Globalization and Its Critics challenges the claim that globalization is a clearly understood phenomena whose effects are well known and easily accounted for. It explores the categories we use to think about globalization, the dynamics which are driving it, and the effects which globalizing tendencies are having on the key institutional features of the contemporary world. The contributors examine not only how globalization is refashioning political and economic institutions, but also the way in which specific forms of knowledge and technology are shaping the ongoing dynamic of globalization....

This book evaluates the claim that in order to explore the changing social foundations of global power relations today, we need to include in our analysis an understanding of global civil society, particularly if we also wish to raise ethical questions about the changing political and institutional practices of transnational governance. The authors engage directly with the notion of global civil society in order to examine the ethical, social, and political conditions that make certain kinds of globalizing practices a reality today. They explore and utilise the normative dimensions of the...

Randall Germain explores the changing political economy of finance at the global level. He relates changes in global finance to wider changes in the organization of the international economy, and considers how commercial and investment banks have responded institutionally to these changes. Changes in the institutional organization of credit have rendered traditional policy instruments for controlling credit less useful today than in the past. Germain thus argues that the international organization of credit is likely to be relatively unstable into the twenty-first century, and the role of...

Randall Germain explores the changing political economy of finance at the global level. He relates changes in global finance to wider changes in the organization of the international economy, and considers how commercial and investment banks have responded institutionally to these changes. Changes in the institutional organization of credit have rendered traditional policy instruments for controlling credit less useful today than in the past. Germain thus argues that the international organization of credit is likely to be relatively unstable into the twenty-first century, and the role of...

The financial crisis prompted many to ask how financial systems from America and Iceland to Russia and Hungary could have been so misgoverned that their near collapse plunged the entire world into recession. Randall Germain assesses what needs to be done, and by whom, to avoid a repetition of what he calls the 'great freeze'.