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This best-selling book examines the political, economic, and environmental changes that affect people's lives in the United States and around the world. Using an accessible, narrative approach Robert Schaeffer explains contemporary global processes and developments. Just as a storm that moves across an area has differing local, regional and even national and global impacts that are welcome to some and disastrous to others, global events can have very different consequences-good and bad-for people in different settings. Though many of the global changes that he examines are interconnected, the stories Schaeffer presents are told separately. The result is a text that provides readers with accounts of change that can be studied individually or read collectively.

In this fourth edition Schaeffer offers a new chapter on global migration in which he examines the causes and consequences of contemporary economic, environmental, and gender-based migrations. He also looks at the economic problems of 2008 which plunged the United States into a recession and triggered a global economic downturn. Throughout Understanding Globalization Schaeffer examines developments in past years that shaped or resembled current global challenges, making this text an excellent primer for understanding current global developments.

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CHOICE Review

Schaeffer (former journalist; now sociologist, Kansas State Univ.) presents his contrarian view of globalization in this update to the 1997 edition. His major conclusion is that under globalization, people work harder for less--a condition more particularly true for women. Denying the conventional view of the inevitability of globalization in the world economy, a position said to be influenced by the economic and political elites without popular support, Schaeffer offers in rebuttal the views of academic scholars, policy research institutes, environmental and feminist organizations, and Ross Perot and Ralph Nader. However, Schaeffer's approach allows for a middle ground containing both winners and losers, though most of the analysis in chapters 1, 4, and 5 is heavily weighted toward an abundance of losers, with the IMF and the World Bank playing a significant role in that regard. Twelve remaining chapters deal not so much with standard problems as with other issues such as the effects of world commodity prices on developing countries, global climate change, dictatorship and democracy, and mafias and the global drug trade; some are carried forward without updating of source material from the first edition. A preferred book on this topic is distinguished economist Joseph Stiglitz's Globalization and Its Discontents (CH, Oct'02). Public and undergraduate library collections. H. I. Liebling emeritus, Lafayette College

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Robert K. Schaeffer is professor of sociology at Kansas State University.