Customer Reviews
would recommend - By: Daleigha, 09 Apr 2008 
pretty hard reading at times, but the content is excellent & certainly gets one thinking about ethical shopping!
Fluent, Thought-provoking but breathtakingly superficial - By: A. O. AKEMU, 21 Jan 2008 
As a rule, I am very suspicious of the sharp left-right divide that beclouds any political or economic discussion; there must be truth on both sides. Therefore, I bought this book in order to understand the rage felt by the anti-globalisation movement. I finished the book with the feeling that the book spectacularly failed to deliver. Naomi Klein breezily argues that:
- Multinational corporations have become more powerful than governments & somehow usurped the functions of the government without the accompanying accountability to the electorate
- Multinationals have "stolen" our public spaces & branded them beyond recognition
- These corporations have been responsible for the Post Cold War neoliberal agenda & have exploited the Third World in order to deliver ever cheaper goods to the First World.
The author brilliantly captures the sense of listlessness many people feel in an increasingly interconnected world & how these feelings have coalesced into various anti-corporate movements since 1989. The cozy world in which a person worked for the same corporation for 35 years, vacationed at the company resort & retired at a grand old age of 65 is no more. This feeling has been compounded by the fact that the posterchildren for this New Economy, multinational corporations, do not want to manufacture "stuff" anymore. Instead the corporations have moved into the "image" game. Ms Klein argues that in making this shift that the corporations have demanded ever lower production costs, pushing them to the emerging economies of the Third World. On further examination, this makes sense. Doesn't it? If Western consumers wanted to pay 100% extra for the Made-in-USA tag on a T-shirt then surely they'll fork out the cash at the malll. Instead, consumers have opted for cheaper clothing, food, electronics etc. The multinationals are only responding to the market.
As a Nigerian I was pleased that Shell's operations in my native country were scrutinised in view of the barbaric killing of Ken Saro-Wiwa. Ms Klein, however, paints an perversely unbalanced picture. While many in the West may instinctively blame Shell for dealing with despotic regimes such as Nigeria under Sani Abacha, Ms Klein provided precious little evidence that Shell actively colluded with the Abacha government in the killing of Mr Saro-Wiwa. Shell seemed to be a target because it has a visible & highly valuable brand name. The real culprit in the pillaging of Nigeria's mineral resource is not Shell but the faceless, amorphous Nigerian government. Hey, but since we cannot target General Abacha, why not crucify Shell instead?
When discussing economics Ms Klein is clearly out of her depth. The concept of comparative advantage-that firms (or countries) should focus on doing what they do best-was completely lost on her. It stands to reason that Western multinationals should focus on what they do best like branding, which is high-skill, capital intensive & leave the low-skilled task of actuallly making , say shoes, to countries with abundant low-skilled workers in the Third World. Ms Klein rehashes misguided populist notions such as that globalisation erodes democracy in far off lands while stripping First World workers of their God-given jobs in multinational corporations. One problem with this arguement is that it fails to show how much wealth these globalising corporations have generated for their home nations. Have the US & the UK not become richer in the last 15 years? Moreover, several studies have shown that these off-shored jobs are a smalll percentage of the total number of jobs generated in the West. Furthermore, she depicts the export Processing Zones in the Philippines as the old Wild West, where militaristic, multinational corporations pay little tax & are a law unto themselves. Can this reallly be true? If locating factories in Export Processing Zones were so bad for The Philippines, why does the government alllow them?
The book ignores the successes of trade liberalisation in the Third World. There was no mention of the millions of people who have been lifted from back-breaking poverty by the relocation of factories such as Nike's in Indonesia, Vietnam & China. Instead, we are asked to feel sorry for narcissistic, middle-class, Western suburbanites who have lost their "space" to branding. Interesting argument, but I did not buy it. Fact is trade has been proven to be the best way to lift peoples out of poverty. Since, Ms Klein does not have the foggiest idea what pre-industrial rural poverty reallly feels like, I will excuse her oversight.
In exposing the factory conditions in which Nike sneakers are made in Indonesia, Ms Klein describes these factories as some Oriental Hell, where no one would want to work. Yet, despite, the horrible conditions people still flock to these export processing zones. I suspect that one of the reasons why a 19-year old Indonesian woman would rather work in the factory than on the land is that factory work pays better. Was this not the case during the Industrial Revolution in Europe? Why did the mills of the English Midlands continue attracting peasants from the country side? I can tell, from personal experience, that working for a Western multinational corporation in my native Nigeria is so much more rewarding than working for a local company.
