Vignettes

Where's the value in globalization?

You can find Cosmopolitan on news­stands in Korea, India, Russia, Greece, Brazil, China, and 50 other countries. How did the idea of the “fun, fearless female” go global — and pull in profits for Hearst?

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With consumers becoming increasingly concerned about how their goods are produced, international companies are faced with managing conditions — as well as productivity — all along their supply chains. In many cases, that means finding ways to oversee factories in China.

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Global commerce would be impossible without the movement of information — contracts, arrangements, plans, blueprints. Before the digital revolution transformed many of these things into bits and pixels, there was a postal revolution that improved the speed of information flow around the world.

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Recent comments from the Q5 community

Comment from How does business value human rights?

Read Christine Bader's BusinessWeek op-ed "Change Big Business From the Inside."

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Comment from Can the business of food impact climate change?

Helene,

You are truly doing state-of-the-art work. More than 40% of Costa Rica's carbon footprint comes from agriculture. However, it's a challenge no one seems to be tackling here. People are quick to focus on energy (transport) and industrial process emissions.

I wonder if you could share some of the tools you have used to show people how to reduce carbon footprints. I liked your approach of making non-meat items more tasty instead of just removing meat products from the shelf.

Thanks for sharing your story. It's great to hear another SOMer making a difference on climate, especially in the ramp up to Copenhagen.

Cheers,
Roberto Jimenez '09

Posted by Roberto Jimenez
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Comment from Is China the new global star?

The policy of free economy is very important to help chinese company to grow up and spur the economy.And the golobalization enviroment really help educate so many chinese students and employees.

Posted by Zhu Heng
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Comment from How do foreign companies market to India?

There has class of people who learned western culture are easy to accept the forgin products,no matter where it produced,they just care about the taste and price;but the bottom line is don't touch their religious belief.Make advertisement to this this people can really help,anyway,your company should share a profit with local government.

Posted by Zhu Heng
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Comment from How has trade shaped the world?

A ghost fleet of more than 500 ships sit at anchor near Singapore. A story in the Mail Online describes the “biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history. Their numbers are equivalent to the entire British and American navies combined; their tonnage is far greater. Container ships, bulk carriers, oil tankers - all should be steaming fully laden between China, Britain, Europe and the US.” Instead they are a dramatic indicator of the slowdown of the global economy. In the last year, the cost to charter a tanker capable of carrying 80,000 tons of cargo dropped from $50,000 a day to $5,500.

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Comment from Where's the value in globalization?

Globalization will result in the loss of country identity and sovereignty
among other things. Corporate profits at the expense of all things and
ideals. Corporations running countries, its crazy when you really think about it and the potential outcome. Similar the the movie "Robocop".
But instead of corporations running a city like Detroit or a country
like the US. Corporations are running the world. Everything geared and engineered toward corporate profits. Corporate ownership.

Imagine saying, "I plead an allegiance to AIG and to the subsidiaries for
which it stands". Two thirds of the world population is already locked out of world prosperity. That percentage is on the raise worldwide, and is now on the rise in the US with 15-18% of the population in poverty. Depending on what numbers you use. High long term unemployment and low wages will be key components in those poverty numbers.

Posted by George Orwell
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Comment from Can you say 'Cosmo' in Russian?

Women’s magazines have been faring poorly at the newsstand according to recent data. The New York Times has a snapshot on the numbers and the business.

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Comment from Has globalization failed in Nigeria?

What’s right with Africa? Foreign Policy presents a set of facts that may give a different perspective on the state of the continent, while recognizing challenges.

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Comment from Where does Africa fit in the globalization puzzle?

Foreign Policy presents a sobering photo essay to accompany the release of the annual failed state index documenting the least stable parts of the world.

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Comment from What's the lesson of Iceland's collapse?

An article in the Telegraph covers the aftereffects of Iceland's spectacular economic explosion. "Iceland's great lurch towards casino capitalism over the last decade has a cultural logic. 'We are a fishing culture: when the herring is there, we take it.'" Apparently the country also knew how to endure a painful readjustment with a devaluation of the currency. Now, having taken its medicine, there are signs it may be recovering faster than other countries.

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Comment from How has globalization benefited the poor?

Besides the child labor angle, I'm curious what other negative affects you see coming from Globalization?

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Comment from What's next for globalization?

I would like to see more about management article than marketing. For all of your articles are very interesting. In my opinion I think that next globalization. Government sector should have an important role more than private sector. And each nation should think in co operative more than balance trade. For example industrial country and agriculture country should be support each other in import and export. Suppose cost of material in country B is lower than finished product of country A 50 percent of product price. In the long run which country is growth.The concept of globalization should stand on fair advantage and equality beside profitability.

