Bill Gamson has been working on and testing a game simulation that highlights globalization processes. A description of the game is available by visiting the website (click here). All of the materials needed by the coordinator and participants are available on the website and the game is currently being used in a number of classes at BC and elsewhere.
This research is based on cross-national data with the country as the unit of analysis. I have worked with many students over the years in efforts to account for cross-national variation in level of income inequality, child mortality, maternal mortality, life expectancy, environmental degradation , level of social welfare spending, corruption, physical quality of life, suicide, homicide, and spending on social security. Extensive use is made of world-systems theory and dependency theory in much of this work.
Shandra, John M., Jenna Nobles, Bruce London and John B. Williamson. 2005. "Child Mortality, Multinational Corporations, International Lending Institutions, and Democracy: A Quantitative, Cross-National Analysis of Less Developed Countries." Social Indicators Research 73:267-293.
Shandra, John M., Bruce London, Owen P. Whooley and John B. Williamson. 2004. "International Non-Governmental Organizations and Carbon Dioxide Emissions in the Developing World: A Quantitative, Cross-National Analysis." Sociological Inquiry 74(4):520-545.
Pampel, Fred C. and John B. Williamson. 2001. "Age Patterns of Suicide and Homicide Mortality Rates in High Income Nations." Social Forces 80(1):251-282.
Pampel, Fred C. and John B. Williamson. 1989. Age, Class, Politics, and the Welfare State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (199 pp.). This book was selected by the American Sociological Association for inclusion in the Rose Monograph Series. The cloth edition was published in 1989 and the paperback edition in 1992.
Boehmer, Ulrike and John B. Williamson. 1996. "The Impact of Women's Status on Infant Mortality Rate: A Cross-National Analysis." Social Indicators Research 37:333-360.
Williamson, John B. and Fred C. Pampel. 1986. "Politics, Class, and Growth in Social Security Effort: A Cross-National Analysis." International Journal of Comparative Sociology 27:15-30.
The development of a global production system, based on cheap labor and exploitation of natural resources, has resulted in a growing ecological burden associated with US consumer behavior. This project looks at how cheap imports are accelerating the cycle of consumer accumulation and discard in manufactured goods, and how a worldwide economy of trade, rooted in US power, is re-shaping global consumer connections.
�Prices and Quantities: Unsustainable Consumption and the Global Economy,� Ecological Economics, forthcoming, 2005.
"Cleaning the Closet: Toward a New Ethic of Fashion," in Sustainable Planet: Solutions for the 21st Century, edited by Juliet Schor and Betsy Taylor, (Boston: Beacon Press) November 2002.
Wear and Donate: The Global Fashion Circuit
The proliferation of low-wage, high-environmental impact South and East Asian textile production has been widely studied. In this project we look at how its expansion has resulted in a cycle of rising acquisition and more frequent discard of garments by US apparel consumers. Donated apparel is then shipped abroad, to Africa, Latin America and Asia. A global circuit of fashion has been created, based on a globalized, sweated, and environmentally damaging apparel industry. Our model shows the linkages.
Jeanne Guillemin has done field research in Russia (Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak, U California Press, 1999, 2001) in Sverdlovsk, in the Ural Mountains. She recently returned from China, where she visited the northeast city of Harbin, the site of the former Japanese biological weapons program (Unit 731), about which she wrote in Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism, Columbia U Press, 2005). In Beijing she met with public health officials and the lead plaintiff in the law suit against the Japanese government for compensation to victims of Unit 731. Her current research also takes her to France and archives on the scientists who originated the French biological weapons program in the 1920s. In Boston, Professor Guillemin has spoken at local community meetings and to elected officials and the Massachusetts Nurses Association about Boston University's proposed Biosafety Level 4 in Boston's South End. She has also worked with Representative Gloria Fox and community organizations to create innovative legislation (House Bill 1397) requiring oversight and regulation of any BSL-4 laboratories in Massachusetts.
Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak, U
California Press, 1999, 2001
Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-sponsored Programs to
Contemporary Bioterrorism, Columbia U Press, (2005)