Labor Contestation at Walmart Brazil

Labor Contestation at Walmart Brazil
Author: Scott B. Martin
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2021-09-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3030746720

This book explores how and why the labor practices of the world’s largest employer, supermarket giant Walmart, were contested by unions and government regulators as it expanded to Latin America starting in the 1990s. With an in-depth case study of Brazil, and a comparative chapter examining Argentina, Chile, and Mexico, this book analyzes the problematic encounter between diffusion of home-office anti-labor practices and evolving national institutional contexts that are quite varied and in some cases enable considerable resistance by unions and/or regulators. Walmart’s “repressive familial” and “anti-union” model is found to generate costs and conflicts that contributed to its unprofitability and ultimate exit from Brazil in 2018. This experience, contrasted with country situations where Walmart’s overall competitive and labor and human resource practices “fit” better with national markets and institutions, underlines the brittle, problematic nature of diffusionist corporate models lacking adaptive capacity to significant cross-national variations across host countries.

South American Policy Regionalism

South American Policy Regionalism
Author: Leslie Elliott Armijo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2024-09-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1040130259

“Regional cooperation exists, but looks different in the global South than in the European Union,” claim the contributors to South American Policy Regionalism, which offers novel theory, methods, and Latin American case studies of joint governance efforts in nine international policy arenas, ranging from illegal drugs to artificial intelligence. Contrasting three major schools of thought in international relations (highlighting power, institutions, and ideas), this book introduces the idea of international policy regionalism as a framework for informed debate about international policy-sector interactions in a regional space. Beginning with a conceptual approach applicable to any world region, it includes a brief history of Western Hemisphere regionalism to aid in future cross-regional comparisons. An international group of contributors constructs rich narratives of the politics of Latin American policy sector evolution since the Cold War. Besides the aforementioned, included sectors span regional development banking, infrastructure planning, electricity distribution, migration governance, climate action, neglected tropical diseases, and food policies. This volume equips readers from various academic disciplines and the policy world to understand the relevance of core international relations theory for the analysis of policy sectors that cross national borders, both within Latin America and elsewhere, and especially throughout the global South.

Wal-Mart World

Wal-Mart World
Author: Stanley D. Brunn
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 426
Release: 2006
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0415951372

With a billion shoppers worldwide, Wal-Mart World is the first book to look at this incredibly important phenomenon in global perspective, its broad scope makes it essential reading for anyone interested in the global impact of this economic colossus.

The Global Food System

The Global Food System
Author: William D. Schanbacher
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2014-07-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1440829128

This detailed analysis of the global food system looks at the way food is produced, distributed, and consumed in an effort to create a more equitable and healthful system worldwide. With large-scale famine afflicting regions around the globe and overconsumption and unhealthy eating habits destroying others, many are beginning to wonder if access to food is less of a class-based social problem and more of an ethical issue affecting the lives—and livelihoods—of people all over the world. This thoughtful text provides a thorough examination of the factors contributing to this global concern, exploring the complexities of international food supply and demand as well as the efforts to bring about a more just global food system. Through this groundbreaking volume, author and educator Will Schanbacher sheds light on flaws in the current structure and suggests ways to achieve a more balanced approach. He considers the economics, politics, and activism behind and involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of the global food system. In an effort to illuminate many problems associated with hunger, inequality, and injustice in the food system, the book also offers many potential strategies and solutions for making a more healthy, sustainable, and equitable world. Chapters contain both theoretical models and concrete practices for food security and offer strategies for creating an equitable system.

The Routledge Companion to Employment Relations

The Routledge Companion to Employment Relations
Author: Adrian Wilkinson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 503
Release: 2018-05-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317434889

Comprising five thematic sections, this volume provides a critical, international and interdisciplinary exploration of employment relations. It examines the major subjects and emerging areas within the field, including essays on institutional theory, voice, new actors, precarious work and employment. Led by a well-respected team of editors, the contributors examine current knowledge and debates within each topic, offering cutting-edge analysis and reflection. The Routledge Companion to Employment Relations is an extensive reference work that offers students and researchers an introduction to current scholarship in the longstanding discipline of employment relations. It will be an essential addition to library collections in business and management, law, economics, sociology and political economy.

