globalization documentary essay

“The American Factory”: Plot and Issues Portrayed Essay

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Introduction

The American Factory is a Netflix original film talking about the journey of an Asian company trying to establish itself in Moraine, Ohio, as an auto-glass manufacturing factory on a previously owned General Motors (G.M.) assembly plant. A stunning yet captivating documentary project by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert focuses its lenses on telling a story to the world about Fuyao, who created a lot of jobs and revitalized an industry, and his esteemed employees (many of whom were formerly employed at the General Motors plant.).

The film showcases a phenomenal cultural difference between the Chinese and American communities, growing pains, internal and external conflicts, and the changing attitudes about work in light of ever-increasing globalization. This paper will discuss an in-depth analysis of the fundamental issues portrayed in this fantastic Oscar Award-winning film for Best Documentary Feature in 2020.

Neoliberalism is the fundamental aspect to consider when understanding the success of the American Factory as it communicates the political and economic ideology. The sole objective of Neoliberalism is to disintegrate the holding process of Keynesian nostrums on a capital basis and the state. The structure and landscape of consumption and production have changed in the recent past concerning globalization, free trade, and deregulation. It is precisely the case that the film industry is susceptible to the interchanges; however, how extremely does a movie propound a counter-good judgment at the extent of form?

The movie American Factory tries to clarify further that Neoliberalism is not a slogan, and neither does it submit to a logical location. It deeply asks how the world receives instructions and who, within Neoliberalism and any transition from it, gets to tell it.

In the film American Factory, Bognar and Reichert delve deep into the livelihoods of the American workers in Ohio and the problematic transition experienced by Chinese managers to American work culture and way of life. Furthermore, the documentary touches on key fundamental socio-economic issues such as unionization and work safety measures while still showcasing the difference in cultural setups between the two communities and the culture clash resulting from the acquisition.

A discussion has been fronted among Chinese and U.S. communities on cultural differences concerning work. For instance, Chinese workers have proven to be relatively skilled over their counterparts on the dimensions of productivity that matter, effectiveness, and speed. They perform better and work for longer periods. On the contrary, many American workers do not possess the work experience necessary for an auto-glass-producing factory.

In the film, we encounter charming scenes of the American and Chinese coworkers having positive bonding experiences, getting to know one another, and even a spectacular recorded location of Fuyao chairperson, Cao Dewang, making rounds on the revitalized factory.

He candidly talks about several essential changes he plans to implement in the company’s architectural structure. However, interpersonal tensions alongside cultural and country-wide strains play out at Fuyao Glass America. This tension comes about due to Fuyao being a multinational corporation operating in America and paying its workers relatively minimal wages than its predecessors.

General Motors’ employees received higher wages before the recession and worked under a union contract. These same employees of the in-glass company come to work with the exact expectations and feel that the Fuyao management should do better. Safety concerns are also on high alert. American employees claim to be uncovered to risky degrees of heat inside the workplace, as portrayed in the film by Reichert and Bognar. The Chinese community is also subjected to a string of coarsely generic, sometimes cringe-worthy talks about American culture.

The president of the glass company advises his Asian employees of their brothers in the United States, stating, “We need to use our wisdom to guide and help them because we’re better than them.”

American Factory further tries to explain in several ways the division between union supporters and union busters and between management and workers. Fuyao management establishes talks on several occasions to educate them about the American work culture and the importance of union organizations to workers. The true feelings among the Chinese community against union organizations are still unknown to many, a factor that may be significantly influenced by the migration and visa status of most of these Chinese workers.

Fuyao’s management style is borrowed from a playbook called the anti-union, which is usually used by American companies. An interesting theory is Fuyao glass factory has been in business since its inception and has been making profits supplying glass to all the General Motors shops worldwide. However, paying the same previous workers much lower wages compared to before. It is a correct argument to suggest that G.M. has employed more foreign workers than Americans in the U.S.

On the issue of culture and productivity, this documentary, American Factory, showcased sufficient evidence of the role that autonomy and trust perform in industrial manufacturing in Chinese markets. They appear to listen carefully and eagerly while getting their superior’s advice and directions more than their American colleagues. Also, a few of them acknowledge the difficulties they experience when working long hours and in very hot-hazardous environments. They have to work many miles away from their families and friends.

Due to its one-sided narration of the factory, highlighting cultural variations while ignoring the advantages to nearby workers, the movie, in a single experience, will no doubt make contributions to an understanding that Chinese funding in U.S. production is something to be avoided and in that respect, the film has a decidedly anti-China thrust.

In conclusion, American Factory highlights how Chinese commercial enterprise within America hurts the workers; however, it doesn’t forestall the problem: its eyes are, in the end, on us all to create the destiny of labor. America has to stay open to exchange and funding from different international locations to rebuild our efficient abilities and enhance our people’s dwindling preference of living. China will now no longer become a “savior” of U.S. production; however, at the same time, Chinese funding needs to no longer be demonized, as we’re tending to do today.

We cannot forget that China maintains its door open to corporations from the U.S. and the relaxation of the arena below the condition that the American president management is enforcing more great price lists on Chinese imports and persevering with the change battle that the quit can’t be seen. Compared to the U.S., China is greater assured of embodying a globalized world.

Hitchcock, P., (2021) “American Factory” and the Difficulties of Documenting Neoliberalism,” Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images 1 (1).

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IvyPanda. (2023, January 1). “The American Factory”: Plot and Issues Portrayed. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-american-factory-plot-and-issues-portrayed/

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IvyPanda . 2023. "“The American Factory”: Plot and Issues Portrayed." January 1, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-american-factory-plot-and-issues-portrayed/.

1. IvyPanda . "“The American Factory”: Plot and Issues Portrayed." January 1, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-american-factory-plot-and-issues-portrayed/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "“The American Factory”: Plot and Issues Portrayed." January 1, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-american-factory-plot-and-issues-portrayed/.

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• CFP for Issue 5.1

Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s documentary American Factory , a project purchased by Netflix and distributed by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature at the 92nd Academy Awards in 2020. It is a stunning and poignant movie about how a Chinese company comes to establish an auto glass factory in Moraine, Ohio, on the site of a former GM production plant. In light of American Factory ’s critical success, this essay focuses on the contemporary capacity of the documentary form to capture the specific logic of socioeconomic and geopolitical contradictions. This is explored through the rubric of neoliberalism, especially as it complicates how a story of a factory might be told. It also links the style of documenting workers to a longer cinematic history.

neoliberalism, labor, China, Obama, representation

How to Cite

Hitchcock, P., (2021) ““American Factory” and the Difficulties of Documenting Neoliberalism”, Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images 1(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/gs.857

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Introduction

Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s documentary American Factory , a project purchased by Netflix and distributed by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature at the 92nd Academy Awards in 2020. 1 It is a stunning and poignant movie about how a Chinese company comes to establish an auto-glass factory in Moraine, Ohio, on the site of a former General Motors (GM) production plant. For some, it may not better Reichert and Bognar’s other work on US labor and gender issues and, as they aver, it is strenuously apolitical. 2 Reichert is no stranger to the Oscars: several of her films ( Union Maids [1976], with Jim Klein and Miles Mogulescu; Seeing Red [1984] with Klein; and The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant [2010], with Bognar—a preface to the Oscar winner based on the same factory) have been nominated for awards before, and Reichert is one of the top US documentarians of the last fifty years (even her early work such as Growing Up Female and Methadone strike one as radically rigorous, resonant, and politically incisive). 3 The economic aura of Hollywood will hover at the edge of this critique but here we will focus on the contemporary capacity of the documentary form to capture the specific logic of socioeconomic and geopolitical contradictions.

Neoliberalism

In order to understand both the achievements of American Factory and the problem of representing the major themes in play, it may be useful to consider the political and economic ideology that forms its backdrop and space of contention. Neoliberalism set out to break the hold of Keynesian nostrums on the function of capital markets and the state. 4 For at least the past forty years, using a heady mix of free trade, globalization, and deregulation, neoliberalism has significantly changed the landscape of production and consumption, and it is hardly extraordinary that culture both expresses and resists this hegemony in political economy. It is certainly the case that cinema as an industry is broadly symptomatic of such changes, but to what extent does film offer a counter logic at the level of form? Several studies have already noted the ways in which documentary and film in general relate to the homilies associated with faith in market forces, 5 but can a critique of neoliberal globalization as a subject also confront the perquisites of marketization in the form of documentary itself? 6 Rather than place the burden of this aesthetic struggle on a single film, I would like to think of American Factory as being caught up within significant structural antinomies of representation, for which some of its solutions are both prescient and problematic in addressing, for instance, the future of the US workplace in a world of globalization. Neoliberalism can be told as story by documentary but not in a way that necessarily changes the manner in which that story is told.

One way to negotiate the intervention of American Factory is to consider its forthright attempt to make tangible the material conditions of globalization concretized in the opening of a factory by Fuyao Glass Industry Group Co., Ltd., (a major Chinese corporation and globally the seventh largest producer of auto glass). 7 The very title, American Factory , announces the paradoxical dilemma of such a project. Does American reclaim a historical identity for industrial production and does that sound not unlike “Make America Great Again”—an ideology and policy vigorously opposed by Reichert and Bognar (although a phrase enunciated by Jeff Liu, the Chinese manager of the factory in the current film)? Interestingly, in The Last Truck , one of the GM workers about to be fired says, “Let’s take care of our own people here. Let’s make it here, buy it here. Take care of our own.” Is this not the sentiment behind a slogan such as “America First”? “Popeye,” the nickname of a vital interlocutor in The Last Truck (he also provided some of the factory interior film when GM refused access to the documentarians), notes that Walmart does not sell anything that is made in the United States (actually, Walmart sells a lot of groceries that are made in the United States, although 80 percent of its total goods suppliers are Chinese 8 ). Popeye continues, “We don’t have a manufacturing base anymore—it’s going to be foreign-owned.” This way of viewing the world serves as a reminder that, in the 2016 presidential election, Trump won Ohio by 8.13 percent (a 10 percent swing—he also won the state’s union vote by 9 percent). 9 To call the factory owned and run by Fuyao “American” is simultaneously to identify and misunderstand the contradictions of contemporary capitalism. Reichert and Bognar’s documentary demonstrates this problem, which, for narrative, can be indicated in the contradictory logics of neoliberalism itself rather than primarily in the language of image.

