Latin American social movements in the twenty-first century: resistance, power, and democracy

Readers who are concerned about globalization need to study the experience of the privatization of public enterprise in Europe and North America very carefully.What forces cause the nationalization and privatization of firms?Does privatization lead to greater foreign control?Do foreign owned or privatized firms behave differently than locally owned or public ones?Are any of these configurations better or worse for public welfare?If there are differentials in privatization, what explains these, and are these differentials consequential?These are all important questions in the study of the world system.Answering such a system requires a clear description of the spread of nationalization or privatization -a map of the causes or effects of such differences -and some general explanations about why some firms privatize and others do not.With these elements one could construct a theory of privatization that would be a critical component of world systems theory.This book is not that theory -and does not intend to be that theory.It is the first step in the construction of that theory.Nearly all books on comparative capitalism, be they about comparative labor relations, comparative democracy or comparative ethnic relations, need to start with a simple laying out of the facts regarding the nations of advanced capitalism.The first books in the field tend to be edited collections of chapters -with one chapter per nation describing the dependent variable -in this case the balance between public and private enterprise.Like other books of this type, there are a lot of facts to get on the table.This book requires no fewer than fourteen chapters to do a basic description of the balance between public and private enterprise in various capitalist nations.Fourteen chapters is obviously just a beginning, since there are no treatments of Japan, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Israel, or some of the wealthier Eastern European nations such as Slovenia.That said, fourteen is a lot for a collection of this kind.The chapters are written by different authors -and it is notoriously hard to get authors in a collection to follow a standardized formula.In comparison with other collections, this is fairly disciplined with the chapters more or less covering similar materials and addressing similar schemes.The reader should not expect a generalized theory of privatization here.The reader does get a final essay by the editors marking about eight or nine different themes from the reading.These are discursive and general (Examples: Privatization is increasing -Experiences of different nations are different -More prestigious firms fare better in their treatment by foreign investors) The summary statements are probably mostly true, but they are hardly tested, and there is no attempt to see if all or even most of the cases fit the generalities.This is fine for what the book is trying to accomplish.It is hard to come up with a general theory that fits all of the amazingly complex twists and turns that can characterize inter-European differences in institutional structure.(Labor relations theorists have been tried and failed many times to explain North European vs South European systems of industrial relations.)All the book is trying to accomplish is establish the basic chronologies so that somebody else can come up with the grand theory.