PH. D., University of California, Santa Barbara. Chair: DICK FLACKS
DAI, 59, no. 10A, (1998): 3982

“This dissertation is the first systematic analysis of emerging social movements against corporations and economic globalization.

These movements take three archetypal modes:
– Contestation/reform movements use existing democratic institutions and direct action to constrain corporate power. (These include the Corporate Welfare and Campaign Finance Reform movements, Peace and Human Rights movements, Explicit Anti-Corporate Movements, Anti-Profit movements, and Cyberpunk.)
– Movements that attempt "globalization from below" work to build new international democratic structures that will be populist, highly participatory, and just. (These include Environmental Justice, New Labor Movements, Socialism, Anti-Free Trade Agreement movements, and Zapatismo.)
– Relocalization/delinking movements cut themselves off from the global economy, rebuild small-scale economic institutions, and celebrate the pleasures of the limitations of locality. (These include Anarchism, Sustainable Development, Small Business Movements, Sovereignty Movements, And Religious Nationalisms.)

The conclusions of the work include the importance of using a colonial analysis to understand the operations of the global economy, not only on third world nations, but on first world and sub-national areas. It finds that a diversity of non-socialist movements are serious about political economic analysis focused on critiques of growth, dependency, colonialism, and consumption.
The study also draws attention to issues of scale and community both for political economy and democratic theory. At the same time, even the tremendous impacts of the destruction of national sovereignty, we may need to reconsider the liberatory possibilities within the delegitimized concept of nation. For social movements theory, the work finds that the movements are not organized as identity movements and do not use postmodern techniques of struggle. Promising new alliances have been forged and surprising new ones are suggested. Each of the movements studied makes important contributions to the project of delegitimizing corporate projects and to reimagining economies".