Introduction

Contemporary processes and practices of social change across the globe are situated on the landscape of globalization (Guidry, Kennedy, & Zald, 2000; Pal & Dutta, 2008a, 2008b; Robertson, 1992). Globalization is constituted in the increasing flow of goods, capital, labor and services across national borders; economically, it is defined and marked by neoliberalism¹ as the primary political and economic organizing framework for social relations, institutional frameworks, policy-making, and implementation of policies across various sectors of the globe (Dutta, 2009; Ganesh, Zoller, & Cheney, 2005; Harvey, 2005; Pal & Dutta, 2008a, 2008b). As a social, cultural, economic, and political process, it has been marked by the hegemony of the neoliberal logic as the primary organizing framework for constituting relationships among nation states, key political actors in these nation states, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), transnational corporations (TNCs), global policy-making bodies, activist groups, and wider publics in the various sectors of the globe (England & Ward, 2007). The neoliberal logic is fundamentally an economic logic that operates on the basis of the idea that opening up markets to competitions among global corporations accompanied by minimum interventions of the state would ensure the most efficient and effective political economic system. Therefore, proponents of the neoliberal logic argue that the public sectors around the globe ought to be privatized so that these sectors could operate most efficiently and effectively. The advent of the neoliberal logic on the global stage has been marked by the power and control of global organizations such as the international financial institutions (IFIs): World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), as well as the Global Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), which later evolved into the World Trade Organization (WTO), created with the goals of minimizing the barriers to global trade, and maximizing trading opportunities for transnational corporations (TNCs) across national borders (World Bank 2000a, 2000b, 2000c, 2 2001). The neoliberal logic of power and control has been and continues to be carried out through the linkages among TNCs, IFIs, the WTO, national governments, and local elites, also referred to as neoliberal hegemony, with a critical role played by the debts doled out by the IFIs as mechanisms for setting up structural adjustment programs in nation states across the globe.