Perrons Globalization and Social Change

Perrons (2004) 2004. Globalization and Social Change: People and Places in a Divided World. Routledge Chapters 3 and 5
To accompany Lecture 1. Uneven development among cities

Pretty much a recapitulation of the lecture. Notes taken. Jist is you need theory to figure out what is going wrong, but depends what theory. Perrons doesn't like the theory that market processes lead to convergence (see quote p.59). She claims it is uneven, leads to what she calls clustering. With globalisation, geography should not matter, "yet at every spatial scale, the global, the nation, the region, the city or locality, economic activity is clustered." She also looks at whether development is ethnocentric or value laden. .

On Ch. 5 she looks at the global division of labour, which she says is uneven. The West is becoming increasingly distant from the production that comes under its name. Nike, for example, concentrates on brand and marketing. The further it gets from production, the less control so the more exploitation. p. 136 UK highest proportion of population living in poverty in the EU, and highest nummber of children in poverty (after Italy). p. 142 Under Fordism when unions were strong and collective bargaining led to high wages and stable jobs, all were happy. Now, p. 160 "capitalist societies are characterised by eneven development."