To clarify this further: neoliberalism is not a monolith. It is not simply a mantra or a slogan (and cannot be defeated by one). It is not a single directive and, in true postmodern or post-postmodern parataxis, it does not submit to logical location (this is why, within actually existing globalization, the United States is not solely American; China is not only Chinese). As a further example of the peculiar locution of location, Occupy Wall Street saw no point in actually occupying Wall Street, since all of the stock-trading servers are elsewhere and global finance has no street address. You cannot beat an algorithm with a barricade, but the latter is at least photogenic, representable. 10 If neoliberalism has dimension, it is one of relation, specifically and primarily, of complex economic exchange. It emphasizes individual entrepreneurship, private property, and the decisiveness of markets. It never merely abjures the state but desires one that supports its operative logic strategically. In fact, it can appear sovereign and nonsovereign, nationalist and wildly postnationalist, without ever giving up on its central tenets of flexible accumulation and what David Harvey refers to as “accumulation by dispossession.” 11 Shade it a little further toward markets and it becomes quasilibertarian; color it with more policy and it becomes benevolent state capitalism; mix in some arch ethnocentrism and it can sanction forced labor. Because there is no scenario in which neoliberalism could fully deliver redistribution as public good, it cannot embrace postcapitalism of any kind (which of course does not negate the possibility of it as a precondition). If, as some contend, neoliberalism is on the wane, folks at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the majority of central banks are not yet losing sleep over the prospect. 12 If capital is “dead,” as Mackenzie Wark offers in the title of one of his books, or capitalism is a “zombie,” as Chris Harman puts it in the title of one of his, we have reached the afterlife before actual extinction, and we live in a world of speculation as veritable specters (a novel reinterpretation of Marx on dead labor). 13 This may not sublate in advance the possibility of narrating neoliberalism via documentary and/or social realism, as Reichert and Bognar effectively do, or perhaps even displace, it to a degree, through emphasis on human and humanist empathy, which is very much in evidence in American Factory , but it deeply questions how the globe gets told and who, from within neoliberalism and within any transition from it, gets to tell it.

The Factory Today

To the extent that the ideologies of neoliberalism get sutured at the level of information, American Factory attempts to tell a different story, a mode of counter factualism, whose very anachronism might function as an intervention. It is almost as if because the film does not have time to say, or is not in the time to say it, it disturbs its own field of representation. 14 To some extent, this is indicative of the immanence of labor in the production of the documentary in contrast to the form of labor to which it otherwise dedicates representionality; yet this is compounded by a kind of temporal disjunction, as if US factory labor can only exist as a phantasm that floats among the ruins of postindustrialism. 15 Work today is obviously never only factory bound (and never was, of course), but because wage labor saturates the socius, it places greater pressure on a narrative hook, a mode of distinction at once vulnerable to aesthetics of displacement. One of the many achievements of American Factory is that, in the twenty-first century, it dares to show a factory with labor by workers laboring within it (a cinematic anomaly even at the height of industrialization and rarer still in an economy dominated by service industries). Much commentary has attempted to slot the visual aesthetics of American Factory into a veritable Cold War discourse that pits China against the United States, a kind of bad exploitation of the worker versus an eminently humane version (which is at least one reason why one needs to see Bognar and Reichert’s The Last Truck too). Even at the annual World Economic Forum at Davos, there have been calls for a more fair, equal, and sustainable capitalism, and an early booster of neoliberal rapacity, Joseph Stiglitz, can today appear on the progressive talk show Democracy Now! , urge Apple to pay taxes, and believe in a kinder, gentler capitalism. 16 Postcolonial states of the Global South are increasingly overdetermined by this geopolitical tension/whiplash, which, for some, is preferable to rejecting the substance of a false opposition (false only because the winner is still capitalism). 17 Certainly, there are moments in the documentary when the narrative comes close to endorsing a stark China/US division. In a training seminar, when the Chinese expert on US labor relations tells the Chinese workers, “We’re better than them [Americans],” there is a strong possibility that Chinese viewers might agree while US viewers may discover a complementary reflex of jingoistic or xenophobic opprobrium. Certainly, the narrative fights this hopeless binary, but it is not easy because its very form seems to edit out the conditions of its own possibility. Could the absence of such frames or framing be a mode of documentary interpellation, a way of hailing the underlying relation the antinomy of American Factory otherwise represents? Is it useful to think of documentary as symptomatic of what it cannot convey through images? While the pertinence of the nonvisualized is a standard approach to the possibility of the image (in the off screen and off frame, for instance), here it bears crucially on how temporality is perceived, how the “event” of the factory is managed, situated, captured. 18

The History of the Factory

There is, then, the history of this factory. Briefly, Moraine Assembly began as a Frigidaire production facility in 1951—a key moment of US working-class prosperity (after the hardships of the Second World War and previously in the Great Depression) when workers could start to buy the appliances they made. When GM came to this suburb of Dayton in the late seventies, they decided to go big, and the factory became a behemoth larger than the Pentagon, with a capacity to produce over two hundred and fifty thousand cars and trucks a year. Yet, at this very moment, political economy was undergoing key structural changes (in part produced by the upheavals of the early seventies: the oil crisis, the end of the gold standard and Bretton Woods, automated trading, and a growing perception that state-sponsored social-safety nets and unions stood in the way of robust accumulation on a global scale). 19 Not long after the first Chevrolets rolled off the line at Moraine, president Ronald Reagan was already working hard to reduce state and corporate responsibility and ramp up antiunionism. In 1978 China, Deng Xiaoping’s Four Modernizations program kickstarted capital accumulation and joint ventures, soon followed by rapid intensification of the industrial base, the unleashing of a vast reserve of Chinese labor power, and a flood of foreign direct investment and foreign-currency reserves. 20 One of the early victims of the new global order was the US steel industry, leaving the greater Cleveland area and the Mons Valley of Pennsylvania some of the original postindustrial wastelands (pertinently, several complete steelworks were dismantled, shipped by container vessels, and then rebuilt in China). Coincidentally, beginning in 1982, the heartland was visited by the Japanese car industry, and anti–Japanese populism quickly bubbled close to the surface of US culture (seen in films like Gung Ho , Black Rain , etc. 21 ). Yet, the reason Moraine did not close earlier was because labor costs and demand were relatively stable domestically. What changed?

Globalization rapidly reduced labor costs per unit in the car industry. Audi recognized this in China by the late eighties (the Audi 100 was then made in Changchun), but they did not move more aggressively because of legal and economic restrictions on private car ownership in China. By the time GM got their investment strategy together and built a factory in China, companies like Volkswagen (VW) were already well entrenched. At last measurement, GM now has ten joint ventures in China, two wholly owned factories, and fifty-eight thousand workers, each of whom costs less than a quarter of their US counterparts in the United Auto Workers (UAW). In 2018, GM produced over 3.5 million vehicles in China. 22 On the outskirts of Shanghai, the Cadillac Jinqiao factory alone has a capacity to produce one hundred and sixty thousand cars a year. As part of its strategy in China, GM first marketed a US cast off, the Buick Regal, with the logic being that Chinese executives would buy or requisition large sedans of this kind. When the Moraine plant closed in 2008, the last car off the line was an SUV, the GMC Envoy. It is featured both in The Last Truck , of course, and in American Factory , and it now sits in the Carillon Historical Park in Dayton next to a piece of Fuyao auto glass signed by its CEO (the signing event is included in American Factory ). The Envoy was cobranded as the Chevy Trailblazer (which was also made in Moraine). This is significant because the latter became part of GM’s model lineup in China (made in Shanghai). In 2009, the year following the closure of the plant in Ohio that Fuyao would then buy in 2014, GM built 727,620 cars and trucks in China. This capitalist chiasmus is not represented in American Factory at all, but it could be argued that it is its material condition. In its story of globalization, American Factory primarily resorts to “slice of life” aesthetics, which foregrounds the human drama of Moraine but radically truncates an understanding of the worker at a world scale (including the meaning of American in its title). The largest and most luxurious version of the Envoy was called the Denali (an anagram of denial). 23 It is not that the documentary consciously refuses the circumstances of its story, but it is as if the field of vision is also structured by an optical unconscious mediated by necessary economic elisions. 24 Even the most fervent documentary realism cannot assimilate or represent these absences without jeopardizing its capacity to narrate—especially, as in this example, when the film participates directly in the process it might otherwise critique. The logic of the factory in contemporary capitalism is a dynamic relation that does not easily distill in the subject of the factory itself, and film is compelled to measure the difficulty of that disjunction (see figure 9.2).

The closure of the Moraine factory occurred because GM (United States) basically presented itself as broke. In the same year it produced those vehicles in China, it declared bankruptcy in the United States, with $82.29 billion in assets and $172.81 billion in debt (the relationship between the debt and the investment in its GM Chinese subsidiaries makes for an interesting narrative by itself, not least because it would lead to GM importing its joint-venture Chinese production to the United States following the bailout). If the prelude to GM’s foray into China was a global reorganization of capital and labor, it was the financial crisis that almost killed the US-based auto industry as a whole. Again, this is absent as the ground for American Factory , as is the controversial story of the bailout of GM at that time led, coincidentally, by President Obama. 25 Because of the conditions attached to the bailout, the autoworkers featured in The Last Truck were largely sacrificed as a cost of neoliberal disruption and labor reorganization. The debate about the financial bailout and the terms of globalization continues (Elizabeth Warren, for instance, who chaired the congressional oversight panel of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, wondered how GM’s financial-services division came to be caught out speculating in the housing market in Spain? 26 ). The point is, the story of this factory is indeed a template for understanding the contradictory logic of neoliberalism (and its afterlife). Even with the Obamas’ direct support, the filmmakers do not paper over the excesses of free-market/state-capitalist doublespeak, but the circumstances of The Last Truck present them with nigh impossible narrative demands so that the story of American Factory (which begins with some shots taken directly from its predecessor) tends to record cultural differences around labor practice—some of which, as Reichert and Bognar clearly indicate, are filtered through crude stereotypes. For instance, Americans, we learn from the Chinese cultural consultants in the film, are very obvious: “They don’t hide anything”; “They dislike abstraction and theory in their daily lives”; at work, “they’re pretty slow and have fat fingers” and are even alleged to be scared of heat. The Chinese, according to the American workers at the factory, “refer to us as foreigners, they don’t help us at all, they don’t respect you, and don’t even know what the rules [in the United States] are.” Such prejudice is leavened by comic interludes and genuine human warmth. There is a scene of recently arrived Chinese workers fishing and exchanging pleasantries with local Ohioans. Later, the documentary records a US delegation performing the Village People’s “YMCA” at a Fuyao party in China, and one rep, albeit tipsy, gets teary repeating “we are one” to his Chinese counterparts. And so it goes on, dialogically, perhaps, feeding a narrative about labor relations as basically a question of cultural attitude, not a condition deeply embroiled in market forces. While one position obviously does not exclude the other, the question for the documentary is how they can be effectively mediated.

