Marcus Taylor (ed.): Global Economy Contested: Power and Conflict across the International Division of Labour.(Book review)

Marcus Taylor (ed.) Global Economy Contested: Power and Conflict across the International Division of Labour, Routledge: London, 2008; 251 pp: 978-0415775496 22.99 [pounds sterling](pbk)

This book edited by Marcus Taylor is an important collection of powerfully authored accounts of the effects of globalisation on workers and labour, with an international perspective. Contrary to mainstream approaches that consider issues of control, balance and efficiency as central to the analysis of globalisation, this book attempts to go beyond ideas of the global economy as an uncontested and taken-for-granted reality by looking at issues of power and resistance as articulated within the international division of labour. With this aim in mind, the book is divided into four sections. The first, 'Reworking the international division of labour', goes straight to the point by examining how global productive structures rest upon the creation and reproduction of labour forces that are socially embedded in local power relations and institutional contexts' (p. 3). Following this, Chapter 1, by Marcus Taylor, establishes the theoretical basis of …