Richard P. Appelbaum, Ph.D., is Distinguished Professor Emeritus and former MacArthur Foundation Chair in Global and International Studies and Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He has previously served as chair of the Sociology Department 1988-1992, Director of the Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research 1993-2005 (ISBER), co-founder of the UCSB Global & International Studies Program, and served as the founding Director of its M.A program (2005-2012). He is currently Professor at Fielding Graduate University, where he chairs the doctoral concentration on Sustainability Leadership.
He received his B.A. from Columbia University, M.P.A. from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He has been a Simon Visiting Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Manchester, England, and an Honorary Visiting Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Hong Kong. Between 1964-1966 he served as on a Ford Foundation program a consultant to the Oficina Nacional de Planeamiento y Urbanismo (ONPU), Lima, Peru.
Professor Appelbaum has received numerous awards and commendations for excellence in teaching, including the UCSB Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award in the Social Sciences. He has served as an elected Council Member of the Political Economy of the World-System Section of the American Sociological Association, as well as its President. He is on the Board of Consulting Editors of the Encyclopedia of Housing and the Encyclopedia of Global Studies. He has served as a faculty representative to the University of California Advisory Committee on Trademark Licensing/Designated Suppliers Program, and chairs the Advisory Council of the Workers' Rights Consortium. He is the author of the report of the Los Angeles Jewish Commission on Sweatshops, for which he served as a founding member. In the past, he was co-PI (and served on the Executive Committees of) the NSF-funded Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science, 1999-2004 (CSISS), Spatial Perspectives for Analysis in Curriculum Enhancement, 2003-2009 (SPACE), and the Center for Nanotechnology in Society, 2006-2016 (CNS).
Professor Appelbaum has published extensively in the areas of social theory, urban sociology, public policy, the globalization of business, and the sociology of work and labor. In addition to numerous scholarly papers, he has published policy-related and opinion pieces in the Los Angeles Times and The American Prospect. He has authored or co-authored His recent books include Innovation in China: Challenging the Global Science and Technology System (with Cong Cao, Xueying Han, Rachel Parker, and Denis Simon; Polity Press, 2018; Achieving Workers’ Rights in the Global Economy (co-edited with Nelson Lichtenstein; Cornell University Press, 2016); Can Emerging Technologies Make a Difference in Development? (co-edited with Rachel Parker, Routledge, 2012); Towards a Critical Globalization Studies (co-edited with William I. Robinson, Routledge, 2005); States and Economic Development in the Asian Pacific Rim (with Jeffrey Henderson; Sage, 1992); Behind the Label: Inequality in the Los Angeles Garment Industry (with Edna Bonacich; University of California Press, 2000); Rules and Networks: The Legal Culture of Global Business Transactions (co-edited with William L.F. Felstiner and Volkmar Gessner; Oxford, England: Hart, 2001; and Introduction to Politics and Economics (an edited collection of readings; Kendall-Hunt 2004).
He is also co-author (with Anthony Giddens, Mitchell Duneier, and Deborah Carr) of Introduction to Sociology, currently in its 11th edition (W.W. Norton). He is a founding editor (and currently emeritus editor) of Competition and Change: The Journal of Global Business and Political Economy.
Professor Appelbaum is currently engaged in two principal research projects: a multi-disciplinary study of labor conditions in supply chain networks in the Asian-Pacific Rim, and a study of high technology development in China.
Ph.D., Sociology, University of Chicago, 1971
M.P.A., Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, 1966
B.A., Public Law and Government, Columbia University, 1964
Rules and Networks: The Legal Culture of Global Business Transactions pdf by Richard Appelbaum
International business transactions are heavily influenced by culture,practice and rule. The pursuit of business relationships within nation-states can be subject to differences in the generation of norms and the processing of disputes, but these conflicts are magnified many times over in cross-border transactions where nation-state control and support is weak or absent. This book seeks different explanations of the ways in which business people and their legal advisers try to minimise the effect of these magnified difficulties. At the outset the editors suggest four sources through which the international business community might be considered to have supplemented nation-state conflict prevention and dispute resolution institutions-an international legal order; the development of a private normative order based on common business practices (denominated the lex mercatoria); through the efforts and work product of internationalised law firms, and by means of extensive, thick personal relationships often referred to by their Chinese term guanxi. Since most explanations are dominated by North American and European legal scholarship and practice, a second concern of this book is to open up the discussion to competing explanatory frameworks. Specifically, it develops the notion that global legal convergence may not be the immediate, inevitable result of increased global economic interaction. Rather, less formal mechanisms for achieving normative understanding and predictability in business dealings may also flourish.