Graduate Degrees in the Emergent Political Economy of Contemporary Globalization

Abstract

The varied processes that we collectively term contemporary globalization are in one way or another very much organized around and through that component we refer to as “economic globalization.” Beginning in the late 1960s observers began to note significant shifts in the ways that globalization was transforming the distribution of capital, the location and pursuit of manufacture, and the distribution of labor. Early in the 1990s Robert Reich, who would go on to become the Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, developed an analysis of work and labor that he held to be consistent with both the emerging information economy and contemporary globalization. In a new typology he drew distinctions between white-collar and blue-collar work, the classic categories of the manufacturing era, to add that of pink-collar work—the global use of data entry workers, largely women, to input the vast data arrays that had become the commonplace of global business, especially that fraction of it wherein firms in one part of the world exported their data to another part of the world to be entered and returned to the sending entity, thereby making use of the (usually) significant differential labor costs between first world and developing world labor forces—an extension of the cost equation that had propelled manufacturing from the “first” world to the developing world in earlier decades. Acknowledging the rapidly changing nature of much of what constitutes “work” in a knowledge economy, he termed these roles “symbolic analysts” to refer to all work beyond simple data entry and manipulation that involves the complex creation, analysis, transmission, and distribution of symbols—that is to say: information and knowledge, and especially information effected at a distance. In this view much of what “the professions,” wherever they are located, do is the work of symbolic analysts. Also in this view much of what we have witnessed as innovation featuring the creation and transmission of information at a distance in the emergent knowledge society is equally the work of symbolic analysts … including most specifically HE, but also including—decidedly—finance.