This collection of essays explores in concrete anthropological detail the ways that people throughout the world have been drawn into the new international labour web created by multinational corporations and the world capitalist market.

At the same time, the authors' investigations provide concrete evidence of local efforts to create culturally distinct and socially equitable lives and show how the spread of the world capitalist economy changes the everyday lives of people. They point to ways in which people use their local traditions of kinship, culture, and community to resist and shape economic change to more satisfying local ends.

"Introduction - the emerging global factory and anthropology", Michael L. Blim. Part 1 Global production and the mobility of capital: "What happens to the past? Return industrial migrants in Latin America", Frances Abrahamer Rothstein
"Capitalist production in a socialist society - the transfer of manufacturing from Hong Kong to China", Alan Smart and Josephine Smart
"NRI investment and India's drive for industrial modernization", Johanna Lessinger. Part 2 The new industrial diversity: "Small-scale industrialization in a rapidly changing world market", Michael L. Blim
"Spanish Galician industrialization and the Europe of 1992 - a contextual analysis", Hans C. Buechler and Judith-Maria Buechler
"The unexpected entrepreneurs - small high-technology firms, technology transfer and regional development in Wales and northeast England", Douglas Caulkins
"Rural industrial enterprise and socialism with Chinese characteristics'", Eugene Cooper and Xiong Pan
"Informal sectorization of Egyptian petty commodity production", Kristin Koptiuch
"Industrial decentralization and women's employment in South Africa - a case study", Georgina Jaffee. Part 3 Worker struggles and survival in the new insutrial world: "Labour-managed systems and industrial redevelopment - lessons from the Fagor co-operative group of Mondragon", Davydd J. Greenwood
"Tobacco, textiles and Toyota - working for MNCs in rural Kentucky", Ann E. Kingsolver
"Women as political actors in rural Puerto Rico - continuity and change", Ida Susser
"Women workers and the labour movement in Korea", Seung-Kyung Kim
"Conclusion - new waves and old - industrialization, labour and the struggle for a new world order", Frances Abrahamer Rothstein.