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Comment from Where does Africa fit in the globalization puzzle?

NPR has coverage of a study by MIT economists finding that “in years with higher temperatures, poor countries experienced significantly slower economic growth.” They also graph per-capita GDP and average temperature which reveals cool, rich countries on one end of the spectrum and hot, poor countries on the other.

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Comment from What do we owe the bottom billion?

Singer has a provocative essay in the New York Times magazine bringing up hard questions surrounding the potential need to ration healthcare.

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Comment from Is China the new global star?

The Economist covers a worrying trend associated with China's increasing presence around the world. Despite major investment in infrastructure in countries around the world, anti-Chinese violence is growing against the communities of resident Chinese workers.

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Comment from Where does Africa fit in the globalization puzzle?

Qn also talked with Michael Watts, of the University of California, Berkeley and editor of the Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta. He discussed the impacts of Nigeria's 500-year history of interacting with the global economy.

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Comment from Has globalization failed in Nigeria?

Qn also talked with Todd Moss, an Africa expert with the Center for Global Development, about Africa's integration in world markets, why trade between African countries is so hard, and the role of outside powers such as China.

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Comment from How do foreign companies market to India?

Every market can be visualised like a pyramid, where at the apex is the set of consumers who are seeking to align themselves strongly with global/western values (unfortunately in today's world these two terms are quite synonymous, hopefully it will change in the years to come).

So multinational brands that enter a market based on their global values tend to only appeal to the consumers who are in the apex of this pyramid.
However, it is the base of this pyramid where the larger set of consumers exists. And these consumers have a more local world view and don't embrace a brand just because of their global/western lineage. When brands do manage build a relationship with these consumers based on local insights their volumes increase dramatically and they become a true mass brand.

The shape of this pyramid would vary from market to market, so if a market is culturally more atuned to western values, its apex will be larger and the base of the pyramid would be comparatively narrower, one would expect a market like Philippines to behave in such a manner. While markets that are culturally more insular the apex will be narrow and...

Posted by Navonil Roy
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Comment from Is globalization endangered?

Decoupling, which posited, among other things, that emerging economies would be able to weather any downturn among developed countries, was held in great favor before the economic crisis reverberated around the world. According to an article in the New York Times, the theory is gaining supporters again as emerging economies seem to be emerging from the recession faster than Japan and the Western economies. At least one economist warns that capital flooding to these emerging markets might create the same sort of bubble seen in Latin America during the 1970s.

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Comment from Is the Gates Foundation remaking education?

Research by McKinsey puts the economic cost of the education gap at $2.3 trillion for 2008. This includes both gaps between U.S. students and students from other countries and gaps among students within the U.S. from “differing ethnic origins, income levels, and school systems, according the McKinsey Quarterly. “Together, these disturbing gaps underscore the staggering economic and social cost of underutilized human potential.”

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Comment from How do you take a brand global?

This is a fascinating discussion of marketing and strategy. The emphasis on using the global reach of the internet as part of your marketing strategy is essential for anyone moving into a foreign market. In combination with this is maintaining consistency with your message and look for overall marketing formats. You want your customers to be able to recognize you whether they see your promotional efforts on the web or in print.

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Comment from Did the mail shape globalization?

From an article in the New York Times: "The Swiss postal service has started redirecting some mail from the letter box to the in-box.

A program introduced by the Swiss Post in June allows subscribers to receive scans of their unopened envelopes by e-mail message and then decide which ones they want opened and scanned in their entirety, to be read online.

Subscribers can also ask to have the contents archived, send unopened letters to another address or have them shredded and recycled."

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Comment from What do we owe the bottom billion?

Qn's conversation with Yale faculty Edward H. Kaplan and A. David Paltiel echoes Singer's comments on how we value lives. Kaplan and Paltiel have collaborated to bring business analyses to public health issues including best approaches to reducing the spread of HIV/AIDS. Paltiel said, "I have a collection in my files of instances where important people — usually politicians — have said, more or less, ‘Even if it saves one life, it's worth it.' Now, that sounds beautiful, and there's even a biblical reference — ‘He who saves just one life saves the entire world.' But I think most of us coming out of SOM recognize that one wants, when thinking about whether something is ‘worth it,' to ask the question ‘compared to what?' One wants to ask about opportunity costs, and what else might I have been able to purchase with that investment instead? That's the kind of question one does not hear in the discourse around health and medicine."

Read the entire discussion in Q3.

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Comment from Who owns the crisis?

