Labour and Employment in a Globalising World: Autonomy, Collectives and Political Dilemmas

Abstract

Globalisation is a comprehensive process of multi-level social, economic and political interdependencies. The "local", nonetheless, is of particular relevancy.Globalisation is said to heighten market competition, as it punctuates the world's economies. Thus Suzanne Berger underscores "the changes in the international economy and in domestic economies that are moving toward creating one world market […] To make this term [globalisation] a useful one, it needs to be pared down to the core idea, which is the emergence of a single world market for labour, capital, goods and services". And she continues: "a more concrete definition of globalisation, then, is the acceleration of the processes in the international economy and in domestic economies that operate toward unifying world markets" (Berger, 2006: 9). The definition is too static. For Saskia Sassen ( 2002), globalisation is the equivalent of hyper-mobility: international networks of communication and the elimination of problems inherent in distance and localisations. It's the spatial dimension which is emphasised here. Globalisation does transform the spatial and socioeconomic scales of regulation (Swyngedouw, 2000). But this movement does not contradict the local dimension as enterprises continue to depend upon territories and their human capital, they are not mere predators of lower labour costs. The quality of the labour force -its education standards, skills and adaptability -, institutional stability and reactivity are conditions of sustainable economic development.Globalisation is political as it incites glocal interactions and interdependencies. It is neither a 'win-win' nor a 'win-lose' relationship, but impacts the way groups act, interact and assimilate ongoing transformations. Appropriate tools are needed to apprehend its repercussions upon work and employment in their respective national environments.Globalisation is paradoxical precisely because these phenomena cannot be standardised. Its differentiations are as much contextual as they are analytical because they are perceived from multiple viewpoints. (Assayag, 2005). Global and local are not contradictory, the glocal is inherently comprehensive. The viewpoints are conditioned by the factors advanced to justify a particular problematical stance. For example, the ideology of neoliberal market regulation reduces all social processes to their economic component and relegates the other dimensions of capitalism -ecology, culture, politics, civil society -to "the sway of the world-market system", whose defining trait is what Ulrich Beck calls "globalism" (Beck, 2000b: 100). According to "globalism", an economy which engulfs all other single societal phenomena modifies one's perception of reality. When praising globalisation, neoliberal economists point to the expansion of world trade and take for granted Montes-

Media innovation and social impact: the case of living documentaries

“…In the realm of digital journalism and documentary, interactive documentary is still a recent, albeit constantly developing, opportunity for documentary makers and online journalists to tell their stories and publish their findings . Top-and producers "move between what Arjun Appadurai has referred to as 'regimes of value' (Appadurai, 1986, p. 4), and what, in other literature, has been discussed as 'systems of belief' (Bolin, 2009;Bolin, 2011;Bourdieu, 1993).…”