Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

STUDY OF COMMUNICATIONS AND MEDIA POLICY 9
not only by the French Régulation School, but also from an earlier and
prescient analyst of capitalist transformation, Karl Polanyi. Polanyi wrote
that capitalism, or the market economy, was determined by both the material
forces of production and distribution, as well as by social practices
that legitimated the market system. Thus in addition to the state’s integral
role in (often violently) introducing ‘market organization on society
for non-economic ends’, Polanyi was also concerned with the type of
society and economic subject that the market needs in order to function.
In his famous historical overview of the development of the welfare state,
the ‘double movement’ of capitalism showed that the expansion of market
mentality to all areas of social life was met by state-sanctioned social
protections that inadvertently allowed the market to function by insulating
society from the ‘dislocating effects’ of the self-regulating market
(Polanyi 1957: 76).
Today, we see institutional change in various parts of the world, such
as the EU and other regional and supranational bodies of governance
that serve as the means to control financial uncertainty on behalf of ‘free
markets’. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is highly selective – much
of new FDI associated with globalization in the last decade is concentrated
in strategic sites within Asia, where rising rates of inequality and
financial instability threaten gains from higher wages in fast-growing
sectors (Hanson 2001). TNCs seek entry into developing markets in
search of lower relative wages but also stable markets and specialized
infrastructure. 1 Gordon argues that the construction of ‘highly specialised
and institutionally particular economic sites’ has resulted not in
an increasingly more ‘open’ international economy but in an increasingly
closed economy for productive investment if we consider the relationship
between FDI and larger economic development goals. This analysis
is applicable to modern labour relations, only too visible in the organization
of transnational production-accumulation regimes, characterized by
First World sweatshops for the production of microchips for the ‘information
revolution’ and the environmental racism apparent in the global
city centres of the ‘knowledge economies’. It also points to the high rates
of exploitation across the First and Third world economies that becomes
painfully visible through renewed attack against unions and welfare and
civil rights. 2 There is not much new about the low wages across the newly
industrialized countries: however, what is now distinctive is the fact that
TNCs ‘negotiate with each other and host countries for joint production
agreements, licensing and joint R&D contracts. They search among potential
investment sites for institutional harbours promising the greatest
protection against an increasingly turbulent world ’ (Gordon 1994: 295, our
emphasis).