Simon Johnson writes in the Baseline Scenario blog that the "official view" of the global economic crisis is that it was created by an unfortunate confluence of rare events and is best fixed by bailouts and support of the financial sector. Johnson goes on to describe a second view, "If the size, nature, and clout of finance is the problem, then…pumping resources into the financial sector delays the day of reckoning and likely increases its costs. More likely, the Mother of All Bailouts is storing up serious problems for the near-term future."

The Financial Times has an article on rising salaries in the banking sector. "In spite of the troubled environment, market rates for bankers have been running close to the boom-time highs of two years ago." It goes on to explain that the phenomenon is "partly driven by a need to hold on to good staff – and partly to offset the threat of bonus taxes or caps in the US – UBS, Merrill and Morgan Stanley have all increased their basic pay substantially. Citi now plans to do the same."

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Comment from What do we owe the bottom billion?

I think Peter points out a key element of why people find it difficult to imagine that 27,000 children die everyday from hunger related diseases. I helped World Vision to move from the abstract to the concrete when they had their world hunger campaign in Australia, but telling them to talk about 21 children dying every minute, but emphasizing the point, by showing all sorts of children in their campaign (not just emaciated, predominantly "African" children, which is their usual approach. The difficulty for many is coming to terms with 27,000, but your own child, or a child you know, is much easier to empathize with.

Empathy is one of the key issues here - research on donors to charities found that an increase in income did not correlate with an increase in altruism, or empathy with others who were not as well off. Successful business people may find it difficult to feel altruism, whether it is for the poor, or whether it is related to consuming products to benefit others, because the non-poor, or the ethical consumer, has to know that the poor exist, or has to have some experience of being exploited.

Posted by Paul Harrison
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Comment from What do we owe the bottom billion?

For more about The Life You Can Save visit the book’s website. For additional information about Peter Singer’s work, visit his website.

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Comment from Where's the value in globalization?

Various ways of gathering data from cell phones are being developed. The Economist covers a few of the interesting possibilities being explored, including using information extracted from the text messages sent to rural health clinics in the Mekong Bason as real-time disease data that can speed responses to disease outbreaks. Another system tracks the movements of phones and can be used for big-picture urban planning decisions on where to locate rail stations or smaller-scale choices such as where to place emergency exits in a building.

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Comment from Has globalization failed in Nigeria?

The Guardian reports that "The oil giant Shell has agreed to pay $15.5m in settlement of a legal action in which it was accused of having ¬collaborated in the execution of the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other leaders of the Ogoni tribe of southern Nigeria." The article goes on to say that many believe the settlement may impact decision-making by multinational corporations around social and environmental issues.

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Comment from How do foreign companies market to India?

The pitchman is alive and well in India—and bringing the fruits of globalization to people in the countryside. A feature story in the Wall Street Journal follows Sandeep Sharma as he hawks products in rural parts of the country where traditional advertising mediums such as TV, radio, and newspapers aren't widely available. Whether it is Nokia cell phones, Castrol oil, or Nestle noodles, Sharma has sold it with a mix of showmanship and knowledge of local needs and culture.

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Comment from Where does Africa fit in the globalization puzzle?

Todd Moss is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. For more on these issues, see his book African Development: Making Sense of the Issues and Actors.

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Comment from Where's the value in globalization?

"As a business leader, imagine trying to manage more than 7,000 scientists from 85 countries around the world—with their own languages, cultures, and expertise—on a 20-year collaboration to create the most complex system ever built." This Businessweek article catalogs the management challenges of running the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland are cataloged in, and the innovative systems the organization has put in place to succeed.

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Comment from Where's the value in globalization?

Dani Rodrik, professor of international political economy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, takes on the question of trade liberalization in a blog post. Focusing on the most potent policy steps the U.S. could take on its own, and considering the possibility of adverse movements in income distribution, he proposes “liberalize agricultural trade, and expand visa quotas for highly skilled foreign workers.”

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Comment from What can values do for globalization?

The Wilson Quarterly has an article exploding many of the myths of demographic shifts around the world while exploring the likely possibility of shifting populations reshaping the world’s religious landscape in the coming century.

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Comment from How has trade shaped the world?

For more on William J. Bernstein's work, including the introduction to A Splendid Exchange, visit his website.

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Comment from Do we need a global regulator?

A clear result of the economic crisis: the IMF has been pushed to sharpen its definition of a global recession. The Wall Street Journal’s Real Time Economics blog gives a capsule history of IMF recession standards as well as a chart of what the new standards tell us about past recessions and the year to come.

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Comment from Is globalization endangered?

