Dickinson and Schaeffer raise the standard for research on social change and collective action by arguing that transformations of work and gender can be traced to protest on a global scale as diverse as movements for social justice, democratization, women's rights, corporate responsibility, and environmentalism. The evidence is detailed, the analysis compelling.

John Walton, University of California - Davis

This is an ambitious and thought-provoking study of changes in global work patterns over the last thirty years. Fast Forward lucidly analyzes the often hidden relationships, which link North and South and sustain privilege across local, regional and global differences of class, gender, colour and age. The authors see hope in the destabilization of capitalist institutions and the breakdown of oppressive gender relations. They show how working people around the world are organizing to resist the impact of global capital in their daily lives and on the environment and to create new social alternatives.

Anna Davin, Middlesex University, London

Fast Forward offers an admirable discussion of the big picture concerning working class labor in the global village...quite instructive in piecing togehter an understanding of how the world economy may be best conceptualized as on organism having many parts, rather than as many countries that have no formal relationship to on another aside from political dialogue.

Contemporary Sociology

This book is a well thought-out synthesis of developments in the organization of work and its impact on working people around the world.

American Journal of Sociology

Schaeffer and Dickinson paint an extremely challenging view of the new global economy-a view that is clearly at odds with what you will hear at most thinktanks and universities.

John B. Judis, Senior Editor, The New Republic