Globalization, Enterprise, and Governance

Abstract

Globalization is about borderless nations, stateless firms, infirm states, and a new frontier -- without frontiers. That's the Reader's Digest version, popular with cocktail party cognoscenti and among those who imagine themselves, someday, attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Globalization is emerging as the defining historical phenomenon of our times, transforming structures and conditioning outcomes across an expansive range of endeavour. It is a work in progress, a new order under construction, an expression of power relationships. Given the relentless diffusion of the mass media and entertainment industries and rising levels of trade and international investment, travel and immigration, education and communications, it seems likely that more of the same is in train. Loved or loathed, globalization can be resisted, but it can't be ignored.Simply put, globalization is working at the supranational level to create a single world society. This is possible because fundamental change -- greater interdependence and technological capacity; increased mobility of most factors of production; higher levels of market integration and liberalization; and deregulation, privatization, and a reduced role for government -- has reshaped the world economy.Globalization is an active and comprehensive process in which a critical range of activities -- economic, social, and cultural -- are transferred to the global scale. Because they contribute to insecurity and threaten democratization, the political implications of globalization, too often overlooked, are profound. Perhaps more than anything else, the striking speed of globalization has generated attention. To date, and quite understandably, the negative aspects of globalization have dominated the debate. But because the process is dialectic in nature, it also provides opportunities for creative response. This aspect of globalization has been lost in much of the contemporary commentary. Those with a limited tolerance for ambiguity or uncertainty, be forewarned. It is extremely difficult to assign precise cause and effect to the various impacts of globalization. In some cases it accelerates or exacerbates change already under way, and in others the causal relationship is ambivalent or unclear.The Big Picture, TransformedAs the industrial age is supplanted by the information age, many economic constructions, political relationships, and diplomatic conventions established in the wake of the Second World War are being overtaken by events. Among a variety of colossal shifts, the end of the cold war and the dissolution of the Soviet empire, accelerated modernization and urbanization, and the dynamic emergence of the Asia-Pacific region figure prominently. Simultaneously, the triumph of transnational structures and forces has shifted much of the action beyond the purview of governments. In both theoretical and practical terms, many traditional assumptions which have informed our perceptions and underpinned the legitimacy of institutions and activities have become obsolete.The exchange of goods among countries is being dwarfed by trade in services and the exchange of both goods and services within and between corporations: one third of world trade now occurs among units of the same firm. The lines between national and international, domestic and foreign are no longer clear, if they exist at all. The rules, players, and games are changing. Among and inside regions and countries, provinces and people, gaps are widening. This metamorphosis of the global political economy will affect the lives of individuals, the balance sheets of corporations, and the survival prospects of governments. Few will emerge unaffected.The animus of globalization is corporate, its mantra is the marketplace, and its creed, adjustment. Globalization, the highest cosmopolitan expression of capital, is the apotheosis of the neoliberal imagination and its most advanced manifestation. …