An essay on McKinsey’s What Matters website puts the impact of the current economic crisis on global sourcing into historical perspective with a quotation from John Maynard Keynes. “The inhabitant of London [in August 1914] could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep.” World War I made clear to the Londoner the progress of globalization is not entirely regular and predictable, but it is a lesson many forgot. The authors give advice on how to move forward given our own recent shake-up, with a particular focus on the way political realities impinge on global business activity.

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Comment from How does business value human rights?

Christine Bader is profiled on the Yale SOM website.

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Comment from How does business value human rights?

Thanks for a really interesting article. I think there's been some real progress in this field in recent years. Yale should be very proud of Christine Bader.

Posted by Matt Stephens
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Comment from Has globalization failed in Nigeria?

Christine Bader '00 discusses the relationship between business and human rights with Qn. She offers perspectives from both her work with BP and her current role as Advisor to the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Business and Human Rights.

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Comment from How does business value human rights?

As part of the Faith and Globalization Initiative sponsored by Yale and the Tony Blair Foundation, Christine Bader and Tim Collins, Senior Managing Director and CEO of Ripplewood Holdings, discussed building business practices that are tied to principles of social responsibility.



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Comment from What is Nollywood?

This is interesting and I'd love to see visual references to the films discussed here to get a sense of the level of production value. I'm not aware of broadband's penetration in Nigeria, but it's interesting to consider the effect something like YouTube would have on this particular industry, and how it connects people in both the home country and the diaspora.

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Comment from Has globalization failed in Nigeria?

National Geographic photojournalist Ed Kashi took the photos of Nigeria that appeared in the book, produced in collaboration with Michael Watts, Curse of the Black Gold. Kashi described what it's like to visit the oil-producing Niger Delta:

"The Delta is an intriguing place. It is verdant — the second largest wetlands in Africa. There is jungle and mangrove swamp run through with streams, rivers and lakes. It is also a place where you turn a corner and there is suddenly a massive flare burning into the sky. It's almost surreal. On the one hand you are in the midst of natural, undeveloped beauty, and then you come upon these industrial works belching black smoke."

See more of Kashi's photographs of Nigeria on his website.

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Comment from What can values do for globalization?

Find out more about Yale's Faith and Globalization Intiative or the Tony Blair Faith Foundation.

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Comment from What is Nollywood?

For more on Nigeria, read Qn's interview with University of California, Berkeley geographer Michael Watts who has researched the oil producing region of the country for some 30 years. Watts has also collaborated with with National Geographic photographer Ed Kashi on Curse of the Black Gold.

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Comment from Can you say 'Cosmo' in Russian?

For more on Hearst's efforts in international markets, read the Yale SOM case study.

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Comment from Is there a global literature?

International editions of books often include cultural translation where "pavements have become sidewalks and mums are moms," according to an article in the Guardian. Now because of a proposal to remove import restrictions on books in Australia, those foreign editions may be competing with the original and perhaps limiting writers ability to present material as they intended, even in their homeland. The article cites author Kate Grenville’s experience. "She was effectively forbidden from lapsing into antipodean idiom.

“Disapproving foreign editors would strike words like 'ute,' 'dunny,' and 'chook' from the page, not because they were crude versions of English which Australians proudly call 'ocker,' but because it was as if she was speaking another tongue. They did not understand that Grenville was describing a 'truck with an open back,' 'an outside toilet,' and 'a cooked chicken.'

"'They wanted me to de-Australianise a lot and if I had said no, I would never have been published overseas,' she said. 'There was a blind cultural assumption that American English was English and I was speaking a very different sub-category which needed subtitles.'"

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Comment from Did the mail shape globalization?

The mail may have laid tracks for later expansions of globalization; it may also have shaped the development of American democracy.

The postal system of the newly formed United States was a marked departure from the norms of the time. The earliest systems were set up entirely for the use of the government, and in times when communication over distance was a significant challenge, expanding access to the general population was commonly seen as a tool that gave too much power to enemies of the state looking to pass secrets. As the American colonies demonstrated, the concern was legitimate; breaking away from the British mail system was a significant step toward fomenting the Revolutionary War. After the war, the new country prioritized an effective postal system as key to having informed citizens. The government heavily subsidized postage on newspapers, which were generally handed around or tacked in a public spot when they reached outpost towns. Access to the mail system was the “the material foundation for American democracy,” according to postal historian Richard R. John, whose book Spreading the News covers the era in depth.

The postal system pushed quickly into the hinterland. At a time when...

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Comment from Has globalization failed in Nigeria?

The Nigerian film industry, Nollywood, has quickly grown into the largest producer of feature films in the world. Generally shooting direct to video and with low budgets, the homegrown industry reminds one film scholar of the early years of Hollywood. Read Qn’s interview with Dudley Andrew to get a glimpse of another aspect of the Nigerian economy.

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