Social Structures of Direct Democracy

Social Structures of Direct Democracy
Author: John Asimakopoulos
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2014-06-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 900426275X

Neoliberalism has pushed capitalism to its limits, hollowing out global economies and lives in the process, while people have no voice. John Asimakopoulos addresses the problem with a theory to practice model that reconciles Marxism, with its diverse radical currents, and democratic theory. Social Structures of Direct Democracy develops a political economy of structural equality in large-scale society making strong empirical arguments for radical transformation. Key concepts include filling positions of political and economic authority (e.g., legislatures and corporate boards) with randomly selected citizens leaving the demos as the executive. Asimakopoulos shows that an egalitarian society leads to greater innovation, sustainable economic growth, and positive social benefits in contrast to economies based on individualism, competition, and inequality.

Labor in the Global Digital Economy

Labor in the Global Digital Economy
Author: Ursula Huws
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2014-12-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1583674632

For every person who reads this text on the printed page, many more will read it on a computer screen or mobile device. It’s a situation that we increasingly take for granted in our digital era, and while it is indicative of the novelty of twenty-first-century capitalism, it is also the key to understanding its driving force: the relentless impulse to commodify our lives in every aspect. Ursula Huws ties together disparate economic, cultural, and political phenomena of the last few decades to form a provocative narrative about the shape of the global capitalist economy at present. She examines the way that advanced information and communications technology has opened up new fields of capital accumulation: in culture and the arts, in the privatization of public services, and in the commodification of human sociality by way of mobile devices and social networking. These trends are in turn accompanied by the dramatic restructuring of work arrangements, opening the way for new contradictions and new forms of labor solidarity and struggle around the planet. Labor in the Global Digital Economy is a forceful critique of our dizzying contemporary moment, one that goes beyond notions of mere connectedness or free-flowing information to illuminate the entrenched mechanisms of exploitation and control at the core of capitalism.

Media Piracy in Emerging Economies

Media Piracy in Emerging Economies
Author: Joe Karaganis
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 438
Release: 2011
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0984125744

Media Piracy in Emerging Economies is the first independent, large-scale study of music, film and software piracy in emerging economies, with a focus on Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa, Mexico and Bolivia. Based on three years of work by some thirty five researchers, Media Piracy in Emerging Economies tells two overarching stories: one tracing the explosive growth of piracy as digital technologies became cheap and ubiquitous around the world, and another following the growth of industry lobbies that have reshaped laws and law enforcement around copyright protection. The report argues that these efforts have largely failed, and that the problem of piracy is better conceived as a failure of affordable access to media in legal markets.

Agriculture, Environment and Development

Agriculture, Environment and Development
Author: Antonio Augusto Rossotto Ioris
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 474
Release: 2022-11-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3031102649

The Second Edition of this book is completely revised and updated throughout providing an overview of current challenges faced within the area of Agri-food in relation to policymaking, ecological conservation and socio-environmental justice. Including a range of new chapters, the book explores some of the conceptual and analytical gaps that are presented by current approaches to this topic. The series of interconnected chapters offers a critical reinterpretation of the tensions associated with the failures of mainstream regulatory regimes, land and resource grabbing, and the impacts of global agri-food chains at local, regional and inter-sectoral scales. The book also examines past legacies and emerging challenges associated with agriculture modernisation, politico-spatial disputes, climate change, social movements, gender, ethnicity and education. It likewise addresses the transformative potential of different combinations of biophysical, socio-technical and socio-spatial practices of food sovereignty.

Uberworked and Underpaid

Uberworked and Underpaid
Author: Trebor Scholz
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

This book is about the rise of digital labor. Companies like Uber and Amazon Mechanical Turk promise autonomy, choice, and flexibility. One of network culture's toughest critics, Trebor Scholz chronicles the work of workers in the "sharing economy," and the free labor on sites like Facebook, to take these myths apart. In this rich, accessible, and provocative book, Scholz exposes the uncaring reality of contingent digital work, which is thriving at the expense of employment and worker rights. The book is meant to inspire readers to join the growing number of worker-owned "platform cooperatives," rethink unions, and build a better future of work. A call to action, loud and clear, Uberworked and Underpaid shows that it is time to stop wage theft and "crowd fleecing," rethink wealth distribution, and address the urgent question of how digital labor should be regulated and how workers from Berlin, Barcelona, Seattle, and São Paulo can act in solidarity to defend their rights.