Globalization Lived Locally

The various meta-narratives of globalization project hyper-mobile capital as the leading factor for global economic integration, ignoring the active role that labour plays in the very process of capital expansion. This book debunks myths concerned with globalization, employing a labour geography approach that focuses on how workers actively participate in differentiated geographies of capitalism. The geographic perspective sheds light on local variability and uneven development in labour market, helping chart the complex landscapes in which contemporary workers live, work, and struggle. Through four in-depth empirical case studies set in Kerala, where the labour scenario has dramatically changed over the second half of twentieth century, this book constructs a collage of trends in labour market in an analysis that departs from economic orthodoxy and borrows from sociological, anthropological, and partly ethnographic approaches to highlight the role played by seemingly unlikely actors in the process of globalization.