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In 2006 electronics giant Apple was drawn into an ethical dispute after reports surfaced that manufacturing company Foxconn, a US $16 Billion dollar a year giant and supplier to Apple, was mistreating workers in its plants in China and other Asian countries . This highlights the notion brought forward by Evelyn Hu-Dehart that core investors in the “New World Order” have been freed from the corporate responsibility of ensuring minimum standards of living for their employees through a restructuring of the relationship between the core, semi-periphery and periphery regions of the world .

The 'dependency' school of thought that emerged during the 1970's placed emphasis on an idea known as the 'core-periphery' model . In this model it is held that a strong economic core will emerge, centralising tendencies will promote rapid growth in the core at the expense of surrounding peripheries. The forces of concentration that promote core growth are known as polarization effects – the core grows at the expense of the periphery. The core then absorbs four critical development factors: Capital, labour, innovation and services. Capital investment is brought into the core, which slows periphery growth; younger and more educated workers are attracted to the core; innovation inside the core brings about new and improved industries and finally; the cores fast growth creates a more service rich environment, attracting future investment . The semi-periphery is the 'middleman' who acts as a mediator between the core and periphery .

On an international scale the model applies to nation states exploiting other states for cheap materials, land and, most prominently in the modern day, labour. Previously it was seen that colonialism was the means to extract cheap goods and raw materials from the peripheries, now the dependency of the periphery on the core lies more with a phenomenon known as neo-colonialism. Rather than entire nation states forcing dependence...