Mainland Chinese Immigrant-owned SMEs in Malaysia: Case Studies

This article explores the contributions of—and constraints faced by—small and medium enterprises (SMEs) owned by mainland Chinese immigrant entrepreneurs in Malaysia using qualitative research and primary data gathered from five cases. It was found that Chinese immigrant SMEs make significant contributions to the host economy in terms of employment, diverse products and services, exports, innovation, micro foreign direct investment (FDI) and global linkages. Of these, employment creation and exports appear to be their most important contributions. They face various constraints, some of which are largely the same as those faced by local entrepreneurs. However, they additionally face some specific constraints which local entrepreneurs do not, such as language barrier, lack of financial support in the growth stage, lack of government assistance, and onerous bureaucratic problems, such as tax and visa requirements. The findings suggest that the government should create a special department to formulate tailor-made policies and incentives to support immigrant-owned SMEs, so that their contribution to the future economic development of Malaysia can be further strengthened and monitored.

Parallels and ruptures in the neoliberal intensive parenting regime

This Open Space commentary offers a response to the special issue article by Ana Vergara del Solar, shedding light on global linkages and discontinuities in childhood and parenting in two national contexts that sit at the heart of the neoliberal project, Chile and the UK. In particular, it explores how social investment rationales have worked to instrumentalise parent‐child relationships, enforcing a stifling intensification of parenting.

Globalization in LIS Education

Globalization can be seen to impact Library and Information Science (LIS) education as global processes and practices influence policies and structures, pedagogy, faculty, research, and collaboration. Globalization and internationalization are employed interchangeably in much professional literature, but the latter is a more prominent concept in LIS education. Internationalization in LIS has been discussed in Europe and the US in light of its impact on learning, academic mobility, research collaboration, and international partnerships. This chapter focuses on iSchools being in the frontier of internationalization in addressing the need in higher education to reach across national borders, specifically in South Korea and the Philippines. The discussion focuses on the development shown by two countries in integrating international and global dimensions into the curriculum, faculty composition, research, student support, and global linkages/partnership.

The Emergence of Catholic Charismatic Renewal ‘in a Country’: Australia and Transnational Catholic Charismatic Renewal

Global Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR) has been the subject of few scholarly historical studies. Outside the United States, Australia was one of the main early contexts for its emergence and expansion. This article assesses the historical origins and early development of CCR in Australia from a transnational perspective, exploring the relationships and flows between this country and the American upper Midwest ‘cockpit’ of early CCR – the university cities of South Bend, Indiana, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. These global linkages may be understood as part of a broader ‘drift’ towards US Christianity in Australia after 1945. Such connections were formative for much of Australian CCR in terms of the development of leadership structures and patterns of practice – in particular, the construction of charismatic communities, such as the Emmanuel Covenant Community, Brisbane, Queensland. The dynamics of these transnational relationships, however, also shaped the emergence of a national movement with a distinctively Australian identity and global sensibility. Increasingly during the 1970s Australians themselves became leading actors in CCR worldwide.

Defiance from Down River: Deflection and Dispute in the Urban-Industrial Metabolism of Pollution in Guadalajara

Research in urban political ecology has been important in recent decades in understanding the complex socionatural processes entailed in urbanization, exploring the local and global linkages of the production and consumption processes of urban metabolism. While these studies have explored diverse networks and artefacts in this metabolism, little attention has been paid to the flows of the pollution of water and air, particularly of the industrial emissions that are also key to the socionatures of urbanization in industrialized regions of the Global South. In this paper, we explore two interconnected nodes in the metabolism of the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area in Western Mexico. These are key sites for the flows of resources and emissions, with different levels of social discontent and conflict related particularly to the health impacts of water pollution. Here, government authorities tend to deflect attention from industrial- and city-level sources of pollution, focusing instead on proximate sources and household emissions. Organized social resistance, on the other hand, calls attention to powerful industrial actors and speculative urban development while taking action to imagine new socio-ecological configurations in the region. We focus on the role of the state in maintaining socio-ecological inequities, and the lessons that can be learned about urban metabolism by expanding the frame to include industrial processes in the shaping of urban socionatures.

Global value chains and policy practice: The making of linkages in the Ivorian cashew industry

The global value chain framework has gained increasing prominence as a policy tool for resource-based industrialization. Focusing on synergies between the commodity-producing and related manufacturing and service sectors, value chain interventions assume that buyer-supplier linkages facilitate the upgrading of local industries. This study investigates these synergistic assumptions in the context of the Ivorian cashew industry. The Ivorian case exemplifies how the value chain concept, with its associated focus on local-global linkages, has placed collaboration with foreign lead firms at the heart of the industrial policy agenda. While these collective arrangements are crucial for negotiating inter-firm relationships along global value chains, this study finds little evidence that they have initiated upgrading for local industries. Instead, the emergence of foreign buyers as strategic partners for policy-makers has created opportunities for these lead actors to reinforce their dominant position, stemming from access to finance and technology.