What fundamental changes in the state, and in the analysis of the state, have been stimulated by economic globalization? In the course of interactions with global markets and regulatory agencies, so-called Asian tiger countries like Malaysia and Indonesia have created new economic possibilities, social spaces and political constellations, which in turn condition their further actions. The shifting relations between market, state, and society have resulted in the state's flexible experimentations with sovereignty. Graduated sovereignty refers to a) the different modes of (...) governing segments of the population who relate or do not relate to global markets; and b) the different mixes of legal compromises and controls tailored to the requirements of special production zones. The Asian financial crisis further demonstrates the concept of graduation in that the market-oriented agenda can mean different things, strengthening state power and protections in certain areas, but not in others. (shrink)

Mutations in citizenship are crystallized in an ever-shifting landscape shaped by the flows of markets, technologies, and populations. We are moving beyond the citizenship-versus-statelessness model. First, the elements of citizenship are becoming disarticulated from each other, and becoming re-articulated with universalizing criteria of neoliberalism and human rights. Such ‘global assemblages’ define zones of political entitlements and claims. Second, the space of the ‘assemblage’, rather than the national terrain, becomes the site for political mobilizations by diverse groups in motion. Three contrasting (...) configurations are presented. In the EU zone, unregulated markets and migrant flows challenge liberal citizenship. In Asian zones, foreigners who display self-enterprising savoire faire gain rights and benefits of citizenship. In camps of the disenfranchised or displaced, sheer survival becomes the ground for political claims. Thus, particular constellations shape specific problems and resolutions to questions of contemporary living, further disarticulating and deterritorializing aspects of citizenship. (shrink)

"Golf day 2005 @ federal golf club, red hill." Ethos: Official Publication of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, (196), pp. 7.

Foreign managers in China talked about the need to “re-engineer the Chinese soul” in order to make employees conform to global corporate norms. My approach examines how Western business knowledge and practices are transferred to Shanghai in two major ways. First, I discuss attempts by American managers to focus on corporate norms aimed at disciplining Chinese employees to be team players, not entrepreneurial figures. Frustrations encountered in attempts to “re-engineer” workers are expressed in terms of the opposition between We­stern business (...) “rationality” and Chinese cultural “irrationality.” Chinese employees appear to be driven less by company rules and goals than by individualist careerist moves in a turbulent job market. Western management knowledge is also entering not through American companies but through returning Chinese expatriates who exercise a sophisticated blind of business enterpreneurialism and cultural knowledge in their business dealings. The article concludes by identifying the contradiction in foreign firms wishing to remake Chinese workers as neoliberal subjects but then these same workers are faulted for being too self-enterprising and China critiqued as a site where neoliberal opportunism has run wild. (shrink)