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Current changes in the economic system brought about by the 'globalization' of the economic, production and commercial systems will soon give cities/'mega-cities' the distinction of being the templates for governance that will be followed by the national government. While cities also manifest the ills of economic and political mismanagement, they are more in the position to innovate policies that promote sustainable urban development despite the economic pressures on them that promote a compartmentalization of its constituents into 'enclosed' communities.

The integrated global economic system dilutes the social responsibilities of nation states and undermines the feminist agenda of gender equality. Though the process of nation building has institutionalized male dominance, a number of provisions included in the constitutions of liberal welfare states are helpful to women's causes. However, a new phase of social relationships has set in with the advent of globalization, which threatens to perpetuate gender inequality at different levels.

In the 1970s, babies in Third World nations were dying when they might have been thriving. The apparent culprit: ersatz mother's milk made from powder. The Nestle Company, a Swiss-based [...]

Intellectuals need to be scrupulous and skeptic about scholarly journals and books in order to formulate their own factual interpretations and provide public awareness on the perceived ills of global corporatism and means to cope with this global trend. This initiative is much-needed to bring to light the exploitation of labor forces in developing nations by multinational corporations.

This paper argues that Prague is rapidly becoming a standard Western city considerably shaped by forces of contemporary global capitalism. The impact of global forces on local urban restructuring in Prague is enabled by system transformations, which form the backbone of a government-directed transition to market economy. The system transformations, such as public management deregulation, privatisation processes and liberalisation of prices, have alread set 'new rules of the game', have reallocated resources and power, and thus hav created the necessary pre-conditions for the next phase of transition. Secondar transformations in the urban environment, such as the struggle for command over space, local labour market restructuring and the emergence of new consumption landscapes, have serious implications for geographically uneven development and the recomposition of urban form. Consequently, the time-space compression, whic links Czechs with the Western world, has had highly differentiated impacts on various social groups. In conclusion it is argued that the contemporary transition should be viewed as internal transformations within the project of modernity, and the regulation theory approach is employed to shed light on link between transition in the Czech Republic and contemporary restructuring in the Western world.

Postcolonial thought, or Third World criticism, has become the language of the intelligentsia in a global capitalist economy. As such, it is doubtfullthat postcolonial thought as a form of discourse can adequately address the limits of capitalism, especially on a global scale. Intellectual borders have been breached and erased, and the existence of forms of hegemony is taken for granted. Unfortunately, postcolonial paradigms of the day cannot turn upon themselves as an object of study, and are therefore unaware of their own hegemonic limits.

AS THE AFTERMATH OF SEPTEMBER 11 PROMPTS questioning about anti-Western rage, a good starting point is a statistic: 800 million. That's the number of people in the developing countries who [...]

GLOBALIZATION IS OFTEN SEEN AS GLOBAL WESTernization. On this point, there is substantial agreement among many proponents and opponents. Those who take an upbeat view of globalization see it as [...]

NOTHING IS great, writes Seneca, 'which is nor at the same time calm.' (1) In contrast to warriors, gladiators, he goes on to say, 'are protected by skill but left [...]

* The capitalist state, although territorially defined, was born and developed as a loose network of interralated and overlapping jurisdictions. The regulatory framework for corporate capitalism which emerged from the last part of the 19th century was based on the national state, but involved emulation and transplantation of forms, as well as international coordination; and it facilitated international ownership of capital through the transnational corporation, which became the dominant form in the 20th century. TNCs have favoured minimal international coordination while strongly supporting the national state, since they can take advantage of regulatory differences and loopholes. Processes of international coordination of state functions, relying on national legitimation, have taken the form of bureaucratic-administrative corporatist bargaining through a motley network of informal structures as well as the more visible and grand organisations. The growing globalisation of social relations has put increasing pressure on both national and international state structures.

