inequalities in income and wealth, which enable some to afford access and others to be left out. Political economy approaches are evolving in response to challenges from cultural studies approaches. Political economies of media technologies are now placing greater emphasis on international communication, on communication history, on standpoints of resistance, on new media technologies, and on new media activism.

Winner of the International Studies in Poverty Prize awarded by the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP) and Zed Books.Poverty has become the central focus of global development efforts, with a vast body of research and funding dedicated to its alleviation. And yet, the field of poverty studies remains deeply ideological and has been used to justify wealth and power within the prevailing world order. Andrew Martin Fischer clarifies this deeply political character, from conceptions and measures of poverty through to their application as policies.Poverty as Ideology shows how our dominant approaches to poverty studies have, in fact, served to reinforce the prevailing neoliberal ideology while neglecting the wider interests of social justice that are fundamental to creating more equitable societies. Instead, our development policies have created a 'poverty industry' that obscures the dynamic reproductions of poverty within contemporary capitalist development and promotes segregation in the name of science and charity. Fischer argues that an effective and lasting solution to global poverty requires us to reorient our efforts away from current fixations on productivity and towards more equitable distributions of wealth and resources.This provocative work offers a radical new approach to understanding poverty based on a comprehensive and accessible critique of key concepts and research methods. It upends much of the received wisdom to provide an invaluable resource for students, teachers and researchers across the social sciences. 041b061a72