Eileen M. Otis
“Global Restructuring and the Production of Femininities in China's Emergent Service Industry”
With the advent of global restructuring in China, the service sector has become a central site for also restructuring gender. This paper analyzes the gender structure of China’s new global service sector through examining ethnographies of two international hotels, which are linked to a U.S.-based transnational corporation. I ask: Why did these hotels produce different gender identities in response to similar gendered work protocols? My first case, which I call “the Beijing Transluxury Hotel,” illustrates how the importation of new luxury practices, by a U.S. corporation, are embedded in socialist institutions. This embedding produces a “productive femininity.” A brief discussion of my second case study, the “Kunming Transluxury Hotel.” reveals that managers reproduced only a thin veneer of socialist organizational legacies and women are engulfed by markets. I explain how a defensive femininity is produced in response. The creation of feminized workers grounds global restructuring in women’s bodies and identities with different consequences for women in contrasting locales. By examining workplaces central to China’s new global service sector we can better understand not only how globalization structures gender processes but also the gender processes that structure globalization. The femininities produced in China’s Transluxury Hotels help to bridge cultural differences between businessmen from around the globe, who gather in these sites for conferences and business entertainment. By underscoring shared class and gender identities of businessmen – as these identities are constructed in contrast to the women who serve them – international hotels can form and reinforce an international hegemonic masculinity.

Hüseyin Ozel
"The Right to Nonconformity: Human Rights and the
Market Society"
This paper argues on the basis of Karl Polanyi’s analysis in The Great Transformation that the market system is unable to protect basic human rights institutionally. In order to show this, first a conceptual framework in which the “basic” human rights, as defined in respect of the “value” of human species that refers to developmental potentialities that exists in every human being, are distinguished from “non-basic” human rights is developed. Then, on the basis of this framework, it is argued that the market system, with the mode of thinking that it dictates, namely, the “market mentality”, is characterized by a “dehumanization” process, which follows from the creation of fictitious commodities and deprives human beings of the very qualities that characterize their “humanity” by atomizing the individuals and thus violating their quality of being a “social animal.” Yet, such a “dehumanization” process, through which human beings are reduced to mere means for each other to achieve their ends within the market, also violates individual’s basic rights to develop and realize her potentialities. That is to say, the market violates both individuality and sociality of human beings by restricting the “right to nonconformity”, to use Polanyi’s expression, which is believed to be essential in developing human potentialities and the “authenticity” of individual in a social environment.

Eyüp Özveren
“When the Imperial Project Awakens: Questioning the Structures of Global Governance”
If a specter ever haunted the “nineteenth-century civilization” as Karl Polanyi called it, it was that of imperial projects. This era began with Napoleonic Wars. Out of the ashes of the French Revolution, Napoleon resurrected an imperial project and attempted in vain to impose it upon the then “Old Europe”. We overlook this because it failed and concentrate instead on how the reaction it cultivated helped inaugurate an era of nation-state building that worked against the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. The era was brought to an end by the reactivation of an imperial project by the Nazi Germany. The nineteenth-century civilization was an exception in another sense. It was a world of nation-states embedded in an international order the parameters of which were supplied by Britain, being paradoxically the uniquely successful empire of the time. As Polanyi demonstrated, its instruments of power consisted of novelties such as privileged access to haute finance. Therefore, Polanyi’s discussion of England as the trend setting case of the nineteenth-century can be further elaborated by taking this attribute into account. This will be done in the first part of the paper.
Having been a first hand witness to the devastating collapse of the nineteenth-century order in Central Europe and writing in self-imposed exile during the Second World War, Karl Polanyi gave clues of an alternative world order in his The Great Transformation. These reflect not only the constituent elements for a fair and lasting peace among equal parties in the future, but also the formative influence of the Central European reality on his wishes. As a matter of fact, this paper in its second part will demonstrate to this effect the strong parallelism among the works of Polanyi and Hayek who remain as poles apart on all other matters concerned.
Today, we find ourselves further removed from the utopia Polanyi and Hayek shared as U.S. as a frustrated hegemonic power is retreating to an imperial project resisted by seemingly structures of global governance such as the United Nations. However, such structures were put into place in the first instance as instruments of US hegemony and their functioning does not comply with truly democratic principles. Therefore it will be argued that our common future cannot be entrusted to them.