Global "Body Shopping"

Global
Author: Biao Xiang
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2011-05-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1400836336

How can America's information technology (IT) industry predict serious labor shortages while at the same time laying off tens of thousands of employees annually? The answer is the industry's flexible labor management system--a flexibility widely regarded as the modus operandi of global capitalism today. Global "Body Shopping" explores how flexibility and uncertainty in the IT labor market are constructed and sustained through concrete human actions. Drawing on in-depth field research in southern India and in Australia, and folding an ethnography into a political economy examination, Xiang Biao offers a richly detailed analysis of the India-based global labor management practice known as "body shopping." In this practice, a group of consultants--body shops--in different countries works together to recruit IT workers. Body shops then farm out workers to clients as project-based labor; and upon a project's completion they either place the workers with a different client or "bench" them to await the next placement. Thus, labor is managed globally to serve volatile capital movement. Underpinning this practice are unequal socioeconomic relations on multiple levels. While wealth in the New Economy is created in an increasingly abstract manner, everyday realities--stock markets in New York, benched IT workers in Sydney, dowries in Hyderabad, and women and children in Indian villages--sustain this flexibility.

The Global Body Market

The Global Body Market
Author: Michele Goodwin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2013-05-27
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1107355087

Black and gray markets for body parts are illegal, but also pioneering and inventive. Although this type of criminal activity requires dexterity and innovation, these markets thrive and flourish, sometimes in view of law. On the other hand, altruistic procurement is mired by low participation, which encourages black market transactions. Thousands of patients die each year waiting for an organ or bone marrow donation through the altruistic procurement system, so some turn to the dark side. This book offers a frank discussion of altruism in the global body market. It exposes how researchers exploit their patients' ignorance to harvest tissue samples, blood, and other biologics without consent, chronicles exploitation in the name of altruism, including the non-consensual use of children in dangerous clinical trials, and analyzes social and legal commitments to the value of altruism - offering an important critique of the vulnerability of altruism to corruption, coercion, pressure, and other negative externalities.

Body Shopping

Body Shopping
Author: Donna Dickenson
Publisher: ONEWorld Publications
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2008
Genre: Medical
ISBN:

Our tissues, genes, and organs are becoming, in the words of the head of one pharmaceutical company, 'the currency of the future'. From the trafficking of women for their eggs to 'beauty junkies', Dickenson reveals the ingenious ways that body parts are converted into profits. Drawing on 20 years of insider knowledge, Dickenson's sweeping exploration goes beyond the horror stories to suggest a range of strategies to bring the global biotechnology industry to heel.

Rethinking the Body in Global Politics

Rethinking the Body in Global Politics
Author: Kandida Purnell
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2021-04-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429809158

This book rethinks the body in global politics and the particular roles bodies play in our international system, foregrounding processes and practices involved in the continually contested (re/dis)embodiment of both human bodies and collective bodies politic. Purnell provides a new, innovative, and detailed theory of bodily (re)making and un-making that shows how bodies are simultaneously (re)made and moved and (re)make and move other bodies and things. Presented in the form of reflective/reflexive and theoretically innovative essays, the book explores: bodies in general and their precarious, excessive, ontologically insecure, and emotional facets; the fleshing out of contemporary necro(body)politics; and the visual-emotional politics embodied through the COVID-19 pandemic. The empirical analyses feed into contemporary IR debates on British and American politics and international relations and the Global War on Terror, while also speaking to broader and interdisciplinary, theoretical literature on bodies/embodiment, visual politics, biopolitics, necropolitics, and affect/emotion, and feelings.

Dressing Global Bodies

Dressing Global Bodies
Author: Beverly Lemire
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2019-11-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351028723

Dressing Global Bodies addresses the complex politics of dress and fashion from a global perspective spanning four centuries, tying the early global to more contemporary times, to reveal clothing practice as a key cultural phenomenon and mechanism of defining one’s identity. This collection of essays explores how garments reflect the hierarchies of value, collective and personal inclinations, religious norms and conversions. Apparel is now recognized for its seminal role in global, colonial and post-colonial engagements and for its role in personal and collective expression. Patterns of exchange and commerce are discussed by contributing authors to analyse powerful and diverse colonial and postcolonial practices. This volume rejects assumptions surrounding a purportedly all-powerful Western metropolitan fashion system and instead aims to emphasize how diverse populations seized agency through the fashioning of dress. Dressing Global Bodies contributes to a growing scholarship considering gender and race, place and politics through the close critical analysis of dress and fashion; it is an indispensable volume for students of history and especially those interested in fashion, textiles, material culture and the body across a wide time frame.

Why We Buy

Why We Buy
Author: Paco Underhill
Publisher:
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1999
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

The culmination of 15 years of meticulous research and observation, this riveting audiobook offers hilarious anecdotes and amazing hard facts about one of Americas favorite pastimes. Abridged. 7 CDs.

The Body Impolitic

The Body Impolitic
Author: Michael Herzfeld
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2004
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0226329143

The Body Impolitic is a critical study of tradition, not merely as an ornament of local and national heritage, but also as a millstone around the necks of those who are condemned to produce it. Michael Herzfeld takes us inside a rich variety of small-town Cretan artisans' workshops to show how apprentices are systematically thwarted into learning by stealth and guile. This harsh training reinforces a stereotype of artisans as rude and uncultured. Moreover, the same stereotypes that marginalize artisans locally also operate to marginalize Cretans within the Greek nation and Greece itself within the international community. What Herzfeld identifies as "the global hierarchy of value" thus frames the nation's ancient monuments and traditional handicrafts as evidence of incurable "backwardness." Herzfeld's sensitive observations offer an intimately grounded way of understanding the effects of globalization and of one of its most visible offshoots, the heritage industry, on the lives of ordinary people in many parts of the world today.

The Global Beauty Industry

The Global Beauty Industry
Author: Meeta Jha
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 134
Release: 2015-09-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317557964

The Global Beauty Industry is an interdisciplinary text that uses beauty to explore topics of gender, race, class, colorism, nation, bodies, multiculturalism, transnationalism, and intersectionality. Integrating materials from a wide range of cultural and geo-political contexts, it coalesces with initiatives to produce more internationally relevant curricula in fields such as sociology, as well as cultural, women's/gender, media, and globalization studies.

What Can a Body Do?

What Can a Body Do?
Author: Sara Hendren
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2020-08-18
Genre: Design
ISBN: 073522000X

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and LitHub Winner of the 2021 Science in Society Journalism Book Prize A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and a call to imagine a better-designed world for us all. Furniture and tools, kitchens and campuses and city streets—nearly everything human beings make and use is assistive technology, meant to bridge the gap between body and world. Yet unless, or until, a misfit between our own body and the world is acute enough to be understood as disability, we may never stop to consider—or reconsider—the hidden assumptions on which our everyday environment is built. In a series of vivid stories drawn from the lived experience of disability and the ideas and innovations that have emerged from it—from cyborg arms to customizable cardboard chairs to deaf architecture—Sara Hendren invites us to rethink the things and settings we live with. What might assistance based on the body’s stunning capacity for adaptation—rather than a rigid insistence on “normalcy”—look like? Can we foster interdependent, not just independent, living? How do we creatively engineer public spaces that allow us all to navigate our common terrain? By rendering familiar objects and environments newly strange and wondrous, What Can a Body Do? helps us imagine a future that will better meet the extraordinary range of our collective needs and desires.