The Workers

But then, even as cultural difference has generated the most discussion about the documentary among Chinese and US communities (and sometimes between them), 27 the documentary is careful to humanize both sides. Wong He, the furnace expert (and shown to be an inveterate Twinkie eater), is separated from his family for up to two years, which is not just a proclivity of Chinese capitalism but is seen as a necessary condition of labor mobility in the present. The consanguine idea of remittance is old, for instance, but it has become a central mechanism of worker migration (temporary or relatively permanent) in developing countries and a symbol of cheap labor in the developed world (particularly, of course, among agricultural, construction, and domestic workers). While three quarters of labor migration globally is internal—a process of proletarianization from the countryside to the city (led in the last forty years by China, one that stands as the largest migration in history)—almost one hundred and eighty million workers now find themselves in foreign countries. 28 Importantly, both The Last Truck and American Factory signal new regimes of labor management through the precarity this entails. One worker, Rob Haerr, befriends the Chinese at the factory and has them come over for Thanksgiving to shoot his guns but later he is dismissed from Fuyao (apparently for being too slow). Even the head of the company Cao Dewang, referred to as “Chairman Cao” (a title which cannot help invoking Mao Zedong), has reason to worry, not just because of the challenge of US unionism (ostensibly in contrast to the shadow of unionism seen at Fuyao’s headquarters in Fuqing, Fujian 29 ), but because, as a billionaire, Cao is unsure of the benefits of all of the factories he has built (which may or may not spur his extensive philanthropy). Reichert and Bognar suggest, correctly, that capitalism is always a people’s story but, as I have attempted to indicate, the factory itself is a key interlocutor of narrative possibility that yet resists its story in images. The question of unionism is important and long-standing (one activist invokes Sally Field’s character of Norma Rae in this regard), but surely the factory itself is the last gasp of industrialism and that, even though Cao believes it is an important vehicle for enhancing the image of China transnationally, American Factory remains a tombstone to human productive capacity under the terms of labor globalization. 30 Despite this caveat, it is clear that the unionization of any worker across the globe remains an existential threat to capital accumulation. When, on the official opening day of the factory, the Ohio senator Sherrod Brown mentions that he hopes the company acknowledges the workers’ desire for a union, the American managers of Fuyao are apoplectic; one, Dave Burrows, says Brown’s people will never be allowed in the factory again while Cao says bluntly, “If a union comes in, I’m shutting down.” This is read as Fuyao’s imperative but, given the history of the factory and the circumstances of GM’s departure, it is very much part of the political economy of neoliberalism.

Labor Unions and Globalization

If the conversation between the filmmakers and the Obamas is to be believed (recorded as a supplementary document to American Factory itself), much of the friction portrayed in the main film will become superfluous through the rise of automation. 31 Therefore, if the tone and taxonomy of the documentary is demonstrably and appreciably for labor, the resolution of its story comes close to displacement, as if the mise-en-scène of worker struggle is rendered moot in a flourish. Since Marx wrote of factories as automatons in the nineteenth century, automation is hardly a new discourse (interestingly, it was not seen by Marx as simply regressive regarding the end of capitalism 32 ), but the sight of robotic arms juxtaposed directly with the firing of American workers in the film remains a warning, if not an obvious imaginary mediatory condition for all that has come before. To be fair, automation is indeed a framing device of the documentary (the opening shots are also machine filled), and yet it is clearly not its thesis. You do not have to feature a Chinese auto-glass corporation in Ohio to illustrate the prospect of automation. GM did not flee Ohio because it could not automate its production. The chronotope of the documentary is positioned, if not overdetermined by, transformations in the globalization of capital (accepting, with Trinh Minha, that such determinants do not an unalloyed objectivity make 33 ). Yet, GM goes to China because of its market and because surplus is easy when labor is cheap and relatively unprotected. Fuyao comes to the United States because Americans still buy a lot of cars, and who wants to pay import tariffs and shipping costs? At the heart of American Factory is a constitutive nonsaid—by which, I mean that its formal surfaces seem constrained not to narrate the conflicted globality that is its very possibility. 34 But surely all Reichert and Bognar have to do is invite a few talking heads onscreen to relate the above and the narrative will be said, verifiable, real? American Factory is not completed by making it more sociological, or more attune to political economy, or more consistent with the skillful socialist syntax of Union Maids , a standout film in Reichert’s justly revered career. 35 Even if we say the factory “speaks” in the film, albeit of its own dereliction and aphanisis (its fading or disappearing subjectivity 36 ), are its images adequate to the contradictions of its logic? Is its success its affective approach, a sensitivity to the dilemmas posed that lets even viewers less defined by precarity in the workplace the possibility of appreciation (the problem of audience here would provide another crucial line of inquiry 37 )? While I do not think the film is primed by an appeal to a bourgeois liberal I , it nevertheless tends to obfuscate any outright rejection of that warm embrace. Does the factory, however, become a touchstone about the US economy rather than a tombstone because it is now owned by a Chinese corporation? This question is also not devoid of structural antinomy in how contemporary neoliberalism comes to haunt storytelling in the present.

The polemical heart of American Factory is a lot more than whether China and the United States play political games around tariffs within globalization, but it is a lot less than a critique of the neoliberalism, waning or otherwise, that links global workers through value extraction and exploitation. In part, this tussle between insight and provocation is produced by what has elsewhere been termed the cognitive capture of neoliberalism or, perhaps more formally, dissonance or disruption as itself the salve for global cognition; the logic of neoliberalism’s slippery register disables counter critique by immediately absorbing its discourse as negotiable and/or as monetized. 38 In terms of narrative, several alternative strategies have been proposed, including those that favor some kind of oppositional synthesis and cohesion in the face of discursive fragmentation and blatant incoherence. 39 On the face of it, this sounds user friendly and pedagogically promising, and there are sequences in American Factory that could be deployed in this way, even as such an approach might risk didacticism and stridency. We have mentioned the human story, and Reichert and Bognar are particularly adept at linking cultural difference around the Fuyao project by foregrounding moments of desire for basic understanding and social exchange. This, indeed, is the most translatable aspect of the film’s meaning, often enhanced by the Coplandesque vernacular of Chad Cannon’s score, which, like Lindsay Utz’s editing (a first for Reichert and Bognar), carefully integrates the workers’ experience of each other. Wong’s story, for instance, that of the aforementioned dedicated glass-furnace expert who struggles with separation from his family, provides a sympathetic image of the human costs of globalization. Even so, Wong is willing to defer happiness in order for the Fuyao experiment in the United States to work: “I think the most important thing is mutual understanding.” This is something that Reichert and Bognar’s juxtaposition of personal narrative—mixed with fly-on-the wall misrepresentations of each other by the Chinese and Americans—aims to complicate: how can one now read a corporate multinational? Another worker, Jill Lamantia, a forklift operator, has suffered through the lean times of Ohio’s economy, and we first see her living in her sister’s basement. Regular pay at Fuyao allows her to rent her own apartment and, for a while at least, her life appears to resume some form of normality. Yet the question of labor organization as a way to mitigate the will to precarity in neoliberalism hangs over Fuyao and the film as a whole (see figure 9.5).

The crisis over the unionization of Fuyao’s Ohio factory is the closest the documentary comes to themes that Reichert’s career in particular has emphasized: labor rights, women’s rights, worker dignity, and the capacities of class consciousness. The film offers a significant ideological divide among the workers themselves, some of whom believe that, after years of just getting by (particularly after GM’s controversial departure), management’s job demands are a hardship worth risking. Other workers at the factory side with the efforts of the UAW to bargain on behalf of Fuyao’s labor force, and some join the demonstrations outside the factory gates in support of the unionization effort (those who are deemed “agitators,” including Lamantia, are denied further access to the work site and are fired). To head off the possibility of a union, Fuyao hires (for a reported $1 million fee) a consulting firm, Labor Relations Institute, who are tasked with conducting seminars (with mandatory worker attendance) to go over what might be lost and gained in this regard. The filmmakers include audio secretly recorded by a worker at one of these meetings, where it is clear what kind of “labor relations” the company desires: one based on individual decision (basic stakeholder parlance) rather than the power of collective bargaining. The “no” vote is overwhelming, and the idea of the factory is then much closer to Cao’s vision: a project to improve China/US relations, but not by sacrificing the very work regimens that have made that relationship relevant in the past forty years. While Reichert and Bognar are hardly cheerleaders for this position, Cao himself does not come off as an archcapitalist roader. Indeed, one of the striking elements of the directors’ approach is to provide backstory to Cao’s position, which he seems more than willing to offer (they film him on his corporate jet, but we also see him praying at a Buddhist temple, with his voiceover appreciating the fact that while he was poor when he was young, the simplicity of peasant life was bound up with the intimacy of nature). For Cao now, the idea is stripped of romanticization: “The point of living is to work.”

Cao’s worldview is not beyond contradiction and however much he might simultaneously pine for the bucolic and the necessity of labor, his monologue is quickly juxtaposed with what we might read as a visual denouement via the rollout of factory robotic arms that almost literally occlude workers on the shop floor. Subtitles solemnly declare: “Up to 375 million people globally will have to find entirely new kinds of jobs by 2030 because of automation. How workers, governments, and businesses tackle these seismic shifts will define the future of work.” As we have noted, technological advance is not simply a function of neoliberal efficiency, even as it clearly permits a narratological pass for opposing unionism and firing workers on behalf of progress. 40 The subtitles at the end of the film document a certain inexorability to this process that Cao’s company both accelerates and heroically inhibits: “Fuyao Glass America made a profit from 2018. Starting wages remain $14 an hour. The company now employs about 2200 American workers and 200 Chinese workers.” There is profit, there is work, and there is a framework for crosscultural China/US understanding. Must the documentary settle for a description of globalization rather than a syntax that might more forcefully challenge its inertia?

Documenting Labor

Daniel Worden’s Neoliberal Nonfictions argues for the salience of a “documentary aesthetic,” one that, for instance, is “a rejoinder and accompaniment to the ways in which finance capitalism and its intensifications of exploitation, dispossession, and state-sanctioned violence have made the world seem vertiginous and precarious.” 41 On the surface, such a view appears at one with the ambivalent position of the factory at the center of this narrative, although we have suggested its material history could be supplemented and engaged. Nevertheless, when Worden notes that “works that employ the documentary aesthetic engage in juxtaposition, offsetting emotional and personal experience with the structures that produce their possibilities,” 42 American Factory signifies within this lineage, even as documentary itself is mediated by multiple and disparate narrative modes. The question remains about the extent to which the proximity to neoliberal subject relations disables or otherwise renders obtuse reflexive narration and creative modes of critique. On what level might we think of American Factory as counter hegemonic?

