Archive for the 'News' Category

Roland Robertson to Speak at 2012 Conference

Published on January 29, 2012 in Conference, Headline, News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

The 2012 Global Studies Conference is happy to announce distinguished scholar Roland Robertson as one of our plenaries for the Moscow Conference.

Roland Robertson is Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, USA; Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex; and Distinguished Guest Professor of Cultural Studies at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. He was until very recently Professor of Sociology and Global Society at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Professor Robertson was the recipient of the first Distinguished Career Award from the section on Global and Transnational Sociology of the American Sociological Association, 2010. He began his academic career at the University of Leeds, and subsequently held appointments at the University of Essex, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of York (where he was Head of the Department of Sociology from 1970 to 1974). He returned to Pittsburgh in 1974 and remained there until his move to Aberdeen in 1999. He holds, or has held, visiting positions in sociology, pedagogy and religious studies at universities in various countries, including the USA, England, Brazil, Italy, Austria, Sweden, China (Hong Kong) and Turkey.

Robertson has published extensively in the sociology of globalization, culture, religion and sport. Among his most influential publications are The Sociological Interpretation of Religion (1970), Meaning and Change (1978) Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (1992) and a large number of other books and articles. He has also edited or co-edited various volumes, including the Encyclopedia of Globalization (2007) and Globalization: Critical Concepts in Sociology (2003).

His work has been translated from English into about twenty languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, German, Japanese, Chinese, Persian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Croat, Turkish, Italian, French, Polish, Russian, Danish, Korean, Greek, Swedish, and Hungarian.

For more information on Roland Robertson and other Plenary Speakers, please click here.

The Most Important Graphs of 2011

Published on January 24, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic

What is it about graphs and economics? In a discipline where facts are murky and certainty is elusive, graphs offer a bright light of information and a small confidence that the world can be summed up between two axes. So when the BBC asked a group of economists to name their graph of the year, we decided to do the same (so did Wonkblog!). Here, from economists on left and right, and from economic journalists from around the beat, are the graphs of the year. Click through the gallery or scroll down to find the graphs organized under categories including Europe, spending & taxing, and energy.

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The Reckoning Begins

Published on January 7, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Michael Moran, Slate.com

America’s insularity knows no bounds. This is a paradoxical statement, of course, but it’s an apt way to describe America’s current debate about “our future,” and not a bad way to view Washington’s strained efforts to grapple with an economy wounded by two decades of economic Puritanism. As grand as the rhetoric may be, politicians in the United States remain incapable of looking beyond the next election—this goes for the haughty Democrat in the White House and goes double for the Republican opposition. The fact is, airy-fairy optimism still sells on the campaign trail, particularly when the day-to-day reality of the average American is so difficult. Christian, agnostic, Jew, Muslim, or otherwise, we’re a country of people constantly seeking redemption, and we’re suckers for a smooth-talking messiah.

Not this time. At the risk of breaking the hearts that throb for Rick Perry, Mitt Romney or Barack Obama, they cannot deliver us from the future. Thanks to a catastrophic series of decisions by presidents of both parties that radically deregulated our financial system and arrogantly dismissed the “lessons of Vietnam” as dusty, irrelevant history, the United States has shortened the period during which it will remain the dominant power in the 21^st century. I know, I know, all the presidential candidates say we’re still the best! And so we are, in almost every economic and military measure. But measurements of power are like the altimeter of an aircraft: It’s not the altitude that matters, it’s the trajectory, and by now most Americans finally understand that Captain America is trending downward.

Destiny is a big, pretentious concept. Yet today, most Americans understand what their politicians refuse to concede—at least publicly: We’ve lost control of our destiny. Globalization, the fairy dust proffered by everyone from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton to Thomas Friedman, turns out to have some significant downside risks. Many Americans have heard of globalization at this point, and many have very particular opinions of it—normally associated with negatives like offshoring, immigration or, perhaps, the complex risks of modern markets. But few really understand its implications. Thus the continued use by vacuous news networks of the term “nationally televised address,” or the absurd assumption that our economic fate rests in our own hands. The world today—a world largely forged by American economic and foreign policy prejudices during the 20^th century—now has profound influence on our future. Every word a president says in those Oval Office broadcasts these days resonates not just in the cozy “focus groups” in Iowa but also in the offices of the China Investment Corporation and sovereign wealth funds from Qatar to Japan to Russia who hold giant slices of our national debt. Like it or not, they have real leverage now, and evidence and history suggests they will eventually use it.

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Image via Slate.com

Twilight of the Fossils

Published on January 3, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Benjamin Kunkel, N+1 Magazine

This piece first appeared in Occupy!, an OWS-Inspired Gazette, now available for free in print and online.

Unable to imagine the past except in the form of costume dramas or to think of the future except in terms of far-off collapse, our era has suffered from a blocked political imagination. For twenty years we flattered or rued our condition as the end of history. But present-day civilization reflects arrangements exceptional in human history—and perhaps equally fragile. It is characterized in particular by an unprecedented dominance of fossilized labor (or capital) over living labor, and of fossil energy—oil, coal, and natural gas—over living energy. This reign of the fossils must and will end. Two special conditions that we’ve taken for granted are not long for this world: an ever-growing supply of fossil fuel and other non-renewable resources, and endless economic growth.

The words ecology and economy share a root in oikos, Greek for household. This suggests the concerns they name must ultimately coincide: the establishment and maintenance of the human residence on earth. Yet economics and ecology are rarely taken seriously at the same time, and official opinion usually denies that a crisis exists in either sphere. Few professional economists and no prominent politicians will concede what was obvious to the classical economists: namely, that economic growth would eventually terminate in what John Stuart Mill called a “stationary state.” Mill and Adam Smith focused on limits to the division of labor: subdividing economic activity could only bring about productivity gains up to a point. More recent analysts have worried about the exhaustion of natural resources (as in the Club of Rome’s famous 1972 report, The Limits to Growth and much literature since), or about the preponderance of services, such as health and education, over industry and agriculture in contemporary capitalism. As an IMF working paper from 1997 argued, industry and agriculture are, for technical reasons, susceptible to productivity improvements that the service sector can never enjoy to the same extent: manufacturing or farming can become more efficient in a way that nursing or teaching, for example, cannot.

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Image: www.thesolarvillage.com via N+1 Magazine

Seeking to avoid a mid-life crisis

Published on December 28, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From The Economist

INDIA’S technology firms are no longer spring chickens. Infosys had its 30th birthday this year and its lead founder retired, hailed as a visionary by his colleagues and celebrated as the man who kick-started the country’s first world-class industry. Yet judged by their share prices of late, the three big firms, TCS, Infosys and Wipro, are still giddy, uncertain things. Last month TCS’s shares, which had swaggered earlier in the year, slumped as it posted disappointing quarterly figures. Wipro’s shares are well down on the year and this week’s news of quarterly profits little changed from a year ago sent them a bit lower still.

The volatility partly reflects investors’ fears of a depression in the rich world, where the three make the bulk of their money. But it is also a symptom of mild paranoia about whether these firms can in their dotage still deliver perky growth. The worry is that they might go the way of Nokia: for years the Finnish handset firm maintained high margins, in defiance of its many doubters. Then, suddenly, the naysayers were proved right.

Regarding the slump in rich economies, the recent past does offer a chilly precedent. During the Wall Street crisis in mid-2009 the IT firms’ revenue growth slowed almost to zero as customers, especially financial ones, slashed spending. But activity bounced back smartly (see chart) as clients recovered their nerve and redoubled efforts to cut costs through outsourcing and reorganising their back offices.

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Photo via The Economist