You are teaching “Studying Global Commerce.” Tell us about your course.
Fink: The Global Commerce in Culture and Society (GCCS) track offers students powerful analytical tools to understand the world economy from a liberal-arts perspective. A foundational insight is that economic institutions take a wide range of shapes and forms across countries and industries. “Studying Global Commerce” allows students to appreciate the specificity of, say, the forestry industry in Indonesia. Even the shipping container, which has become a visual shorthand for an ostensibly placeless world economy, was invented in a particular social and cultural context, and we explore that context.
“Studying Global Commerce” also engages deeply with representations of the world economy. Students reverse-engineer exemplars of five genres: business journalism, reports by international organizations, public-policy briefings, NGO reports, and corporate sustainability reports. Because such publications do not only reflect but also reshape the world economy, we discuss their assumptions, strengths, and limitations.
Your background is in sociology, particularly economic sociology and political economy. How do these disciplines influence your approach to global commerce and how does this come out in your course?
Fink: I approach the world economy as an invitation to develop what C. Wright Mills called the sociological imagination: an understanding of how seemingly big structures and small individuals are connected. In a globalized world, this link can take surprising forms. In the first week of “Studying Global Commerce,” we read an ethnography of artisans in Thailand and Costa Rica who continue to produce objects locally not because they manage to keep foreign products out, but because they engage in sophisticated displays of expertise and tradition that draw foreign tourists in. What appeals to these tourists is not necessarily representative of local uses decades ago.
