Fast Forward: Work, Gender, and Protest in a Changing World - Softcover

Dickinson, Torry D.; Schaeffer, Robert K.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0742508951 ISBN 13: 9780742508958

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001

Synopsis

This innovative, global feminist analysis of work and politics examines the diverse problems and related protests of women and men who labor to make ends meet in a rapidly-changing world. Using vivid examples from around the world, it reveals how "globalization" is reshaping social institutions and lives. Fast Forward explores how businesses and states reshaped and redistributed work around the world during the last 30 years of "globalization," often with adverse consequences. Within this fast-moving context, laboring people today engage in work outside of formal employment, try to obtain survival resources, mount a diverse array of often women-centered protests against firms and states, and try―on their own terms―to reinvent work and democratic political practices. Portraying the human face of global change, Fast Forward shows how overlapping social movements wrestle with economic and political marginalization, and initiate highly diverse, but related attempts to change the way the world works.

About this title

About the Author

Torry Dickinson is associate professor of women's studies at Kansas State University. Robert Schaeffer is associate professor of sociology at Kansas State University.

Review

Dickinson and Schaeffer raise the standard for research on social change and collective action by arguing that transformations of work and gender can be traced to protest on a global scale as diverse as movements for social justice, democratization, women's rights, corporate responsibility, and environmentalism. The evidence is detailed, the analysis compelling. (John Walton, University of California - Davis)

This is an ambitious and thought-provoking study of changes in global work patterns over the last thirty years. Fast Forward lucidly analyzes the often hidden relationships, which link North and South and sustain privilege across local, regional and global differences of class, gender, colour and age. The authors see hope in the destabilization of capitalist institutions and the breakdown of oppressive gender relations. They show how working people around the world are organizing to resist the impact of global capital in their daily lives and on the environment and to create new social alternatives. (Anna Davin, Middlesex University, London)

Fast Forward offers an admirable discussion of the big picture concerning working class labor in the global village...quite instructive in piecing togehter an understanding of how the world economy may be best conceptualized as on organism having many parts, rather than as many countries that have no formal relationship to on another aside from political dialogue. (Contemporary Sociology)

This book is a well thought-out synthesis of developments in the organization of work and its impact on working people around the world. (American Journal of Sociology)

Schaeffer and Dickinson paint an extremely challenging view of the new global economy―a view that is clearly at odds with what you will hear at most thinktanks and universities. (John B. Judis Senior Editor, The New Republic)

Edition details

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0742508951
• ISBN 13: 9780742508958
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 304