In Gramscian terms, this is something of a war of position that intimates a new vision and builds toward an alternative and liberatory hegemony. True, one could be more confrontational as in war of maneuver in Gramsci’s parlance, that seizes on crisis to shake power—but taking it to the streets also depends on a high degree of relative autonomy from the braided front of state and civil society, and its effects are assessed on a case-by-case basis. 43 In the documentary, this would be registered primarily as content, in the struggle to unionize the factory space, yet of course this is neither the scale nor the form of the labor/capital relation I have otherwise indicated. Between gradualism and insurrection, there is no formula for telling the story of the world system as such. Thus, the idea is not to embrace such generic inability but is at least to reflect on the limits globality represents and the persistence of abstraction/displacement that neoliberalism, even in decline, pursues. If naming the factory American introduces a primary antinomy of contemporary capitalism (how to reconcile labor identity with global circulation), are the film’s formal components under any obligation to concretize that reality? In the documentary’s denouement, Reichert and Bognar juxtapose eye-level shots of workers leaving Fuyao factories in both China and the United States. It is a powerful montage that intimates several layers of signification. Some of the distinctions the filmmakers’ visualize include differences in dress (the Chinese uniforms evoke the workers’ version of the Mao suit, a sign both of solidarity and the negative link between uniform and uniformity—the Americans by contrast are not uniformly uniformed through that connotation); the figures of the US workers are much more racially diverse, suggesting a specific and irreducible history of racial capitalism that also pinpoints a key dimension of how a factory might indeed be deemed “American”; the regimen of labor is indicated by revealing the Chinese workers in a shift change (workers are filing in and out at the same rate and an assistant keeps the lines separate and moving; and the differences in facial expressions are more subtle but there is perhaps an unsurprising relief in those for whom the workday is ending, perhaps mediated to some degree by the visibility of the camera and the depth of vision deployed). Cinematic referentiality in this sequence is just as provocative and reminds us that films tell stories that are simultaneously stories about film itself. There is a certain invisibility in worker identity and practice (derived in part from the abstraction of labor as concept in political economy) that cinema has insistently sought to overcome, to compensate for, or radically displace. One thinks, for instance, of one of the first films, the Auguste and Louis Lumière brothers’ project of 1895 called Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory . 44 It is not just happenstance that workers are “captured” in this way; as I have argued elsewhere, the problem of representing labor as relation haunts cinema, as if film must assume worker subjectivity is available, eminently visual, and communicable or else reveal its absence as constitutive to modernity as such. 45 From Metropolis (1927) to 24 City (2008), the workers leaving the factory and/or entering it is a primary if changing challenge of visual art. 46 Labor was always and more so now much greater than the factory worker, yet exiting the factory is a punctum of sorts, a reminder of the passage of a particular form of work and those who do it. It is part of the narrative of neoliberalism that “advanced” or “mature” economies are service based and that Fuyao’s factory near Dayton is a last gasp in postindustrialism. Yet one of the many lessons of China’s participation in globalization in the past forty years is that the farm-to-factory transition is integral to what neoliberalism represents. Such proletarianization in the Global South dwarfs all narratives of industrialization in the West and is a key reason that Fuyao has the capital to locate itself in the US auto market, and GM has the capacity to produce in China. The workers are leaving the factory, but for neoliberalism, crucially, they have not quite left it.

It is too soon, perhaps, to judge whether American Factory marks a key juncture in the reorganization of labor and cinema’s relationship to it, or whether it marks time by being vaguely anachronistic or workerist. The Obamas, in the face of the quandary American Factory presents, argue for uplifting stories, a “higher ground,” and a stubborn yet conscious capitalism. There are few places where Reichert and Bognar polemically challenge that prescription in their documentary, not because the Obamas’ distribution facility becomes part of its process, but because the film’s images empathize with and humanize its subjects so closely as to reproduce the substance of their dilemma. The “last truck” is seen in a museum in American Factory . The reason and systemic logic behind it have yet to be consigned to or to be imaged as history (the image of history as collective—and how to image this time, this socialization). Such a history remains a provocative challenge for storytelling and more, as Reichert put it in her acceptance speech at the Oscars: “Working people have it harder and harder these days—and we believe that things will get better when workers of the world unite.”

• The awards ceremony took place on February 9, 2020, at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles. Bognar and Reichert received their Oscar from the actor/producer Mark Ruffalo. Both filmmakers had their heads shaved. Reichert has been struggling against terminal cancer for two years. Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, dir., American Factory (Los Gatos, CA: Netflix, 2019). ⮭
• See Alissa Wilkinson, “Work Is Going Global: American Factory ’s Directors Explain How They Captured Its Challenges,” Vox, August 21, 2019, https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/8/21/20812012/american-factory-interview-netflix-reichert-bognar . ⮭
• In 2019, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) presented a retrospective of Reichert’s contributions to cinematic history: Museum of Modern Art, “Julia Reichert: 50 Years in Film,” MoMa, May 30–June 8, 2019, https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/5068 . Also, see Jim Klein, Miles Mogulescu, Julia Reichert, dir., Union Maids (Newburgh, NY: New Day Films, 1976); Jim Klein and Julia Reichert, dir., Seeing Red (Newburgh, NY: New Day Films, 1984); Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, dir., The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant (New York: HBO, 2010); Jim Klein and Julia Reichert, dir., Growing Up Female (Newburgh, NY: New Day Films, 1971); and Jim Klein and Julia Reichert, dir., Methadone (Newburgh, NY: New Day Films, 1974). ⮭
• There is a veritable publishing industry dedicated to the exegesis of neoliberalism. Some useful texts in this regard include Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015); Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (New York: Zone Books, 2017); Matthew Eagleton-Pierce, Neoliberalism: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2016); and David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). ⮭
• See, for instance, Daniel Worden, Neoliberal Nonfictions: The Documentary Aesthetic from Joan Didion to Jay-Z (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020); Anna Cooper, “Neoliberal Theory and Film Studies,” New Review of Film and Televisions Studies 17, no. 3 (2019): 265–77; Michael J. Blouin, Magical Thinking, Fantastic Film, and the Illusions of Neoliberalism (London: Springer, 2016); Jyostna Kapur and Keith B. Wagner, eds., Neoliberalism and Global Cinema (London: Routledge, 2011); and Shakti Jaising, “Cinema and Neoliberalism: Network Form and the Politics of Connection in Icíar Bollaín’s Even the Rain ,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 56, (Winter 2014–2015). ⮭
• While such questions may not drive the filming decisions of the documentarians, it can affect the editing process (see note 2). In general, Bognar and Reichert aimed to represent a multiplicity of viewpoints from their almost-three years of shooting and twelve hundred hours of film. For Netflix, this certainly helped smooth issues around marketing and exhibition and, at last count, the documentary was available in at least twenty-eight languages—a remarkable achievement that accentuates the importance of globalization as an underlying theme. ⮭
• For basic background on the emergence of Fuyao in the auto-glass industry, see Forbes, “Fuyao Glass Industry Group,” Forbes, accessed December 24, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/companies/fuyao-glass-industry-group/#3b540a5124a2 . ⮭
• There is much contention over the exact proportions of Walmart’s product sourcing. On its website, the company claims that its domestic purchases account for two-thirds of the total, but obviously the dollar amount is not distributed evenly for goods procured. Nevertheless, the company promises to purchase $250 billion of US goods per year by 2023. ⮭
• Despite victory, the margins were hardly uniform across the state. In Montgomery County, for instance, where Dayton is located, Trump won by less than two thousand votes. My point here is that the sentiments expressed by the local workforce are relatively consistent with Trump’s appeals to his base at that time. ⮭
• Obviously, the political tactics of the Occupy Movement were varied and situational and, at times, included taking space itself. For an interesting if informal account of how to “occupy” at the level of economics, see Richard D. Wolff, Occupy the Economy (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2012). ⮭
• Harvey is interested in, among other important factors, the spatial and territorial desires of neoliberal accumulation. See David Harvey, “The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession,” Socialist Register 40 (2004): 63–87. ⮭
• For a critique of the centrality of these institutions, see, for instance, Richard Peet, The Unholy Trinity: The IMF, World Bank and WTO (London: Zed, 2009); Eric Toussaint and Damien Miller, Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank: Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010); and Ngaire Woods, The Globalizers: The IMF, the World Bank, and Their Borrowers (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007). ⮭
• See McKenzie Wark, Capitalism Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (London: Verso, 2019); and Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx (London: Bookmarks, 2009). ⮭
• The problem of time in documentary film is well discussed. I am thinking in particular of temporal noncoincidence in how film “documents” and the extent to which this can be materially specified. For work on the phenomenological implications of such temporality, see Mahlin Wahlberg, Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). For the most part, American Factory follows spatial disjunction/continuity between the United States and China but it is difficult to relate the longue durée of neoliberal globalization as a function of living memory alone. In what ways could one edit not just the footage of the film but the time of neoliberalism itself? ⮭
• Phantom labor usually describes undocumented or unaccounted labor, often deployed to exploit lax rules over migrant workers and terms of employment or else refers to various scams to claim wages for workers who do not otherwise exist. Here I am thinking more of the spectral remains of industrial labor left behind by strategic deindustrialization; for instance, a real person with skills rendered ethereal by changes in the form or location of work. As Reichert indicates at the end of this piece, such workers are specters, not just of what was but of what could be. ⮭
• There are many examples of this kind of thinking, but Stiglitz is particularly noteworthy because of his expertise and the gusto with which he argues the case. See, for instance, Joseph Stiglitz, People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019). ⮭
• Aihwa Ong is not the first to note how neoliberalism collapses inside/outside demarcations, even if several critics, including Harvey as she points out, seem to reinscribe an earlier dichotomy of the West and the rest. See Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). For an alternative reading of both postcolonialism and globalization in this regard, see Sankaran Krishna, Globalization and Postcolonialism: Hegemony and Resistance in the Twenty-First Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). If indeed the Global South is being drawn into a new Cold War between China and the United States, it is over the grounds of capitalist modernity rather than through alternatives to the same. ⮭
• Event here has to be seen in contrast to Alain Badiou’s conception, which philosophically (and perhaps mathematically) more or less ties Event to a rupture in the conditions of Being, and is thus transformative. Here, event exists as potential and perhaps could only figure in Badiou’s idea as a future conditional. The factory is indeed a historical site, as I detail, but the adequacy of its meaning also arrives from the future, which may necessitate alternative visual registers. This theme is connected to that indicated elsewhere as precarity and automation. It is also related to Badiou’s following comment: “In France, where we’re under the illusion that we live without workers now, we’re aware, thanks to the cinema, that workers still exist in China. A great Chinese cinema has grown up around this very question: What is becoming of our factories and our workers? Such testimony about the world is unique to cinema; no documentary-style reporting can ever be a substitute for it.” See, Alain Badiou, Cinema , trans. Susan Spitzer (Cambridge: Polity, 2013). ⮭
• This narrative can be told in several ways. A good example is that of Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century , especially part four in which he considers the changed dynamics of the US economy within financial globalization. See Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1994). ⮭
• The Four Modernizations do not constitute an uncontentious topic in recent Chinese history. For an economic perspective, see Satyananda J. Gabriel, Chinese Capitalism and the Modernist Vision (London: Routledge, 2006), especially chapter 8. ⮭
• Some of the stereotypes seen in a film like Gung Ho feed off discourses with a long history in US culture. I mention these examples from the 1980s because they tend not only to trivialize culture difference (Americans are also stereotyped) but displace the political unconscious at work in the narratives around the newfound power of the Japanese economy. See Ron Howard, dir., Gung Ho (Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 1986); and Ridley Scott, dir., Black Rain (Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 1989). ⮭
• Much of this data can be found on GM websites. See, for instance, General Motors, “About GM China,” General Motors, accessed December 24, 2020, https://www.gmchina.com/company/cn/en/gm/company/about-gm-china.html . Michael J. Dunne’s book, American Wheels, Chinese Roads , paints a somewhat rosy picture of GM’s move to the Chinese market. See Michael J. Dunne, American Wheels, Chinese Roads (Singapore: Wiley, 2011). For a critical assessment of GM’s China strategy, see also Edward Neidermeyer, “The Secret History of GM’s Chinese Bailout,” Quartz, January, 24, 2016, https://qz.com/594984/the-secret-history-of-gms-chinese-bailout/ . ⮭
• Denali (meaning “high” or “tall”) is the Koyukon name for the highest mountain peak in North America. Given the carbon footprint of some GM SUVs, I find the anagram somewhat apposite. ⮭
• For more on what Walter Benjamin means by the “optical unconscious,” see Walter Benjamin, On Photography , ed. and trans. Esther Leslie (London: Reaktion Books, 2015). Benjamin believes that photography is the first technology to reveal this possibility; that is, a visual space at the limits of human intentionality. I invoke it here as a cinematic corollary, particularly regarding how the image figures the logic of the capital/labor relation. ⮭
• Given that GM had received an almost $50 billion bailout from the Obama administration, critics were surprised at this eventuality. See, again, Neidermeyer, “The Secret History of GM’s Chinese Bailout.” ⮭
• Warren’s point was that, given the taxpayers’ ownership of GM at the time (61 percent), some explanation was owed regarding GM’s financial speculation in property markets across the globe. Partisan critiques quickly followed that accused Warren herself of property speculation in the 1990s. Here, the fate of GM and its factories is mediated by financial decisions typical of neoliberal economics. ⮭
• Much of the discussion is overdetermined by the state of China/US relations, which have markedly deteriorated in recent years. The online debate in China is particularly interesting, since the documentary is not officially available for viewing there. That some of the labor issues discussed have such global reach is also testimony to the achievement of Bognar and Reichert in this film. ⮭
• The question of global labor migration is at the margin of American Factory yet has a significant role in how the factory today can be cognized at a world scale. A consistently reliable source for research initiatives in this area is the International Labour Organization (ILO), a UN agency. See International Labour Organization, “Labour Migration,” ILO, accessed December 24, 2020, https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/labour-migration/lang--en/index.htm . Much polemical research is available. See, for instance, Michele Ford, From Migrant to Worker: Global Unions and Temporary Labor Migration in Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019); and Pun Ngai, Migrant Labor in China: Post-Socialist Transformations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016). ⮭
• Again, given the filmmakers’ career-long commitment to labor issues, it is somewhat surprising such differences are not explored further. How a putatively worker state inhibits unions and unionism is a topic too large for the present discussion but it is obviously connected both to GM’s move to China and Fuyao’s deep resistance to the UAW. Given the difficulties in union-organized collective bargaining, Chinese workers have had to resort to other forms of agency. See, for instance, Hao Ren, ed., China on Strike: Narratives of Workers’ Resistance (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016). ⮭
• Joshua Freeman shows in his extensive research that, while the functions and form of the factory have changed demonstrably, it still maintains a remarkable presence in the production and reproduction of everyday life. See Joshua B. Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018). ⮭
• See Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, American Factory: A Conversation with the Obamas (Chicago: Higher Ground Productions, 2019). ⮭
• Marx conceived of the factory itself as a vast automaton that would, in order not just to harness but to control labor power, intensify automation. Yet, since automation presupposes “superfluous hands,” as Marx puts it, “capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production.” The production of abject alienation from labor activity is also a sign of how the worker via automation can be liberated from that form of production itself. As Marx puts it, “This will redound to the benefit of emancipated labor, and is the condition of its emancipation.” Of course, the individual experience of such redundancy will be severe where socialization still pivots on the sale of labor power, but Marx is attempting to identify the antinomies of capital accumulation. To this extent, the robot arms in American Factory are, like the figuration of labor itself, “gravediggers.” See, Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy , trans. and foreword Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973), 690–711. ⮭
• Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Mechanical Eye, Electronic Ear, and the Lure of Authenticity,” in The Documentary Reader , ed. Jonathan Kahana (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 758–62. Trinh puts pressure on the false assumption that the mechanics of documentary cinema permit “authenticity” in representation. In art mediated by difference, difference itself challenges the basis, the “eye,” of the cinematic apparatus. ⮭
• In part, this recalls Benjamin’s point again regarding intentionality but it also accentuates the importance of attending to the silences of storytelling that are not themselves produced by the filmmakers’ expressive will. To the art of cinematic silence, one must consider, too, the silences of the text produced by more than cinema itself, including ideological imperatives. ⮭
• Reichert’s contributions to feminist and labor documentary art are immense and individual films beyond the discussion of American Factory here would require much more space. Among many pertinent assessments one might include the long interview with Reichert in Alexandra Juhasz, ed., Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 121–36; and Bob Kotyck, “The Good Fight: the Films of Julia Reichert,” Cinema Scope 79 (Summer 2019), https://cinema-scope.com/features/the-good-fight-the-films-of-julia-reichert/ . ⮭
• I use this in Jacques Lacan’s sense rather than that deployed by Ernest Jones regarding desire, primarily because it permits a focus on the status of the subject in narrative beyond empirical detail sui generis, the seen, and the sensibility. See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis , trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 207–8. ⮭
• See, for instance, Julian Hanich , The Audience Effect: On the Collective Cinema Experience (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017). ⮭
• See Judith Barish and Richard Healey, “Beyond Neoliberalism: A Narrative Approach,” Narrative Initiative, August 2019, https://narrativeinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Beyond-Neoliberalism-Final-8.21.2019-v-1.2.pdf . ⮭
• This can also be seen in Lazzarato’s post-Foucauldian critique of autonomy. See Maurizio Lazzarato, “Neoliberalism in Action: Inequality, Insecurity and the Reconstitution of the Social,” Theory, Culture, and Society 26, no. 6 (2009): 109–33. ⮭
• There are certainly critiques that think through the implications of automation with employment and class constituency although not beyond dire consequences. See, for instance, Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); and Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work (New York: Putnam, 1996). As I have already indicated, the specter of automation is not simply outside narratives of emancipation. The question is not about whether automation is coming; it is about the optimum form of economic socialization in which that can take place. ⮭
• See Daniel Worden, Neoliberal Nonfictions: The Documentary Aesthetic from Joan Didion to Jay-Z (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020), 7. ⮭
• Worden, Neoliberal Nonfictions , 9. ⮭
• See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks , ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), particularly part 2, section 2. Gramsci’s ideas on cultural hegemony continue to influence theory across a range of disciplines. See, for instance, Lee Artz and Bren O. Murphy, Cultural Hegemony in the United States (London: Sage, 2000). ⮭
• Auguste and Louis Lumière, “La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon” (often translated as “workers leaving the Lumière factory”), first exhibited in Lyon, France, December 28, 1895. ⮭
• See Peter Hitchcock , Labor in Culture: or, Worker of the World(s) (London: Palgrave, 2017), especially chapter 6. ⮭
• See, for instance, Ewa Mazierska, ed., Work in Cinema: Labor and the Human Condition (London: Palgrave, 2013). See also . Harun Farocki, “Workers Leaving the Factory,” translated by Laurent Faasch-Ibrahim, Senses of Cinema , 21 (July 2002). Farocki notes, “The first camera in the history of cinema was pointed at a factory.” The number of films on or about labor is, of course, immense. Those mentioned here that reflect on workers leaving the factory are Fritz Lang, dir., Metropolis (Berlin: UFA GmbH, 1927); and, Jia Zhangke, dir., 24 City ( Er shi si cheng ji ) (North Chelmsford, MA: Xstream Productions, LLC, 2008). The Labor Film Database is extremely useful in this regard but is, itself, like the Lumières’s film, only a provocation. See the Labor Film Database, “Home,” Labor Film Database, accessed December 24, 2020, https://laborfilms.com/ . ⮭

