Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective

In his Fifth Edition of Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective, author Philip Mc Michael examines the project of globalization and its instabilities (climate, energy, food, financial crises) through the lens of development and its origins in the colonial project. The book continues to help students make sense of a complex world in transition and explains how globalization became part of public discourse. Filled with case studies, this text makes the intricacies of globalization concrete, meaningful, and clear for students and moves them away from simple social evolutionary views, encouraging them to connect social change, development policies, global inequalities and social movements. The book challenges students to see themselves as global citizens whose consumption decisions have real social and ecological implications.

Presents theory, overview & case studies; labor, banking, agricultural issues; NAFTA, debt, regionalism, more.

Philip Mc Michael grew up in Adelaide, South Australia, and is an International Professor of Development Sociology at Cornell University. His book Settlers and The Agrarian Question: Foundations of Capitalism in Colonial Australia (Cambridge University Press, ©1984) won the 1995 Social Science History Association's Allan Sharlin Memorial Award. He has also edited The Global Restructuring of Agro-Food Systems (Cornell University Press, ©1994), Food and Agrarian Orders in the World Economy (Praeger, ©1995), New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development (Emerald, ©2005), and Contesting Development: Critical Struggles for Social Change (Routledge, ©2010). He has served as Director of Cornell University's International Political Economy Program, as Chair of the American Sociological Association's Political Economy of the World-System Section, and President of the Research Committee on the Sociology of Agriculture and Food for the International Sociological Association. And he has recently worked with the FAO, IATP and UNRISD, the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty, and the international peasant coalition, La Vía Campesina.