*--This paper analyzes some of the controversies in the literature on media imperialism by drawing on two revised concepts: the idea of assymetrical interdependence as a more precise and complex way to frame the imperialism issues, and the idea of audiences actively searching for cultural proximity in cultural goods, as a way to reincorporate the role of audiences in the media imperialism debate. The focus in on limits imposed by dependence, growth in cultural industries, technological change, and reconceptualization of an active audience that is divided by class. The study focuses on television flows vs. national television production, on the primary case of Brazil, and on institutional and audience-centered evidence.

Lu en tant qu'economiste politique, les ecrits d'Antonio Gramsci nous munient d'un vocabulaire qui permet de restructurer d'une facon productive les questions qui inspirent a l'etude du capitalisme canadien. Cet article fait le compte-rendu des termes de reference d'une problematique Gramscienne, examine cinq etudes recentes sur la crise contemporaine globale qui signale un tournant analytique vers la pensee Gramscienne, et finalement incorpore ces perspectives dans le but de mettre a jour la situation canadienne. Pour les academiques canadiens, le defi pose par Gramsci est de reevaluer, en vue des developpements historiques mondiaux, les formes specifiques avec lesquelles les institutions canadiennes ont structure le capital et organise le consensus au Canada, de sonder les transformations presentes et recentes de ces formes, et d'evaluer les aspects positifs ainsi que les dangers que ces changements presentent pour les mouvements emancipatoires. Read as a political economist, Antonio Gramsci provides a vocabulary in terms of which the questions animating studies of Canadian capitalism can be fruitfully re-framed. This paper first reviews the terms of reference for a Gramscian problematic, then examines five recent studies of the contemporary global crisis which signal an analytic turn toward Gramsci, and finally brings these perspectives to bear upon the case of Canada. For Canadian scholars, the challenge pose by Gramsci is to unravel, in view of world historical developments, the specific institutional forms in which capital has been structured and consent organized within Canada, to probe the recent and ongoing practical transformations in those forms, and to appraise the opportunities and dangers that these changes present for emancipatory movements., Restructuring capital, reorganizing consent: Gramsci, political economy, and Canada (*1) (*1) This article is a revised version of the John Porter Lecture, presented June 5, 1989 at the 24th annual [...]

Transformations in the composition and locational patterns of the economy have assumed specific forms in cities and in the urban hierarchy. The new service-dominated urbanization, particularly evident in major cities, has distinct consequences for a range of social conditions. Here we focus especially on the characteristics of today's leading industries, the producer services, disproportionately concentrated in major cities; the impact of restructuring on the earnings distribution generally and in major cities in particular; and the impact of urban restructuring on minorities, a population increasingly concentrated in large cities.

'The emerging interdisciplinary network of scholars who are attempting to understand' ... the changing global context of cities and the growing 'self-conscious and organized responsiveness of people of these changes ... will provide a significant new dimension to the future world polity.'

Comments on the `long boom' in the global economy and its social and cultural implications. Information on the global ethos of openness; Role of technological developments on global economy; Views of the author on several economic boom scenarios.

The debate on changes in work organisation in an international comparative perspective has been revived due to accelerated economic internationalisation. Some authors expect a global spread of managerial best practice, while others trust in the persistence of national cultural or institutional peculiarities. This article presents findings from a comparative research project on capital intensive paper production and labour intensive assembly of commercial vehicles in Austria, Sweden and the UK. The focus is on the intake and development of skills, on the one hand, and on the utilisation of skills within the work organisation, on the other. Of course, vocational training systems, industrial relations and plant traditions do play a role in the shaping of both work organisation and skill profiles. But there are also influences stemming from more universal technological requirements and from knowledge transfer within international companies. Rather than asserting either universal trends or national differences we draw attention to the different and changing strength as well as contradictory nature of national institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo explora el pro y el contra de ser banquero del mundo de la punta de vista de los EE. UU. Se discuten los beneficios sociales para los EE. UU. de su posición de banquero mundial. Se presenta una tabla de la balanza de pagos total neta de los EE. UU. y sus medios de financiamiento. Se presenta una tabla de la estimación de los beneficios y costos derivados de su posición de banquero mundial.