Global political economy in the information age : power and inequality / Gillian Youngs.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Youngs, Gillian, 1956-

Series:

RIPE series in global political economy

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

International economic relations.

Information society--Political aspects.

Information society.

Power (Social sciences).

Equality.

Feminist economics.

Physical Description:

xviii, 186 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

London ; New York : Routledge, 2007.

Summary:

We are living in an unparalleled era of globalization; a world of Internet connectivity and emerging markets in which borders are becoming ever more permeable and trade increasingly global.

From technology and change to knowledge and power, Global Political Economy in the Information Age examines how established theoretical traditions of international relations and global political economy are shifting in the information age. Written from a critical perspective, the purpose of this book is to examine how information and technology are becoming of greater structural relevance to our understanding of globalization. By addressing the linkages between these two together with current socio-economic developments, Gillian Youngs argues that technology is one of the key ways in which we can study how power is attained and maintained in global political economy.

This book is divided into three sections: Time/Space Frameworks, Borders and Inequality, Technofutures and Power.

Global Political Economy in the Information Age is an insightful, fresh and broad-ranging evaluation of the conceptual challenges of globalization and the new information era. As such it will be of interest to and offer a diverse readership useful material when thinking about the future, both theoretically and practically.

Contents:

Introduction: twentieth- to twenty-first-century imaginings and realities - a long view of information society 1

Technology and change: continuities and discontinuities 3

Knowledge and power: production and consumption 7

From geospatial to sociospatial GPE: within and beyond the states/markets framework 10

Industrial and electronic utopias and ghettos: power and inequality in the information age 14

Part I Time/space frameworks 21

1 States and markets: understanding geospatial time 23

The political economy of locatedness: national economies and currencies 24

The pre-eminent dollar 27

The euro as historic challenge? 30

The symbology of fixity: geospatiality 33

2 Virtual realities: exploring sociospatiality 40

Technology: thinking inside and outside the box 41

Virtual or real: overcoming a crucial binary trap 45

From cityscapes to cyberscapes: the new world of digital economy 49

Cybercitizens to cyborgs: some micro considerations 53

3 The political economy of time: historical time, speed and mobility 58

From clock time to digital time: speed as the new imperative 66

The new global political economy of access: neoliberal ideology and universal aims 69

Moving through time and space: the new economics of mobility 73

Part II Borders and inequality 75

4 Transcendence and communication 77

Vertical communication, globalization and new public sphere issues 77

Horizontal communication: sociospatial versus geospatial contexts 81

The political economy of interactivity: state and market in the virtual sphere 90

5 Inequality as driver 92

Inequality as long-term trend: exclusion over inclusion 94

The realities of inequalities: beyond neoliberalism? 105

6 Embedded patriarchy: feminism and inequality in the Internet era 108

Global gender inequalities 109

Time and the experience of it 110

The gender matrix of time and embodied political economy 112

The rationalizing of time and patriarchal constructions of time 115

Time in the service of others and gendered technologies 119

Women on the Net (WoN) and women's online empowerment 122

Part III Technofutures and power 125

7 Complex hegemony in the twenty-first century: power and inequality 127

US hegemony in the information age 128

Inequality and leapfrogging in the knowledge economy 133

Mediated political economy: geospatial and sociospatial contexts 137

Conclusion: Contradictions between connectivity and inequality 143.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [152]-178) and index.

ISBN:

0415384060

9780415384063

0415384079

9780415384070

0203964063

9780203964064

OCLC:

70208003