Author Biography

Peter Hitchcock is Professor of English at Baruch College and on the faculties of Women’s Studies and Film Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), as well as Associate Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics. He is the author of nine books, including Labor in Culture , Dialogics of the Oppressed , and, most recently, Biotheory (co-edited with Jeffrey Di Leo).

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3 Great Films for Teaching About Globalization and Modernization

With the advent of modern mass communication and world tourism, dramatic change has come to nations and cultures which had previously seen little change for centuries. Each technological or social innovation has brought unexpected and unintended consequences. One of the challenges of teaching global issues in middle or high school is helping students grasp abstract economic concepts like globalization and modernization. A well-chosen film, watched actively and with supporting curriculum, can make the difference in helping students understand how these abstract processes work out in human terms.

Irrevocably Connected

Globalization is used here to signify the worldwide integration of previously distinct cultures and economies and the consequent exchange of products, ideas and methods of operation. In such a globalized world, many of your students will eventually enter jobs that will require knowledge and understanding of other cultures.

A simple exercise will show the extent of globalization: assign your students to go through their closets at home, looking at clothing labels and listing the countries where the clothing was made. Or send them to the supermarket to see how many imported products they can find. (As I write this, there are strawberries from Chile, cheese from Ireland and bananas from Nicaragua in my kitchen. The scallops in the Chinese-style stir-fry I plan for tonight's dinner may be from Peru, Mexico, Canada, China or Japan.) Or have students scan a major newspaper. A recent scandal for the winter U.S. Winter Olympic Team's fundraising mitten sale revolved around the fact that the mittens were made in China rather than in the U.S. And of course, we are all aware of the credit card security breach at Target late last year, resulting from malicious code allegedly written by a 17-year-old Russian and allegedly sold to Mexican scammers, among others.

All these examples come from the United States. What has happened elsewhere as a result of globalization, to a greater or lesser degree, is termed modernization . New technologies seep into, are welcomed by or forced upon traditional societies, with a consequent influence on traditional culture. Japan's adoption of Western weapons during the Meiji Revolution or Peter the Great's modeling Russian palaces after French architecture are classic examples of rulers forcing modernization upon a sometimes unwilling populace. Today, proponents of political revolutions and even terrorists rely on the growing availability of social media technology to overthrow governments.

Journeys in Film

To help your students grasp these terms, consider showing them engaging feature films from other countries. Three outstanding films, suitable for secondary classrooms, will engage students, teach them about three great traditional cultures, and illustrate the impact of globalization and modernization. Journeys in Film , a nonprofit educational publisher, has created interdisciplinary lesson plans aligned with the Common Core and available as free downloads to help you share these films with your students.

The Cup (1999) is based on a true story about Tibetan monks, refugees living in a Buddhist monastery in the foothills of the Himalayas. Fourteen-year-old Orgyen, obsessed with Brazilian soccer star Ronaldo, is determined to bring television to his monastery in time for a World Cup soccer game. The film demonstrates to students that even remote regions and traditional cultures are no longer completely isolated. The filmmaker has been careful to introduce other examples of modernity slowly entering the monks' world -- the Coke can which has replaced the traditional vase on the fortune-teller's ritual altar, for example. Download lesson plans at http://www.journeysinfilm.org/for-educators/the-store/discovering-tibet/ . A trailer for the film is also available on that page.

The Iranian film Children of Heaven (1997) is another story that will appeal strongly to students. Nine-year-old Ali, the usually responsible son of a poor Tehran family, accidentally loses his sister Zahra's only pair of shoes, and the children know that their parents cannot afford new ones. In addition to math, English, science, social studies and art lessons, there is a lesson in the Journeys in Film curriculum that explores the growing economic and cultural divide between the traditional family living in the older, poorer section of Tehran and a wealthier family whose lifestyle has been transformed by Western-style modernization. For lessons and trailer, see http://www.journeysinfilm.org/for-educators/the-store/discovering-iran/ .

