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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Making Aluminum In The Rainforest: The Social Impact Of Globalization In The Brazilian Amazon, Paul Ciccantell
Making Aluminum In The Rainforest: The Social Impact Of Globalization In The Brazilian Amazon, Paul Ciccantell
Paul Ciccantell
A great deal of recent attention in the social science literature has focused on the process of globalization, the increasing economic and social integration of all regions of the world. The development of the capitalist world economy over the last five hundred years has been tied to and dependent upon the incorporation of socially and geographically remote regions and ecosystems into the world economy.1 A major driving force behind this process of incorporation has been increasing demand for raw materials to fuel industrialization and feed growing populations in the core nations.2 This process of raw materials-based incorporation is shaped by …
Economic Ascent And The Global Environment: World-Systems Theory And The New Historical Materialism, Paul Ciccantell, Stephen Bunker
Economic Ascent And The Global Environment: World-Systems Theory And The New Historical Materialism, Paul Ciccantell, Stephen Bunker
Paul Ciccantell
The manipulation and reorganization of the relationship between nature and society is the most complex task confronting any ascendant economy. Gaining secure, inexpensive access to the huge volume of raw materials building blocks of capitalist industrial production requires economic, political, technical, and organizational innovations that restructure both existing social relationships (e.g. core-periphery relations) and the characteristics of the nature-society nexus (e.g. what raw materials are extracted where and by whom). The strategies of states and firms in ascendant economies to accomplish this task create what we term "generative sectors": leading economic sectors that are simultaneously key centers of capital accumulation, …
It's All About Power: The Political Economy And Ecology Of Redefining The Brazilian Amazon, Paul Ciccantell
It's All About Power: The Political Economy And Ecology Of Redefining The Brazilian Amazon, Paul Ciccantell
Paul Ciccantell
What happens to rural communities in remote raw materials-rich regions when their definitions of the region's natural resources are confronted with competing and incompatible definitions presented and enforced by external actors? The social constructionist approach in environmental sociology provides an essential counterbalance to environmental determinism, but this article argues that in many contexts social construction is actually a process of the imposition of external actors' material interests over the objections of local groups. New historical materialism, via an interdisciplinary and multimethod research strategy, analyzes the changing definitions and uses of the Brazilian Amazon as a revelatory case study of the …