Global markets and local cultures

Global markets and local cultures

Current Issue | Vol 23, No 2 | March 2022
Cheris Shun-ching Chan
Toward the end of last issue’s editorial note, I posed the question of “what constitutes economic sociology.” In this and the next issue, I have invited contributions from some authors whose works may not be typically classified as “economic sociology,” but their subject matter is definitely of great interest to economic sociologists.
Claudio Ezequiel Benzecry
In my new book, The Perfect Fit. Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry (Benzecry 2022), I study the work of repair and maintenance necessary to keep the global scale going. I do so by studying the work and lives of experts in charge of design and development of shoes for the US market. Research for this project began in 2012; I conducted five years of research in between New York City (USA), Dongguan (China), and Novo Hamburgo (Brazil), scrutinizing the friction (Tsing 2005) between expert work and cheap labor in the production of a ubiquitous commodity: shoes.
Biao Xiang
A global bazaar is a marketplace where small, independent enterprises buy and sell a wide range of goods globally and directly, without relying on a centralized mediator. Typical examples of global bazaars are the Yiwu Market (officially the “International Trade City”) in southeast China and the Dubai markets (the Dubai Wholesale City and a group of specialized marketplaces such as the Deira Covered Shoes Market) in the UAE. 
Julia Chuang
Since 2008, private Chinese family wealth has been rapidly expatriated overseas. Chinese citizens are currently transferring money out of the country at a rate of around 450 billion USD per year (Fan 2016). One industry study estimates that 60 percent of Chinese citizens with a net worth of more than 1.5 million USD are either in the process of moving abroad or considering doing so (Hurun Report 2021). 
Sylvia Martin
“Nobody cares about Hong Kong film.” I was on the set of a Hong Kong film shoot in October 2021, and a film director1 that I have known since I started research on film/TV production here in 2005 uttered this to me, as he had many times over recent years. The director’s remark referred to his perception of a lack of interest on the part of young people to pursue a career in the Hong Kong film industry, making feature (narrative, non-fiction) films geared to theatrical release. 
Alex Preda, Julie Valk, and Ruowen Xu
We started writing this a few days after Alex returned from ethnographic fieldwork in Hong Kong. This research trip required being on the road for two months, first doing a washout period in Bucharest, followed by quarantine in Hong Kong, then finally fieldwork itself. This was not Alex’s first time in Hong Kong, but in fact the sixteenth. The day Alex boarded a flight back to London, another one of us (Ruowen) boarded a flight to Shanghai for an extended period of fieldwork in China. We plan another round in early 2022 in Japan as well, and in the US too, in addition to the ongoing work in London. 
Smitha Radhakrishnan
When Mohammed Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, he drew global attention to the potential benefits of lending small amounts of money to impoverished women in cooperative groups. His work in Bangladesh, in cooperation with the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), had lowered vulnerabilities for women in rural areas to a large extent, and appeared to be a promising method for addressing global poverty (2014). 
Arora-Jonsson, Stefan, Nils Brunsson, Raimund Hasse, and Katarina Lagerström (eds.) · 2021
Competition: What it is and why it happens.
Oxford: Oxford University Press
Reviewers: Ana Rogojanu, Georg Wolfmayr

Charles Camic · 2020
Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Reviewer: Timur Ergen

Marlène Benquet and Théo Bourgeron · 2021
La finance autoritaire. Vers la fin du néolibéralisme.
Paris: Raisons d’agir
Reviewer: Clément Fontan
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