In The Way Home (2002), a seven-year-old South Korean boy accustomed to the comforts and conveniences of modern Seoul is left temporarily with his grandmother in a traditional village. Born and raised in Seoul, he must learn to live in a tiny community, and he is even forced to live without his video games when his batteries run out. Students will relish the scene when he whines to his grandmother about his longing for Kentucky Fried Chicken. She goes to great lengths to procure a live chicken, kill and pluck it, boil it and serve it up to her horrified grandson as a real treat. In this film, the students explore the values in traditional ways of life in the face of inevitable change. Lessons and trailer are at http://www.journeysinfilm.org/for-educators/the-store/discovering-south-korea/ .

Foreign feature films can be used very successfully in the classroom. All three of these free Journeys in Film curriculum guides include suggestions for using the film in your classroom, working with subtitles, film festivals and more.

How have you used film in the classroom to teach your students about other parts of the world?

Globalization and the rise of action movies in hollywood

• Original Article
• Published: 14 January 2022
• Volume 47 , pages 31–69, ( 2023 )

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This paper shows that Globalization contributes significantly to the rise of Action movies in Hollywood. Incorporating both the intensive and extensive margins in trade, this paper develops a structural model to allow movie-quality production heterogeneity across genres and countries. The paper finds that Hollywood studios respond to export-market expansion by tailoring their products to international consumers’ preferences. As a result, Hollywood increasingly focuses on a few blockbusters, overwhelmingly in the Action genre. The movie industry becomes significantly more concentrated both domestically and abroad. Furthermore, a disproportionate increase in Action movies raises consumer welfare in some countries at other regions’ expense.

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In the paper, we use the term “Hollywood movies” to refer to US-produced movies or movies of US-origin.

In the paper, the “Action” genre includes movies classified as either action or adventure films, as these genres have significant overlaps.

A movie’s quality refers to consumer perceived quality, which is revealed by a movie’s box-office revenue. It reflects, but it is not the same as, artistic quality or critical responses.

See De Vany and Walls ( 1996 ), De Vany and Walls ( 1999 , 2004 ), Filson et al. ( 2005 ), Hennig-Thurau et al. ( 2006 ), Walls ( 2009 ), and Filson and Havlicek ( 2018 ).

Their URLs are https://www.the-numbers.com/ and https://www.boxofficemojo.com/ , respectively.

The “Regional Groups of Member States” are from the U.N. website, https://www.un.org/depts/DGACM/RegionalGroups.shtml .

The countries and their corresponding regions are listed in the Appendix which can be found on the authors’ websites.

Some countries do not have data available in the entire period. For example, the Box-office Mojo only provides data for the Chinese market in 2007, 2008, and 2013-2017. In the counterfactual simulations, we used the data of 2013-2017 as the baseline for comparison.

Based on Industry definition, wide-releases refer to those movies released to at least 600 theaters in the American market.

The data has budget estimates of more than 90 percent of the US-origin movies. All the US-origin movies are used in the demand estimation. However, the supply-side estimation use only those movies with budget information.

UNESCO collects data and constructs internationally-comparable data on culture products, such as movies, see http://data.uis.unesco.org .

The number of Action movies has modestly increased. Approximately 20 percent of all annual releases were Action movies before 2000, and this figure has risen to about 25 percent in recent years.

The Chinese cinema screen data is from https://www.statista.com/statistics/279111/number-of-cinema-screens-in-china/ .

These movies were previously released in the US in 1994.

For more details, see the report Hollywood’s crusade in China prior to China’s WTO accession , http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc49.2007/TingWang/2.html .

For more details, see (Ho et al. , 2019 ).

Parallel to the movie industry Globalization, the Internet has become increasingly essential to everyday life. More people are watching movies via streaming services like Netflix and Amazon. A regional time trend can partially capture the changes in consumer movie-viewing habits and online behaviors. Enabling model identification, the time trend is assumed to be the same for all movies in the same region. Due to data limitations, we cannot capture how this parallel trend affects individual movies. Therefore, we cannot eliminate online streaming as a possible cause of the rise of Action movies. In addition, movie piracy has become more prevalent over time in many international markets [(see (Dalton and Leung , 2017 ; Danaher and Waldfogel , 2014 ; McCalman , 2005 ). While we do not explicitly model movie piracy, the time trend specification can capture the increasing global prevalence of movie piracy.

The sequential entry assumption eases computational burden. Also, Einav ( 2010 ) provides evidence that higher-quality movies have the power to choose their release times first in a market.

In practice, we use \(N=10,000\) .

The derivation of the budget elasticity, \({\tilde{\eta }}^n_{jc}\) , is in the Appendix which can be found on the authors’ websites.

The instrumental variable choice follows (Hausman et al. , 1994 ). Our demand estimation approach is also similar to Ferreira et al. ( 2016 ).

One potential concern is that this instrumental variable may not satisfy the exclusion restrictions. In the movie industry, franchise movies are becoming increasingly popular. A movie studio may release a movie in one year and its sequel in the next year. When using the last year’s studio budgets as an instrumental variable, studios with popular franchise movies can have disproportionately large budgets due to persistent productivity shocks. To test the robustness of our estimation results, we reestimate the model using an alternative instrumental variable – movie studios’ numbers of wide-released movies from the previous year, which is less prone to violate the exclusion restrictions due to franchise movies. The online Appendix presents detailed estimation results based on the alternative instrumental variable. Overall, the main estimation results are robust with respect to the alternative instrumental variables. Importantly, the alternative estimations confirm that the ratios of elasticities by genre are much higher in foreign regions than in the USA. The specific choices of instrumental variables do not alter our insight into Globalization’s role in the rise of Action movies in Hollywood.

If movie j is not released in country c , then \(\eta _{cj}=0\) . This measure is an imperfect proxy of the “true” budget elasticity, which would incorporate the impact of budget on export decisions. We show the impacts of changing budgets on export decisions in the counterfactual exercise in Sect. 7 .

Action movies, on average, have higher budgets than Non-Action movies. We make two additional budget elasticity comparisons to see if the budget difference by genre matters. In the first comparison, we compare Action movies to a hypothetical set of Non-Action movies, which have identical budgets and export decisions but have a parameter value \(\gamma _{3r}=0\) . In the second comparison, we compare Non-Action movies to a hypothetical set of Action movies, which have identical budgets and export decisions, but have budget slope parameters set to be \(\gamma _{2r}+\gamma _{3r}\) as in Table 4 . Footnote 25 The elasticity differences between Action and Non-Action movies, holding budget and export decisions fixed, do not change very much.

The alternative comparison results are presented in the online Appendix.

The screenplay data is from an online source, https://pudding.cool/2017/03/film-dialogue/index.html . The original data contains over 2,000 movies from the 1930s to 2015. We can match 413 movies in our sample. Every main movie character has at least 100 words of dialogue, and the actor can be cross-referenced in the IMDb. On average, a movie’s main characters have approximately 10,000 words in total.

Results can be found on the online Appendix.

Therefore, the model fits only the markets shares of the first three movie categories.

In this paper, we focus on only wide-release movies of US origin. If we consider all the movies, regardless of their countries of origin, the US share is 31.7 percent, and the Chinese share is 14.7 percent.

See more details in the online Appendix.

The Chinese movie market has experienced both demand growth and fewer trade restrictions. A higher \(\varphi \) captures the demand growth. Section 7.1.1 discusses the impacts of trade restrictions.

In fact, Low-Quality Action movies have a decline of 2.5 percentage points in foreign market shares.

Unfortunately, we cannot directly compare the foreign market shares of Action movies in 1995, because our data sources do not report reliable foreign box-office data until 2007.

See results in the online Appendix.

We have also estimated an alternative model with \(\gamma _{3r}=0\) in all regions. The counterfactual experiment results are similar using the alternative parameters. Action movies’ market shares increase by only 2.0 and 6.2 percentage points in the domestic and foreign export markets, respectively.

These are based on Panels (A) and (B) of Fig. 7 .

Beyond industry concentration, the overall market shares of Action movies would rise more if the Chinese market size further expands. Please see the online Appendix for a detailed discussion.

The Non-Action movies’ budgets would be at least 35 percent higher in the Proportional Budget Increase case than the Baseline . Meanwhile, the average High-quality Action movie budget would be 78 percent lower. Furthermore, in the Proportional Budget Increase case, the Action movies’ domestic market share is 39.4 percent, and their foreign market share (excluding China) is 54.1 percent. In the Baseline equilibrium, Action movies have substantially higher market shares, which are 55.1 percent and 66.5 percent (excluding China), respectively.

To match the Baseline aggregate industry budget (a 19.2 percent increase in the budget), we increase the US market size by 19.3 percent.

In the US Market Expansion case, the domestic market share of Action movies is 51.9 percent, and the foreign market share (excluding China) is 62.2 percent. The Baseline Action move market shares are higher, which are 55.1 percent and 66.5 percent (excluding China), respectively.

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Leung, T.C., Qi, S. Globalization and the rise of action movies in hollywood. J Cult Econ 47 , 31–69 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-021-09438-z

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A logjam of container ships in the so-called global supply chain, moored off Long Beach, California, on 9 October 2021. Photo by Tim Rue/Bloomberg/Getty

The biggest picture

No wonder we cannot agree on how globalisation works and whether it’s a good thing. all the stories we have are flawed.

by Anthea Roberts & Nicholas Lamp   + BIO

Isaiah Berlin understood the parable of the fox and the hedgehog – ‘the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’ – to illustrate two styles of thinking. Hedgehogs relate everything to a single vision, a universally applicable organising principle for understanding the world. Foxes, on the other hand, embrace many values and approaches rather than trying to fit everything into an all-encompassing singular vision.

Debates about economic globalisation are often dominated by hedgehogs – actors who interpret and evaluate the dynamics and consequences of globalisation through a single lens. Take the narrative that dominated the debate about globalisation in the West from the collapse of the Soviet Union until the global financial crisis in 2008. On this view, economic liberalisation promised to grow the pie so that everyone – developed and developing countries, rich and poor – would be better off. This confident perspective touted free trade as a win-win outcome that would create peace and prosperity for all.

In recent years, this view has been challenged by a variety of narratives that stress that economic globalisation produces many losers. Right-wing populists lament the decay of America’s rust belt, warning of the need to protect the native working class against the offshoring of manufacturing jobs and the onshoring of immigrants. Left-wing populists and critics of corporate power protest that globalisation’s advantages often accrue mainly to rich people and powerful multinationals, hollowing out the middle class. The COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis have heightened anxiety about the resilience and sustainability of our economies.

We are at a critical juncture: a relatively long period of stability in mainstream thinking about economic globalisation has given way to a situation of dramatic flux. During such periods, narratives assume particular relevance because they offer new ways for actors to understand what the problem is and what should be done about it.

The interplay of different narratives could be the starting point of a nuanced appraisal of the complexities, uncertainties and ambiguities of economic globalisation. More often, however, debates about economic globalisation devolve into stand-offs among hedgehogs who emphasise the validity of their perspective while seeking to expose their opponents as economically illiterate, politically dangerous or morally bankrupt.

