SASKIA SASSEN

Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy

Soaring income inequality and unemployment, expanding populations of the displaced and imprisoned, accelerating destruction of land and water bodies: today's socioeconomic and environmental dislocations cannot be fully understood in the usual terms of poverty and injustice, according to Saskia Sassen. They are more accurately understood as a type of expulsion - from professional livelihood, from living space, even from the very biosphere that makes life possible.This hard-headed critique updates our understanding of economics for the twenty-first century, exposing a system with devastating consequences even for those who think they are not vulnerable. From finance to mining, the complex types of knowledge and technology we have come to admire are used too often in ways that produce elementary brutalities. These have evolved into predatory formations - assemblages of knowledge, interests, and outcomes that go beyond a firm's or an individual's or a government's project.

Sassen draws surprising connections to illuminate the systemic logic of these expulsions. The sophisticated knowledge that created today's financial "instruments" is paralleled by the engineering expertise that enables exploitation of the environment, and by the legal expertise that allows the world's have-nations to acjanquire vast stretches of territory from the have-nots. Expulsions lays bare the extent to which the sheer complexity of the global economy makes it hard to trace lines of responsibility for the displacements, evictions, and eradications it produces - and equally hard for those who benefit from the system to feel responsible for its depredations.

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Cities in a World Economy

The Fourth Edition of Cities in a World Economy shows how certain characteristics of flows of money, information, and people have led to the emergence of a new social formation: global cities, new types of migrations, financial crises, environmental catastrophes, and the multiplication of communication technologies. These developments give new meaning to such fixtures of urban sociology as the centrality of place and the importance of geography in our social world.

Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages

From the publisher: Where does the nation-state end and globalization begin? In Territory, Authority, Rights, one of the world's leading authorities on globalization shows how the national state made today's global era possible. Saskia Sassen argues that even while globalization is best understood as "denationalization," it continues to be shaped, channeled, and enabled by institutions and networks originally developed with nations in mind, such as the rule of law and respect for private authority. This process of state making produced some of the capabilities enabling the global era. The difference is that these capabilities have become part of new organizing logics: actors other than nation-states deploy them for new purposes. Sassen builds her case by examining how three components of any society in any age--territory, authority, and rights--have changed in themselves and in their interrelationships across three major historical "assemblages": the medieval, the national, and the global.

A Sociology of Globalization (Contemporary Society Series)

From the publisher: This groundbreaking study focuses on the importance of place, scale, and nation to the study of globalization. Sassen identifies two sets of processes that make up globalization: the first and more commonly studied set of processes is global institutions, from the World Trade Organization to the War Crime Tribunals; the second and less frequently explored set of processes occur at the national and local level, including state monetary policy, small-scale activism that has an explicit or implicit global agenda, and local politics. Emphasizing the interplay between global and local phenomena, Sassen insightfully examines new forms and conditions such as global cities, transnational communities, and commodity chains. This unique approach to globalization offers new interpretive and analytic tools to understand the complexity of global interdependence.

The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo

From the publisher: This classic work chronicles how New York, London, and Tokyo became command centers for the global economy and in the process underwent a series of massive and parallel changes. What distinguishes Sassen's theoretical framework is the emphasis on the formation of cross-border dynamics through which these cities and the growing number of other global cities begin to form strategic transnational networks. All the core data in this new edition have been updated, while the preface and epilogue discuss the relevant trends in globalization since the book originally came out in 1991.

Guests and Aliens

From the publisher: Guests and Aliens shows the causes of immigration that historically have resulted in nations' welcoming incomers as guests of disparaging them as aliens. Sassen describes the relative normality of the pursuit of work across borders during the emergence of the European nation-states and explains the economic and political mass migrations of Italians and Eastern European Jews during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She also discusses the dislocations - particularly those after the end of World War II - that have engendered the "refugee" concept. By mapping the long history of global migration, Sassen shows that the American experience is just one phase in an extended history of border crossing.

Globalization and its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money

From the publisher: In this collection of essays, Saskia Sassen deals with such current topics as the "global city," gender and migration, information technology, and the new dynamics of inequality. She demonstrates how vast the chasm between metropolitan business centers and low-income inner cities has become, bringing together cultural and literary studies, feminist theory, political economics, sociology and political science. Incisive and original, she takes on common political, cultural and economics misconceptions of globalization and offers a thoughtful new look at our increasingly global society.

Losing Control?: Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization

From the publisher: Examining the rise of private transnational legal codes and supranational institutions such as the World Trade Organization and universal human rights covenants, Saskia Sassen argues that sovereignty remains an important feature of the international system, but that it is no longer confined to the nation-state. Sassen argues that a profound transformation is taking place, a partial denationalizing of national territory seen in such agreements as NAFTA and the European Union.

The Mobility of Capital and Labor: A Study in International Investment and Labor Flow

From the publisher: In this empirical study, Saskia Sassen offers a new understanding of the processes of international migration. Focusing on immigration into the US from 1960 to 1985 and the part played by American economic activities abroad, as well as foreign investment in the US, she examines the various ways in which the internationalization of production contributes to the formation and direction of labor migration.

Deciphering the Global: Its Scales, Spaces and Subjects

From the publisher: Breaking with prevailing scholarship, Deciphering the Global relocates the terms of the debate surrounding globalization from the heights of global markets, states, and international corporations to the messier, more complex ground of the local, where broad globalizing trends are negotiated in interesting and often unexpected ways. Each of the essays in Saskia Sassen's collection introduces a new type of complexity and ambiguity to the study of the global, confronting questions of space and the fact that both the local and the global are increasingly multi-scalar. In turn, the chapters in this book expand the analytic terrain of the global, demanding new methodologies and interpretive frames for the study of globalization.

Global Networks, Linked Cities

From the publisher: In this new collection of essays, Sassen and a distinguished group of contributors expand on the author's earlier work in a number of important ways, focusing on two key issues. First, they look at how information flows have bound global cities together in networks, creating a global city web whose constituent cities become "global" through the networks they participate in. Second, they investigate emerging global cities in the developing world-Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Beirut, the Dubai-Iran corridor, and Buenos Aires. They show how these globalizing zones are not only replicating many features of the top tier of global cities, but are also generating new socio-economic patterns as well. These new patterns of development promise to lead to significant changes in the structure of the global economy, as more and more cities worldwide are integrated into globalization's circuitry.

Digital Formations: IT and New Architectures in the Global Realm (with Robert Lantham)

From the publisher: Computer-centered networks and technologies are reshaping social relations and constituting new social domains on a global scale, from virtually borderless electronic markets and Internet-based large-scale conversations to worldwide open source software development communities, transnational corporate production systems, and the global knowledge-arenas associated with NGO networks. This book explores how such "digital formations" emerge from the ever-changing intersection of computer-centered technologies and the broad range of social contexts that underlie much of what happens in cyberspace.

While viewing technologies fundamentally in social rather than technical terms, Digital Formations nonetheless emphasizes the importance of recognizing the specific technical capacities of digital technologies. Importantly, it identifies digital formations as a new area of study in the social sciences and in thinking about globalization. The ten chapters, by leading scholars, examine key social, political, and economic developments associated with these new configurations of organization, space, and interaction. They address the operation of digital formations and their implications for the development of longstanding institutions and for their wider contexts and fields, and they consider the political, economic, and other forces shaping those formations and how the formations, in turn, are shaping such forces.