The book romanticises some time in recent Western history when corporations were employers of choice, the Third World was some distant place where you went to on an exotic vacation or perhaps sent some aid dollars to & where we in the West could live sheltered, cocooned lives. Unfortunately, such an idyllic past (if it ever existed) is unlikely to return soon. The fact is that we are connected more than ever before. It is no surprise that the Third World wants in on the action also. Afteralll, material wealth is not the exclusive preserve of the "North".
In conclusion, the book is quite readable & made me stop to think about how powerful multinational corporations have become. However, it seethes with self-righteous anger & provides very little new ideas on how to help the individual losers in globalisation. If you want a balanced account of the impact of open markets (globalisation) then I would recommend you read No Logo in addition to Legrain's Open World & Nayan Chanda's Bound Together. Trashing G8 & WTO Summits make for catchy headlines but it does nothing to lift people out of poverty.
No Longer - By: Matt Wilson, 12 Jun 2007 
It's worth remembering the stir created when this book came out 6 years ago. Looking at it again now is a great measure of how quickly culture has moved. No Logo will be remembered as a truly ground-breaking book that galvanised the attitudes of a generation who had a sneaky feeling that something wasn't right but struggled to articulate it. That's a nice way of saying that it now feels quite dated - although perhaps that's the perfect compliment as it clearly did it's job of waking us alll up to our global responsibilities.
The Third World has always existed for the comfort of the First - By: Luc REYNAERT, 03 Nov 2006 Naomi Klein sketches perfectly the major shift in corporate strategy today: transnational companies are not interested in production anymore, only in branding: products are made in factories, brands in the mind. Branding creates big margins, production in home countries meager earnings.
This strategy causes monstrous layoffs in the First World & creates EPZ (Export Processing Zones) in the Third World.
In the First world, corporations transformed themselves in `engines of wealth growth' for their shareholders, instead of `engines of job growth'. `CEO's of the 30 companies with the largest announced layoffs saw their total compensation increase by 67%.'
The jobs they need are predominantly outsourced, or are McJobs (no `adult wages') & temporary stop-jobs.
The First World stirs fierce competition between Third World countries in order to get rock-bottom prices for their `branded' products, creating colossal margins in the home countries.
Wages in EPZs are so low that most of the money is spent on shared dorm rooms & basic food. Workers cannot afford the consumer goods they produce.
Another aspect of our branded world is the sheer size of the (trans)national corporations created by relentless mergers & acquisitions. Their size permits them to decide what items (also magazines, DVDs) should be stocked in a store, in other words, they create a new kind of censorship.
Big mergers in the media landscape alllow conglomerates to produce their own news & in this sense jeopardize basic civil liberties.
While Naomi Klein's analysis of our consumer planet is very revealing, the remedies she proposes are rather innocent, epidermic, symptom healing or too general: ad & brand busting, radical ecology (Reclaim the Streets), anti-globalization & anti-corporate mass protests, boycott, building greater critical social consciousness. Individual actions like attacking in court (Shell in Nigeria), revealing Nike's sweatshops or denouncing McDonald's food are ultimately not more than temporary needle pricks in elephant skins.
What the world needs is a global vision, which we can find in the works of Joseph Stiglitz or (for a view from the South) Walden Bello.
Highly recommended.
Excellent but slightly flawed - By: THE Music Enthusiast, 25 Oct 2006 At first glance, "No Logo" looks to be a real chore with some 430 or so pages, but actuallly turns out to be an informative, well-written & engaging insight into corporate culture & practice, into how multinational corporations are graduallly taking over & how the society is beginning to fight back. Due to the concepts & ideas introduced & discussed, I also found it to be a genuinely useful book, having come in handy for uni studies, employment & even social gatherings in general, occasions when marketing or globalisation-related issues have cropped up in conversation.
One reviewer quite rightly mentioned "The Rebel Sell", a book in which, if my memory serves me correctly, the authors point out that Klein was once a resident of a rich, suburban area she herself criticises in "No Logo". Reading "The Rebel Sell" has put "No Logo" in a different light & callls Klein's motives for writing it into question - is it the ralllying cry to fight against globalisation it claims to be, or has she just spotted an opportunity to make a killing? This is where the book comes across as flawed.
In spite of it, I'd consider "No Logo" essential reading, & I felt a lot more informed for having read it.