A prime example of such a standoff was the reaction by establishment figures to the critiques of free trade and immigration that animated Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the United States and the Brexit movement in the United Kingdom. Many curled up into a ball of spikes, disparaging opponents for their stupidity and self-interest. But proponents of the insurgent narratives have been no less at fault: they have drawn much of their energy from their ability to present a radically different perspective, often at the cost of nuance and a willingness to compromise.

None of this is to say that the perspectives brought to light by the hedgehogs are not valid and valuable. Some of them harness the empirical and theoretical tools of particular academic disciplines to build our knowledge of the global economy, polity and environment. Others articulate a particular value system and spell out its ethical ramifications for organising the global flow of goods, people, capital, data and ideas. Each of these perspectives expresses a different viewpoint and sheds light on a piece of the puzzle.

Yet debates dominated by hedgehogs hinder us from moving forward. These debates tend to oscillate between two extremes. On some issues, proponents of different narratives seem to inhabit different worlds, with little or no interaction (silos). Some know a lot about inequality, for instance, but little about great-power competition or how the two might relate. At other times, the advocates of rival approaches clash forcefully, but the sides are so deeply entrenched in their own worldviews that genuine dialogue seems impossible (polarisation).

In order to grapple with complex issues such as economic globalisation, we need to develop more fox-like approaches that seek to overcome the silos and polarisation that are the hallmark of contemporary debates. The fact that hedgehogs have been dominating public debates about economic globalisation not only impedes our understanding of complex phenomena but makes it difficult for us to appreciate and accommodate the different values at stake. It is time for a more foxy approach.

T he first step to developing such an approach is to understand what the hedgehogs have been saying about economic globalisation. In our book Six Faces of Globalization: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why It Matters (2021), we identify six main narratives driving debates in the West about the virtues and vices of economic globalisation. These narratives provide the storylines through which people perceive reality and communicate their understandings and values. They fall into three broad categories: win-win, win-lose and lose-lose narratives.

The establishment narrative has been the dominant frame for understanding economic globalisation in the West over the past three decades. It sees globalisation as an unstoppable but overwhelmingly beneficial force. It focuses on rising productivity and declining poverty rates, emphasising economic efficiency and the virtues of countries and companies playing to their comparative advantage. This ‘everybody wins’ view has been espoused by many institutions that serve as the guardians of the international economic order, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization.

The establishment narrative has now been dislodged from its dominant position. In the decade following the global financial crisis, previously marginalised narratives have made their way to the centre of political debate. While the establishment narrative assumes that everyone wins, four other hedgehog narratives argue that economic globalisation produces both winners and losers. Where they differ is in who wins and who loses, what causes these distributive outcomes, and why they are problematic.

On the Left of the political spectrum, we see two narratives that emphasise how gains from economic globalisation have flowed upward to rich individuals and multinational corporations. On the Right of the political spectrum, we find two narratives that see the gains from globalisation flowing sideways to foreigners and foreign countries.

The Left-wing populist narrative focuses on the ways in which national economies are rigged to channel the gains from globalisation to the privileged few. Even as countries have seen their economies grow, many have also experienced a sharp increase in inequality, with a growing divide between rich and poor and a hollowing-out of the middle class. Whereas some proponents point the finger at chief executive officers, bankers and billionaires (the top 1 per cent of the global population), others take aim at the educated professional class and the upper middle class more broadly (the top 20 per cent). Either way, the poor and working class have lost out.

Proponents of the related corporate power narrative argue that the real winners from economic globalisation are multinational corporations, which can take advantage of a global marketplace to produce cheaply, sell everywhere, and pay as little in taxes as possible. These companies use their power to shape international rules in areas that advantage them, such as trade and investment, while lobbying against effective international cooperation on subjects that might disadvantage them, such as taxation. According to this narrative, economic globalisation produces many losers – workers, communities, citizens, governments – but only one winner: corporations.

The sixth hedgehog narrative argues that we are all at risk of losing from economic globalisation

The Right-wing populist narrative shares with the Left-wing version a deep distrust of elites, but the two narratives part company on what they blame the elite for: whereas Left-wing populists fault the elite for enriching themselves, Right-wing populists deride the elite for failing to protect the hardworking native population from threats posed by an external ‘other’. The Right-wing populist narrative thus has a strong horizontal us-versus-them quality, whether expressed through concern about protecting workers from the offshoring of jobs or guarding them against an inflow of immigrants who might compete for those jobs, live off the welfare system, or threaten the native community’s sense of identity.

The geoeconomic narrative focuses on a different kind of external threat: the economic and technological competition between the US and China as great-power rivals. Although both countries have gained from economic globalisation in absolute terms, in relative terms China has closed the gap on the US. The US increasingly perceives China as both an economic competitor and a security threat, lending the geoeconomic narrative an urgency that it did not have during the Cold War. Instead of applauding international trade and investment as enhancing economic welfare and increasing prospects for peace, the geoeconomic narrative emphasises the security vulnerabilities created by economic interdependence and digital connectivity with a strategic rival.

Sometimes these different narratives overlap. For instance, many members of the Trump administration embraced both the Right-wing populist narrative and the geoeconomic one, while presidential candidates such as Elizabeth Warren embodied both the Left-wing populist critique and the corporate power one. At other times they diverge. For instance, the protests against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership in Europe were much more strongly motivated by the corporate power narrative than the Left-wing populist one. Different narratives focus on different concerns. While the Right-wing populist narrative laments the loss of the manufacturing jobs of the past, the geoeconomic one focuses on winning the race in the technologies of the future, such as fifth-generation (5G) networks and artificial intelligence.

These win-win and win-lose narratives differ from the sixth hedgehog narrative, which argues that we are all at risk of losing from economic globalisation in its current form. This lose-lose narrative portrays economic globalisation as a source and accelerator of global threats such as pandemics and the climate crisis. Some versions focus on how global connectivity increases the risk of contagion of both viruses and supply chain shocks. Others warn that the skyrocketing carbon emissions associated with the global diffusion of Western patterns of production and consumption are endangering both people and the planet.

This global threats narrative emphasises our shared humanity; its proponents call for global solidarity and international cooperation in the face of common challenges. They argue that we need to redefine the goals of our economies to enable individuals and societies to survive and thrive within the limits of our planet. This can mean emphasising resilience over efficiency in our supply chains and sustainability over profit-seeking in our economies. Without change, they warn, we run the risk that everybody loses – though some people and countries are likely to lose first and worst.

T rained in a world that values hedgehogs, the most common question we encountered in our research was ‘So, which narrative is correct?’ We also found that proponents of the individual narratives were quick to point out the ways in which their narrative was right and others wrong – a classic hedgehog move. Both approaches missed a deeper point.

As with any partial representation of a more complex reality, each narrative contains some truth but does not tell the whole truth. Each narrative highlights important aspects of the process of economic globalisation and expresses values that are deeply held by significant numbers of people. Each narrative reveals and obscures. Rather than defending one narrative as the correct one, we need to adopt more fox-like approaches that embrace multiple perspectives, holding them in tension and combining their insights.

At the analytical level, adopting a more fox-like approach helps in developing better understandings of complex issues. As the political scientist Philip E Tetlock explains in his book Expert Political Judgment (2005), what experts think matters far less than how they think. Tetlock finds that hedgehog-like thinkers who know one big thing are often overly confident and inclined to (over)extend the explanatory reach of their expertise into new domains. Yet they are often far less accurate in their predictions than fox-like thinkers who stitch together diverse sources of information to produce more provisional conclusions.

Take the backlash against the French president Emmanuel Macron’s diesel tax as an example. From the perspective of the establishment and global threats narratives, the tax made perfect sense: making fossil fuels more expensive is a market-based way of reducing carbon emissions. The policy failed, however, because Macron did not consider how the tax would appear from the populist perspectives that fuelled the ‘yellow vest’ protests. Right-wing populists saw the tax as an affront to rural ways of life by city-dwelling elites, while Left-wing populists noted how it burdened poorer populations without equally targeting the habits of the rich, such as flying.

If the art of advocacy lies in convincing others to view the world through the lens of your preferred narrative, the art of policymaking requires examining issues through diverse lenses. The question of whether a country should use the telecommunications company Huawei for its 5G networks is not just about whether Huawei’s products are cheap, reliable and economically efficient; it is also about whether a country is comfortable entrusting its critical infrastructure to a company that is subject to the Chinese government in an era of increased security concerns and geopolitical rivalry. Similarly, understanding the spread and impact of the virus SARS-CoV-2 requires an appreciation of the systemic risks arising from global connectivity as well as the variability resulting from domestic inequalities.

The synthesising mind takes in information from disparate sources, knitting it together into a more coherent whole

A fox-like approach can also help overcome some of the mutual incomprehension that plagues economic debates. A fox-like approach encourages us to step into the shoes of the proponents of narratives with which we disagree. It does not require us to adopt their narrative – we may still contest some of the narrative’s empirical claims, value judgments and policy prescriptions. But if we attempt to see economic globalisation through the lens of another narrative in a charitable and empathetic way, we will gain a better understanding of that narrative’s internal logic, appeal and prescriptions, and a clearer vision of the blind spots and biases of our own preferred narratives and policy options.

To develop more fox-like approaches, we need to get better at integrative thinking. This is difficult in today’s environment. Universities typically organise their research and teaching along disciplinary lines and thereby encourage depth, specialisation and mastery over breadth, connectivity and creativity. Policymakers often work in a relatively siloed fashion as different departments take charge of a problem and keep a tight hold of the drafting pen. Yet complex phenomena such as economic globalisation involve a multitude of interconnected issues that do not fall neatly within the disciplinary and subject-matter lines along which much of our knowledge production is organised.

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann was of the view that: ‘In the 21st century , the most important kind of mind will be the synthesising mind.’ The synthesising mind takes in and evaluates information from disparate sources, knitting it together into a more coherent whole. The ability to hold (at least) two diametrically opposed ideas or narratives in one’s head and, instead of simply picking one, produce a synthesis that is superior to either has been found to be a common quality among exceptional business leaders. Increasingly, we are seeing trade policies in Washington, DC , Brussels and beyond that seek to integrate insights from different perspectives instead of simply championing the establishment narrative or replacing it wholesale with another narrative.

Although Trump’s defeat revived optimism among some commentators about a reset on economic globalisation, the new US president Joe Biden’s approach integrates insights from multiple narratives. Biden’s trade agenda embraces the establishment narrative’s enthusiasm for trade’s potential to generate prosperity while tempering it with a commitment to prioritising the welfare of US workers (a concern of both Right-wing and Left-wing populists), an awareness of the need for greater regulation of corporate power (including in the areas of taxation and antitrust), and a determination to compete aggressively with China economically and technologically while attempting to cooperate on global threats such as the climate crisis and pandemics. The Biden administration has continued many of Trump’s protectionist and geoeconomic trade policies, while also seeking to work with allies and reaching out to China on issues of common interest, such as the climate crisis.

