Globalization: Some Critical Issues

The effects of globalization have led to accentuated social inequality in most first-world countries, above all the U.S. and U.K. International trade and capital flows have tended to redistribute income in ways that aggravate inequality in advanced industrialized nations where relative income levels of the salaried middle class and the working class are being eroded, resulting in a downward mobility of these classes. At the same time, unwaged forms of labor, including forced labor and slavery, in poorer regions more and more replace wage labor in developed countries. Informed by an anthropological, humanistic perspective, the contributors in this provocative volume offer critical analyses and alternative visions.

Allen Chun was Research Fellow in the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and is now Chair Professor in the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. He is the author of two major monographs: Unstructuring Chinese Society: The Fictions of Colonial Practice and the Changing Realities of “Land” in the New Territories of Hong Kong (Routledge, 2000) and Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification (SUNY Press, 2017).