How has globalization changed social inequality? In this groundbreaking book, Globalization and Inequalities, Sylvia Walby examines the many changing forms of social inequality and their intersectionalities at both country and global levels. She shows how the contest between different modernities and conceptions of progress shape the present and future.

The book re-thinks the nature of economy, polity, civil society and violence. It places globalization and inequalities at the center of an innovative new understanding of modernity and progress and demonstrates the power of these theoretical reformulations in practice, drawing on global data and in-depth analysis of the U.S. and EU.

Walby analyzes the tensions between the different forces that are shaping global futures. She examines the regulation and deregulation of employment and welfare; domestic and public gender regimes; secular and religious polities; path dependent trajectories and global political waves; and global inequalities and human rights.

Globalization and Inequalities is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students and academics of sociology, social theory, gender studies and politics and international relations, geography, economics and law.

Economies

Economies

Introduction

This chapter reconceptualizes the economy so as to more adequately address complex inequalities and global processes; reconsiders what is meant by economic inequality in this new context; and differentiates between alternative forms of the economy in a way that takes into account gender and other complex inequalities. This chapter also establishes the revised economic concepts needed for the comparative analysis in chapters 8, 9 and 10.

The conventional understanding of the economy as limited to marketized and monetized activities is challenged by the significance of domestic labour and state welfare. Economic inequalities look different when complex inequalities such as gender are included. Inequalities are complex: entwined with positively valued differences as well as inequalities.

Taking gender relations in the economy seriously means recognizing that not all ...

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