Global Village

Today, more Americans than ever are going abroad to visit, work, or study. Increasingly, the ability to communicate and work in cross-cultural situations is seen as an important determinant of success in business, government, education, and the social services. Being successful depends less on what you know of a particular culture than it does on what you know about managing new cultural situations. This book provides a comprehensive and practical guide to communicating, learning, and adapting within any new cultural environment. The skills learned from this book are essential to success and can be put to use in any new culture, anywhere in the world.

Public Administration in the Global Village offers a global and comparative approach to the study of public administration. It examines the ongoing international changes in the field of public administration; it defines the emerging new world order and the promises and challenges that it holds for public administration; and it stipulates the effects and side effects of these changes on developing countries. The volume seeks to promote a global and comparative perspective on public administration to counter the continuing parochialism and ethnocentrism in the field.

This collection of articles examines how people around the world live through personal communities: their networks of friends, neighbours, relatives and work colleagues.

This thought-provoking book points out that the most significant change in international relations in the 20th century was not the defeat of communism, nor the end of the Cold War, but the huge advances in communications technologies. Hisham Nazer, a leading Saudi Arabian intellectual and petroleum industry leader, argues that the West has used its control over these capabilities to superimpose its cultural and political values on the rest of the world. CNN, films and television, and the Internet have become the means of promoting Western products--including soft drinks, detergents, and even the ideals of democracy and human rights--in relatively powerless non-Western nations. This process of creating a global culture through the propagation of Western political and philosophical constructs as "world brands" poses grave dangers for the entire international community. As countries become aware of their exploitation, the possibilities for frustration and violence become increasingly real.

The word "village" has the evocative power of ancient shared social values based on solidarity, equality, and common expectations for the betterment of life. The book's title is borrowed from McLuhan's apt metaphor, but questions its underlying assumptions. The contributors recast some of the basic elements of the complex phenomenon of the so-called "globalization." Trade laws, industrial relations, economic and political systems are analyzed in a critical perspective. Moreover, environment and sustainable development, languages' rights, education, mobility and migrations are discussed in view of contemporary changes that societies are undergoing throughout the world. The vulnerability of societies caught up in new networks of interdependence due to reduced distances also are put to the fore, in the context of the new accelerated circulation of information, ideas, goods, and human beings. Provacative reading for scholars interested in a multinational, Euro-Atlanticist perspective on globalization.

A pervasive force that evades easy analysis, globalization has come to represent the export and import of culture, the speed and intensity of which has increased to unprecedented levels in recent years. The Cultures of Globalization presents an international panel of intellectuals who consider the process of globalization as it concerns the transformation of the economic into the cultural and vice versa; the rise of consumer culture around the world; the production and cancellation of forms of subjectivity; and the challenges it presents to national identity, local culture, and traditional forms of everyday life.

Discussing overlapping themes of transnational consequence, the contributors to this volume describe how the global character of technology, communication networks, consumer culture, intellectual discourse, the arts, and mass entertainment have all been affected by recent worldwide trends. Appropriate to such diversity of material, the authors approach their topics from a variety of theoretical perspectives, including those of linguistics, sociology, economics, anthropology, and the law. Essays examine such topics as free trade, capitalism, the North and South, Eurocentrism, language migration, art and cinema, social fragmentation, sovereignty and nationhood, higher education, environmental justice, wealth and poverty, transnational corporations, and global culture.

Bridging the spheres of economic, political, and cultural inquiry, The Cultures of Globalization brings crucial insight into many of the most significant changes occurring in today's world. This volume will inform readers interested in current and future global challenges and those intellectuals involved incultural, postcolonial, and neocolonial studies in various regions of the world from Latin America to Africa, Asia/Pacific, and the Middle East.

How will members of human society interact with each other in the new millennium and the new "e-sphere" that defines 21st century life? That is the question that writer, teacher, scientist, and futurist Joseph Pelton takes on in this new book. We have moved beyond the "global village" envisioned by Marshall McLuhan. We are now living in the "e-sphere" where rapid-fire, non-stop broad band global communication is the norm. The result is that we no longer receive information passively; to survive we must create and share it. Constant interaction and "future compression" defines the new non-linear paradigm of the world as outlined in Pelton's 21st Century. All this he explores in clear, engaging prose, well buttressed by research and his lifetime of thought. A truly important, necessary study for people at all levels of today's organizations, and for those expecting to live in the age of the "World-wide Mind."