How can our everyday actions contribute towards shaping and transforming the world economy? This volume of original essays argues that current scholarship in international political economy (IPE) is too highly focused on powerful states and large international institutions. The contributors examine specific forms of 'everyday' actions to demonstrate how small-scale actors and their decisions can also affect the global economy and shape global change. They analyse a range of seemingly ordinary or subordinate actors, including peasants, working classes and trade unions, lower-middle and middle classes, female migrant labourers and Eastern diasporas, and examine how they have agency in transforming their political and economic environments. This book offers a novel way of thinking about everyday forms of change across a range of topical issues including globalisation, international finance, trade and regimes and will appeal to students and scholars of politics and international relations.
Presents a novel theoretical approach to the study of the world economy, by examining everyday life Relates everyday international political economy (IPE) to policy issues to provide a fresh perspective on how it has relevance to policy matters Considers a range of topical issues including globalisation, international finance, trade and regimes
1. Introducing everyday IPE: decentring the discipline - revitalising the margins John M. Hobson and Leonard Seabrooke; Part I. Regimes as Cultural Weapons of the Weak: 2. The agency of labour in global change: reimagining the spaces and scales of trade union praxis within a global economy Andrew Herod; 3. The agency of peripheral actors: small state tax havens and international regimes as weapons of the weak J. C. Sharman; 4. Southern sites of female agency: informal regimes and female migrant labour resistance in East Asia Michele Ford and Nicola Piper; Part II. Global Economic Change From Below: 5. The everyday social sources of imperial and hegemonic financial orders Leonard Seabrooke; 6. Everyday investor subjects and global financial change: the rise of Anglo-American mass investment Paul Langley; 7. Peasants as subaltern agents in Latin America: neoliberalism, resistance, and the power of the powerless Adam David Morton; Part III. Bringing Eastern Agents In: 8. Eastern agents of globalisation: oriental globalisation in the rise of Western capitalism John M. Hobson; 9. Diasporic agents and trans-Asian flows in the making of Asian modernity: the case of Thailand Ara Wilson; 10. The agency of subordinate polities: Western hegemony in the East Asian mirror Shogo Suzuki; 11. Conclusion: everyday IPE research, teaching and policy agendas John M. Hobson and Leonard Seabrooke.
