How do our everyday actions shape and transform the world economy? This volume of original essays argues that current scholarship in international political economy (IPE) is too highly focused on powerful states and large international institutions. The contributors examine specific forms of 'everyday' actions to demonstrate how small-scale actors and their decisions can shape the global economy. They analyse a range of seemingly ordinary or subordinate actors, including peasants, working classes and trade unions, lower-middle and middle classes, female migrant labourers and Eastern diasporas, and examine how they have agency in transforming their political and economic environments. This book offers a novel way of thinking about everyday forms of change across a range of topical issues including globalisation, international finance, trade, taxation, consumerism, labour rights and regimes. It will appeal to students and scholars of politics, international relations, political economy and sociology,

‘Hobson, Seabrooke and the contributors to this volume join a select group of scholars who are reconceptualizing the study of the global political economy from the bottom up. The result is a unique set of readings with sophisticated conceptual, policy-relevant and pedagogical implications. This is the most innovative and useful collection of essays to be published in a very long time.’

Robert A. Denemark - University of Delaware

‘Hobson and Seabrooke expertly demonstrate how everyday people have agency in world politics and that agency exists even at the base of the world economy. This book really invites students to become part of a new, incomplete, but exciting research programme – a challenge to which many will want to rise.’

Craig N. Murphy - M. Margaret Ball Professor of International Relations, Department of Political Science, Wellesley College

'This collection succeeds admirably in setting out an exciting new research and teaching agenda for IPE. Its innovative analysis of how the majority of the world’s population shapes the global economy will be taken up by many other scholars.'

Robert O’Brien - Professor of Global Labour Issues, McMaster University

‘This imaginative volume offers an unusual bottom-up perspective in a field that wraps the practice of everyday life in the convention of mathematics and the language of institutions. In making this move, Seabrooke, Hobson and colleagues succeed in shifting our attention to an area of social life that conventional analyses of political economy rarely reach. A book that opens new ways of thinking about questions of political economy.’

Peter J. Katzenstein - Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies, Cornell University

' … this book should be credited for signalling a much-needed ontological shift in international political economy …'

Source: Development and Change