Robert J. S. Ross

Racing to the bottom: international trade without a social clause

Linking trade concessions to compliance with internationally recognised labour standards is referred to as a ‘social clause’. The social clause is usually depicted as causing division between the (rich) global North and the less-industrialised global South. This article shows, however, that there is diversity of opinion among the labour movements of the global South and that contemporary labour-intensive manufacturing pits countries of the South against one another. The article raises the possibility of a race to the bottom in labour standards, where workers cannot enjoy the fruits of growth because their employers and governments hold on to the competitive advantage of cheap labour. Consider competition between China and Mexico for the North American apparel market: despite enormous employment growth apparel workers have not enjoyed wage growth and their conditions are often appalling. The race to the bottom can be prevented by South–South agreement to honour labour standards.

Global Capitalism and the Flow of Foreign Direct Investment to Non-Core Nations, 1980-1996: A Quantitative, Cross-National Analysis

This paper updates an earlier quantitative cross-national study (London and Ross 1995) by examining a more recent time period and re-specifying the original model in a number of significant ways. These include the incorporation of measures of (a) International Monetary Fund penetration into non-core nations (demonstrating that IMF conditionality increases the flow of FDI), (b) the presence of “attractive investment opportunities” in nations (to incorporate a predictor suggested by neoclassical economic theory), and (c) an interaction term that points to the multiplicative significance of intranational and international factors. Our findings generally confirm those of the earlier study and produce some significant new results.

The Political Sociology of Foreign Direct Investment

Theory and research in sociology and political economy have revealed important elements of the structure of world capitalism, but its dynamics remain both more controversial and more opaque. This study uses quantitative cross-national regression analysis to analyze the determinants of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) which originates in core (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) nations and is placed in noncore nations. Based on the theory of global capitalism, which contends that in a new stage of capitalism, First World manufacturing investment seeks Third World labor which is more docile and less costly than that in the older industrial regions, this study finds support for the hypotheses that labor control and, to a lesser degree, labor cost are determinants of FDI, net of level of development.

Facing Leviathan: Public Policy and Global Capitalism

The capitalist system is to be understood as global rather than national. Rapid mobility has diffused manufacturing around the globe, increasingly to nations formerly considered peripheral sources of primary extraction. The large global enterprise (the multinational corporation or MNC) is the main, though not the only, institutional form and channel of this mobility. At the local level of metropolis and region the engine driving development and prosperity is the investment localized there. Economic decline results from capital outflow which is the aggregate result of numerous location decisions by firms and investors. Chief among the considerations to stay, leave, or enter a locality are considerations of wages, the discipline of the labor force, and public policy perceived to be favorable to capital. In the course of the last decade we have learned that the consequences of a net outward flow of capital include many personal and community manifestations which have come to be called social problems. Much of the analysis of the above familiar trends is cast in tones of concern and indignation. It remains for social scientists to bring to bear on such questions conceptual tools based on a theoritical perspective. The proximate goal of such an enterprise is the portrayal of fundamental processes in a consistent and objective manner. That goal can be advanced by enlisting concepts of the balance of class forces and the strategic situation in which classes and their segments are embedded. Such work lies in the intermediate ground between an abstract discussion of the crisis tendencies inherent in capitalism and the empirical details of particular social events. This intermediate level is an appropriate ground upon which to interpret particular kinds of state or public policy. The task of such analysis is to apply a larger theoretical framework to particular phenomena. At the intermediate level policies constitute both products of larger processes, i.e., they register changes in the relative power of classes as evidenced in state activity, and also constitute defacto propositions about the dynamics of the political economy. The theoretical framework referred to in this interpretation of public policies responding to capital mobility is that of global capitalism. By global capitalism one refers to a form of capitalism now becoming dominant, characterized by the operations of the multinational corporation-or the global firm [20; 45; 46; 47; 49; 50]. This form of capitalist organiza-

Local Planners- Global Constraints

A number of reports have been published over the past few years documenting the evidence of decline in the northeastern U.S.A. and the simultaneous migration of industry to the U.S. “Sunbelt.” (Academy for Contemporary Problems, 1977; Sale, 1975; Sternlieb and Hughes, 1975). In developing appropriate recommendations to planners, such studies invariably urge that localities or regions facing industrial out-migration arrest this activity by making themselves more suitable and attractive (Council for Northeast Economic Action [CNEA], 1977a) within the framework of a number of characteristic strategies. We propose to examine critically some of the traditional strategies recommended by these reports.

