Introduction
More than ever, the present global financial and economic crisis draws attention
to the kind of globalization the world has experienced since the 1980s
and its social implications. The effects of globalization on growth and employment
creation are disputed, with pessimists pointing to the increasing
poverty in many parts of the world or to the loss of manufacturing jobs in
industrialized countries; and optimists emphasizing the expansion of world
production, wealth, income and employment that can be shared, reducing the
challenge of globalization to a distributive problem (see Løken et al., 2008 for
a summary of arguments and evidence). It is less disputed, however, that today’s
globalization, and in particular the promotion of the freedom of capital
and the institutionalization of a global “free” market, has a number of negative
social consequences. Th ese include growing inequalities and insecurities,
the loss of democratic control over the economy, and the growing power of
capital at the expense of labour