Similar movements are evident in Brussels. Long a staunch proponent of the establishment narrative, the European Union has been updating its trade policy to achieve greater resilience with respect to critical goods, spearhead its own semiconductor manufacturing to protect its industrial position, and impose a carbon border adjustment mechanism to pursue greater sustainability within a global trading system. Europe is also seeking to incorporate insights from different narratives in its approach to China, with the European Commission declaring that:

China is, simultaneously, in different policy areas, a cooperation partner with whom the EU has closely aligned objectives, a negotiating partner with whom the EU needs to find a balance of interests, an economic competitor in the pursuit of technological leadership, and a systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance.

I f we move past either/or arguments about which narrative is right, where might more integrative thinking about economic globalisation lead us? Although we do not have a definite answer, our survey of competing hedgehog narratives suggests that the debate’s centre of gravity is shifting away from the old establishment consensus in at least two respects: questions of distribution, both within and between countries, are increasingly central; and noneconomic values, whether environmental, social or security-related, are increasingly qualifying or outweighing a primary focus on efficiency and growth.

When it comes to distributive questions, advocates of the establishment narrative traditionally endorsed a two-step approach. The first imperative was to maximise the size of the pie by opening markets to international trade and investment. Distributional questions about how the pie was divided were left to the domestic level. Economic thinking in this mould focused on increasing efficiency so as to promote economic growth for the country as a whole. A growing economy meant that the winners could compensate the losers and still be better off. Whether the winners actually did compensate the losers was a matter for messy politics rather than elegant models.

A common theme that emerges from the other narratives is that distribution is highly significant. It is not enough to increase the size of the pie; the way the pie is sliced is just as important, and sometimes more so. Left-wing populists zero in on the distribution of wealth and opportunity among socioeconomic classes within a particular country. For them, growth is pointless if it is not broadly shared. The Right-wing populist narrative argues that distribution also matters horizontally in geographic space. It contrasts dynamic cities that move ahead with rural communities that decay when factories close.

Relative gains may also be important at the international level. The geoeconomic narrative notes that, although China and the US both gained from economic globalisation in absolute terms, China’s relative success in closing the gap has sharpened strategic competition between the two. Instead of producing a win-win situation that increased peace and prosperity for all, the changing global balance of power now threatens peace and prosperity. Distributional questions, both within and among countries, are becoming central to policymaking.

We need to find ways to more openly discuss and balance different values in our pluralistic societies

Another common theme in the narratives pushing back against the free-trade orthodoxy is the focus on values other than economic efficiency, whether they be human wellbeing, environmental protection, community cohesion or national security. The establishment narrative tends to either ignore nonmonetary values or treat them as reducible to economic measures. The challenger narratives argue that overall ‘welfare’ cannot be represented solely in economic metrics; sometimes other values are more important than wealth and might not be commensurable with money. Even if disability payments, welfare handouts and cheaper products mean that laid-off manufacturing workers are materially better off than their parents, what they have lost in pride and status will likely outweigh any material gains.

The idea that values other than wealth maximisation matter is an essential element of the global threats discourse. Environmentalists and their allies ask us to recast economic growth as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. They remind us that not all economic growth contributes to human wellbeing, especially when it is pursued without respect for planetary boundaries. ‘Today we have economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive,’ notes the economist Kate Raworth ; ‘what we need are economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow.’

Noneconomic values also animate the other challenger narratives. The Right-wing populist narrative prizes the ties that bind families, communities and nations, and it values tradition, stability, loyalty and hierarchy. Its advocates see work as important not just for providing an income but also for conferring a sense of identity, self-worth and dignity, which in turn helps in building stable families and communities. Even if trade encourages greater efficiency and cheaper production, it can damage the social fabric, particularly when change is rapid and highly concentrated in specific geographic regions or industrial sectors.

Sometimes economic growth is helpful in achieving these noneconomic goals; sometimes it stands in tension with achieving them. Proponents of these nonestablishment narratives concur that we cannot focus solely on growing the size of the pie or even on dividing it fairly – we must also acknowledge that the things that we value might not form part of a single pie. This conclusion means that we need to find ways to more openly discuss and balance different values in our pluralistic societies. As the philosopher Michael Sandel explains :

Liberal neutrality flattens questions of meaning, identity, and purpose into questions of fairness. It therefore misses the anger and resentment that animate the populist revolt; it lacks the moral and rhetorical and sympathetic resources to understand the cultural estrangement, even humiliation, that many working-class and middle-class voters feel; and it ignores the meritocratic hubris of elites.

T here is no one view that accurately captures the virtues and vices of globalisation. Instead of buying into the worldview of a single hedgehog narrative, we need to develop more fox-like ways of thinking about complex issues. This approach requires an ability to appreciate the insights of and values held by proponents of different narratives, as well as a culture of respectful debate where different tradeoffs are openly assessed. How should we weigh tradition against economic progress, the wealth of the nation against the wellbeing of particular regions or groups, and the importance of nationality against the value of global and cosmopolitan identities, for instance?

Debates about economic globalisation need to move past either/or battles about which narrative is right. The ability to integrate insights from different narratives and a willingness to explore synergies and navigate tradeoffs will become hallmarks of successful policymaking. Efficient supply chains are no longer good enough; we need them to be secure and resilient as well. Climate policy must not only be economically and technologically feasible; it must also be equitable and inclusive. The choice is not US-China cooperation, competition or confrontation, but how to navigate all three in different domains and at different times.

Looking at an issue through many narrative lenses requires a lot from us, both cognitively and normatively. But it is also the best chance we have of devising approaches that respond to the kaleidoscopic complexity of today’s challenges.

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Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Globalization — Overview of the Connection Between Globalisation and Media

Overview of The Connection Between Globalisation and Media

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ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY

Globalization.

Globalization is a term used to describe the increasing connectedness and interdependence of world cultures and economies.

Anthropology, Sociology, Social Studies, Civics, Economics

Freight Trains

Freight trains waiting to be loaded with cargo to transport around the United Kingdom. This cargo comes from around the world and contains all kinds of goods and products.

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Globalization is a term used to describe how trade and technology have made the world into a more connected and interdependent place. Globalization also captures in its scope the economic and social changes that have come about as a result. It may be pictured as the threads of an immense spider web formed over millennia, with the number and reach of these threads increasing over time. People, money, material goods, ideas, and even disease and devastation have traveled these silken strands, and have done so in greater numbers and with greater speed than ever in the present age. When did globalization begin? The Silk Road, an ancient network of trade routes across China, Central Asia, and the Mediterranean used between 50 B.C.E. and 250 C.E., is perhaps the most well-known early example of exchanging ideas, products, and customs. As with future globalizing booms, new technologies played a key role in the Silk Road trade. Advances in metallurgy led to the creation of coins; advances in transportation led to the building of roads connecting the major empires of the day; and increased agricultural production meant more food could be trafficked between locales. Along with Chinese silk, Roman glass, and Arabian spices, ideas such as Buddhist beliefs and the secrets of paper-making also spread via these tendrils of trade. Unquestionably, these types of exchanges were accelerated in the Age of Exploration, when European explorers seeking new sea routes to the spices and silks of Asia bumped into the Americas instead. Again, technology played an important role in the maritime trade routes that flourished between old and newly discovered continents. New ship designs and the creation of the magnetic compass were key to the explorers’ successes. Trade and idea exchange now extended to a previously unconnected part of the world, where ships carrying plants, animals, and Spanish silver between the Old World and the New also carried Christian missionaries. The web of globalization continued to spin out through the Age of Revolution, when ideas about liberty , equality , and fraternity spread like fire from America to France to Latin America and beyond. It rode the waves of industrialization , colonization , and war through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, powered by the invention of factories, railways, steamboats, cars, and planes. With the Information Age, globalization went into overdrive. Advances in computer and communications technology launched a new global era and redefined what it meant to be “connected.” Modern communications satellites meant the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo could be watched in the United States for the first time. The World Wide Web and the Internet allowed someone in Germany to read about a breaking news story in Bolivia in real time. Someone wishing to travel from Boston, Massachusetts, to London, England, could do so in hours rather than the week or more it would have taken a hundred years ago. This digital revolution massively impacted economies across the world as well: they became more information-based and more interdependent. In the modern era, economic success or failure at one focal point of the global web can be felt in every major world economy. The benefits and disadvantages of globalization are the subject of ongoing debate. The downside to globalization can be seen in the increased risk for the transmission of diseases like ebola or severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), or in the kind of environmental harm that scientist Paul R. Furumo has studied in microcosm in palm oil plantations in the tropics. Globalization has of course led to great good, too. Richer nations now can—and do—come to the aid of poorer nations in crisis. Increasing diversity in many countries has meant more opportunity to learn about and celebrate other cultures. The sense that there is a global village, a worldwide “us,” has emerged.

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Essay on Globalization for Students and Children

500+ words essay on globalization.

Globalization refers to integration between people, companies, and governments. Most noteworthy, this integration occurs on a global scale. Furthermore, it is the process of expanding the business all over the world. In Globalization, many businesses expand globally and assume an international image. Consequently, there is a requirement for huge investment to develop international companies.

How Globalization Came into Existence?

First of all, people have been trading goods since civilization began. In the 1st century BC, there was the transportation of goods from China to Europe. The goods transportation took place along the Silk Road. The Silk Road route was very long in distance. This was a remarkable development in the history of Globalization. This is because, for the first time ever, goods were sold across continents.

Globalization kept on growing gradually since 1st BC. Another significant development took place in the 7th century AD. This was the time when the religion of Islam spread. Most noteworthy, Arab merchants led to a rapid expansion of international trade . By the 9th century, there was the domination of Muslim traders on international trade. Furthermore, the focus of trade at this time was spices.

True Global trade began in the Age of Discovery in the 15th century. The Eastern and Western continents were connected by European merchants. There was the discovery of America in this period. Consequently, global trade reached America from Europe.

From the 19th century, there was a domination of Great Britain all over the world. There was a rapid spread of international trade. The British developed powerful ships and trains. Consequently, the speed of transportation greatly increased. The rate of production of goods also significantly increased. Communication also got faster which was better for Global trade .

Finally, in 20th and 21st -Century Globalization took its ultimate form. Above all, the development of technology and the internet took place. This was a massive aid for Globalization. Hence, E-commerce plays a huge role in Globalization.

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Impact of Globalization

First of all, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) increases at a great rate. This certainly is a huge contribution of Globalization. Due to FDI, there is industrial development. Furthermore, there is the growth of global companies. Also, many third world countries would also benefit from FDI.

Technological Innovation is another notable contribution of Globalization. Most noteworthy, there is a huge emphasis on technology development in Globalization. Furthermore, there is also technology transfer due to Globalization. The technology would certainly benefit the common people.

The quality of products improves due to Globalization. This is because manufacturers try to make products of high-quality. This is due to the pressure of intense competition. If the product is inferior, people can easily switch to another high-quality product.

To sum it up, Globalization is a very visible phenomenon currently. Most noteworthy, it is continuously increasing. Above all, it is a great blessing to trade. This is because it brings a lot of economic and social benefits to it.

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