The Impact of Social Movements on a Profession in Process Advocacy in Urban Planning

The process model of professions enables the observer to build internal conflict and change into an analysis of a given profession. An analysis of a new specialty in city planning—advocate planning—suggests that this model be extended so that social movements are seen to enter a profession through the creation of new specialties or segments. By showing that the new practitioners of advocacy planning were highly, though variably, influenced by social movement organizations of the 1960s, this paper suggests the outlines of conflict and difference within the new segment itself Based on interviews with 112 advocate planners in ten cities, the study finds the new practitioners to be young and of similar background to those composing the activist youth movements of their times in college and graduate schools. The differences among them, in regard to their orientation to politics and professionalism, are also examined in the light of new developments in the analysis of reform movements.

The cost of human neglect : America's welfare failure

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Primary Groups in Social Movements: a Memoir and Interpretation

The slogans of protest and radical groups arch out over their programmatic demands, evoking an aura of human aspiration for renewal and community. This aspiration both transcends and forms the basis of the &dquo;politics&dquo;--the cognitive elements of belief--of movements which nevertheless are considered instrumental as distinct from expressive (cf. Blumer, 1951). Expressive social movements may withdraw from public struggles, attempting to create humanly satisfying microcosms of a new order. But ostensibly political groups ask their members to come &dquo;All Out for Mayday!&dquo; They link arms and sing &dquo;We shall overcome.&dquo; They,too, in ritual and ceremony, in movement folkways and in comradely embraces, plumb the depths of profound emotion and a longing to be linked with others in ways not typical of the social structure they seek to change. The role of face-to-face, more or less

Review Symposium I: Changing the Powers that Be: How the Left Can Stop Losing and Win, by G. William Domhoff Rowman and Littlefield: Lanham, MD, 2003. 143 pp.

How different is the political atmosphere among the intelligentsia in 2004 when compared to 2000. Then, the cumulating frustration with Clinton’s embrace of global capital produced a sullen and simmering resentment directed at the even more infuriating Gore. The Green Party and an angry and vengeful Ralph Nader punished the Democrats for not being liberal enough by helping to elect the most conservative President since McKinley. Nader’s vote provided Bush with the margin of victory in Florida (enough to win the electoral vote) 1and in New Hampshire. This strategy might be called Custeristic – that is the term the Chicago Black Panther Fred Hampton – no namby-pamby shrinking violet himself – used in reference to the Weatherman faction of SDS in 1969. In defense of their actions the Greens argued that it didn’t make any difference anyhow – Gore was that bad and Bush would not be so bad. As the election of 2004 comes round, by contrast, many of the same people who blamed Clinton for the results of the Republican Congress have been terrorized (by the US Patriot Act among other things) into an ABBBNL view of the election: Anybody But Bush, But Not Lieberman. It is into this historical moment that America’s greatest living chronicler of political and social power steps up with an argument about how to make change. Sociology has come a long way towards C. Wright Mills, not least because of the work carried out by Domhoff most skillfully among the generation of social scientists now nearing retirement. Mills, like Domhoff now, addressed young activists in his time (See Letter To The New Left, New Left Review #5, 1960). Given

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The 1960s was not just an era of civil rights, anti-war protest, womens liberation, hippies, marijuana, and rock festivals. The untold story of the 1960s is in fact about the New Right. For young conservatives the decade was about Barry Goldwater, Ayn Rand, an important war in the fight against communism, and Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). In A Generation Divided, Rebecca Klatch examines the generation that came into political consciousness during the 1960s, telling the story of both the New Right and the New Left, and including the voices of women as well as men. The result is a riveting narrative of an extraordinary decade, of how politics became central to the identities of a generation of people, and how changes in the political landscape of the 1980s and 1990s affected this identity.