30th SASE Annual Meeting

Description

or decades, scholars have been charting the multiple effects of “globalization” on political, economic and social practices in the developed and developing world. Broadly, globalization has been understood to involve open trade and the growth of transnational flows, linkages and interdependencies at all levels involving knowledge, labor, business, finance, technology, regulation and norms, such as human rights. After World War II, multiple regimes and institutions traversing and interlinking domestic and transnational positions emerged and were then continuously modified to foster and govern the globalization process. For decades, the diffusion of the ideology and practice architectures of “globalization” was made possible by a strong developed capitalist alliance of mostly western powers, headed by the United States. The results of this historical project have been highly uneven: some regions of the global south (especially Asia), experienced tremendous growth and living standard improvement, while others (eg in Africa) languished; the metropolitan north experienced an initial multiple decade period of prosperity followed by ever more obvious stagnation and socio-economic distress. After more than a half century of increasing openness, nearly all regions in the north and south are experiencing alarming and seemingly ever worsening inequality and often painfully disruptive adjustment in work, civic and private lives. In the wake of these developments, the forces unleashed by the globalization project now seem to be pushing toward its recalibration. Economic success in Asia, especially in China, has shifted global power relations and alliances, challenging the premier position of the US. Recently, populist and authoritarian movements in many global regions have channeled reactions to globalization’s disruptive qualities into political challenges to the basic practices and governance architectures undergirding globalization both domestically and transnationally. Today, at nearly every level of social life across the globe, social, economic and political relations, practices and modes of organization and governance have been unsettled and destabilized.

How should we make sense of the current moment? Exhaustion, rage, reaction, reform, transformation and experimentation all seem to be present and intermingling in turbulent and unpredictable ways. The 2018 annual SASE conference in Kyoto will serve as an occasion for existing SASE networks, as well as new groupings in the form of mini-conferences, to explore the ways in which the processes of reordering occurring across the globe are impacting traditional research areas and paradigms of analysis. How are new developments redrawing the practice and governance terrain within firms and corporations, in management practices, in the welfare state, the law, in industrial relations, across supply chains and in regulation? Are processes of innovation and technological change substantively affected by (or even driving) the current process of global reordering? SASE as a community has long embraced values furthering equality, justice and democracy across a broad array of research terrains. How do reordering processes impact those commitments? The Association’s first meeting in Asia, itself an expression of the changing composition of the global academic conversation, seems like a very fitting occasion for reflection on these powerful dynamics of change and recomposition.

Period	24 Jun 2018
Event type	Conference
Conference number	30th
Location	Kyoto, Japan
Degree of Recognition	International