Margaret Grieco

Calling up culture: Information spaces and information flows as the virtual dynamics of inclusion and exclusion

Both critics and proponents of globalisation tend to assume that it is a uniform process leading to a flattening of the cultural terrain. In contrast, this paper, using examples from Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan and Canada, demonstrates a more complex interaction between traditional cultural practices and modern communication forms. The new information technologies enable universal access to authentic local voice. Archiving social and cultural practices has historically been the business of museums, universities, and indeed oral traditions of song and poetry. New information technologies provide for cultural continuities and reflexivities: they enable the routine archiving of social and cultural practice at a minimal cost through hypertext, Web pages and universal access. The “globalisation of culture”, so often discussed, needs to be reframed with reference to this highly overlooked indigenous capability to archive own culture. This paper attempts to provide such a reframing.

Unions, technologies of coordination, and the changing contours of globally distributed power

This article explores the emergence and significance of new technologies of coordination for globally distributed social movements attempting to shape the power relationship between themselves and the forces of international business. It challenges the entrenched perspective that global markets are constructed and dominated by global capital and the idea that attempts to regulate for decent work and economic justice are futile. It argues that newly available power resources can be harnessed to promote the globalization of labor movements and overcome barriers to international solidarity. It cites case materials from both the developed and the developing world to highlight the dimensions of communication which contribute towards the initiation of new processes of political challenge and material advancement. The article concludes with a brief discussion of some of the dilemmas posed by labor globalization for labor itself.

Shadow factories, shallow skills? An analysis of work organisation in the aircraft industry in the Second World War

The relationship between design and the determination of social and skill practices has been under-considered within the literature. This paper investigates the relationship between design and skill transmission in the context of the Second World War ‘Shadow Factory’ programme. The Shadow Factory programme formed an integral part of the Second World War re-armament strategy of the British Government. The term came into widespread use to describe both (1) duplicated facilities under the direct control of the parent company and (2) distributed facilities managed by other companies with appropriate skills. This paper examines the Shadow Factory component of the wartime expansion of manufacturing production in Britain, and its implications for skill formation and gender in the workplace. The paper also explores the extent to which these shadow plants represented a government-sponsored attempt at technology transfer from the automobile industry to the aircraft industry. The rationale for the advent of this policy was that the introduction of metal fabrication to both aircraft and motor industries had narrowed the difference between them. The managerial skills developed in mass car production were deemed essential to the volumes now required from an aircraft industry that had survived the inter-war period on limited government orders. The shortage of appropriately experienced labour had, during the recovery of the 1930s, prompted the dilution of the proportion of skilled employees and the deskilling of component tasks. In this situation, women were seen as a significant additional source of factory labour. With the advent of preparations for re-armament, this source of labour gained enhanced importance. The paper charts, in the context of re-armament, the alliance between government and unions on the temporary and crisis character of the widespread employment of women. It also documents the deliberate and open governmental strategy of ‘containing’ the impact of womens employment by defining it as a discrete and reversible state of affairs appropriate only to a crisis situation. It is within this context that this paper examines the genesis of the policy decisions relating to the deployment of new manufacturing technology, its impact on work organisation, and the responses of managements, unions and workers.

Big Pharma, social movements, international labor, and the Internet: critical perspectives on coordination

There is a new political space within the dynamics of global organization. The technological needs of globalized capitalism have spawned a new information communication technology which has the capacity to enable and enhance the globalizing of labor and social movements. The all-encompassing attribute of web infrastructure permits the ready clustering of similarly placed marginal or vulnerable groups into globally organized labor and social movements. Social movements of health-product consumers are now visible, with web technology enabling such consumers to readily research and interrogate scientific, medical and commercial product databases. The challenge to Big Pharma, that is the major fully integrated pharmaceutical companies that discover molecules and develop, test, and market drugs, has gained a critical edge from these dynamics. The labor movement has an important role to play in relaying and working with the messages of the vulnerable and oppressed in the area of health and in the challenge to Big Pharma–and there is evidence that labor has already begun to embrace this role. This article discusses this new ground in the development of solidarity through new relations of communication in the arena of the battle between global health and corporate profit.

Identifying time‐space constraints: a neglected element of the development discourse

Purpose - The purpose of this article is to provide conceptual provocation in the context of collective expertise on the identification of time-space constraints – a conceptual provocation that pushes understandings of routines and practices and the tensions that exist around schedulability and social efficiency when the collective dimension of all social action is ignored by social policy, be it in the developing or developed context. Design/methodology/approach - The article examines time-space constraints in three distinctive environments – low-income children in urban Ghana, womens space in the North West Frontier province of Pakistan and low-income elderly sick within the National Health system of the UK. A case study approach is taken. Findings - The analysis draws attention to the impact of mobility constraints on dignity and social functioning in policy environments that maximise rather than address and redress such constraints. Research implications - A time-space constraint approach leads towards more fundamental practices of process investigation rather than a parading of apparent patterns of outcomes, and this in turn leads towards a practice of process correction. There are significant policy implications from this research. Originality/value - Identifying time-space constraints represents a woefully neglected element of the development discourse, and it is time for the correction of this neglect with detailed analysis of time-space constraints across the range of social action. This paper addresses this.