Globalization: The Human Consequences (Revised)

Globalization may spur the movement of people, capital, and information across the globe, but if people themselves are not in control of these processes, who benefits? Human affairs now take place on a global scale, but we can only watch as boundaries, institutions, and loyalties shift rapidly. These new uncertainties place everyone at a disadvantage as jobs disappear from traditional arenas, time-honored national industries collapse, and new hierarchies arise in which everyone is expendable and replaceable. Drawing on the works of philosophers, social historians, architects, and theoreticians such as Michel Foucault, Claude Levi-Strauss, Alfred J. Dunlap, and Le Corbusier, Zygmunt Bauman takes a closer look at globalization's positive and negative effects. From the creation of absentee landlords to prison architecture designed for the criminalization of the underclass, Bauman ultimately finds more division than unity in the rise of a more homogenous, disenfranchised world.