Writing Global Trade Governance operationalises a key post-structuralist methodology in order to expand understanding on the institution at the heart of the global political economy. Despite the WTO’s centrality and the growing popularity of methods utilizing discourse theory, no other text has yet demonstrated how these two fields of learning can be productively combined. The book seeks to move beyond existing literatures that assume the WTO to be a structure, institution or normative framework, in order to enquire into the discursive processes of identity formation that make the WTO both possible and contested. The book criticises conventional approaches that treat critical civil society as distinct to the WTO, arguing instead that it is only through including such social practices within the field of relations making the WTO that we can properly understand what makes the WTO work. The book presents an empirical analysis of the discursive character of the present-day WTO (including its formation and operation) and then moves on to evaluate how it is subject to change within a broader social context. The final stage of the book seeks to discuss the impact of the findings on future research, both on the WTO and other institutions. This work is a significant intervention in the literature on the World Trade Organization and the politics of global trade and social movements, and will be of great interest to students and scholars of global governance, discourse theory and international organizations

Examines the effects of television culture on how we conduct our public affairs and how "entertainment values" corrupt the way we think.

"The author focuses on Adam Smith and his contemporaries, who pondered these issues, particularly the nature and development of commercial society. They attempted to come to terms with the claim that, on the one hand, the market was a decisive element in economic progress, and, on the other, that its workings depended upon the release of the immoral desires of fallen men and that its consequences were socially and politically destabilizing. Hont reconstructs the salient features of this controversy between the proponents of market sociability and its most trenchant critics. In doing so, he has helped to locate historically the most important arguments at the heart of the emergence of modernity."--Jacket.