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World Is Flat: The Impact of Globalization on the United States
In the best-selling book The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman provides a well-researched series of chapters that detail how globalization and the congruency of cultures is making country-level differentiation more challenging to achieve. His contention is that globalization is being caused by the combination of Internet-based technologies and platforms, combined with low-cost labor and higher educational standards in emerging nations (Leamer, 115). Throughout the book he makes a very convincing argument that the United States has lost the ability to compete with its core strengths of intelligence and industriousness, and has become too complacent to the point of having an entitlement mindset (Harvey, Novicevic, et.al.). There are many implications for the United States throughout this book, with two disused below.
Analysis of Globalization's Impact on the United States
The most ironic and impactful...
The motivation for this strategy on the part of call center operators throughout India is to gain the trust of American consumers, and have the telephone interchanges be productive ones that lead to higher satisfaction levels. The strategy works well in the scenarios portrayed in the book. Yet as ironic and entertaining as these vignettes are of Indian nationals learning how to speak and sound like Americans, there is the fact that a college-educated Indian considers it an honor to even work in a call center (Leamer, 114). Such is not the case for the typical American who has been college-educated, who has a far higher level of expectation than that, bordering at times on an entitlement mentality. The eagerness of intelligent, college-trained Indian workers to take on what many in America consider menial, even mundane and…
Works Cited
Harvey, Michael G., and Milorad M. Novicevic. "The World is Flat: A Perfect Storm for Global Business?" Organizational dynamics 35.3 (2006): 207-19.
Leamer, Edward E. "A Flat World, a Level Playing Field, a Small World After all, Or None of the Above? A Review of Thomas L. Friedman's the World is Flat." Journal of Economic Literature 45.1 (2007): 1-126.
Yet Mr. Friedman does not go to this depth of analysis and relies instead of lengthy, conversational passages in the book that could be trimmed and made more potent, relevant and valuable. The concept Mr. Friedman discusses of the Untouchables is altogether too elitist as well, and this chapter of the book is an illusion; there is no job safe in a globalized world. Only those willing to compete
Friedman considers insourcing to be flattener number eight, because it allows small companies to compete like major supply-chain companies. Insourcing refers to hiring another company to handle a company's supply chain. UPS is the major supplier for insourcing services in the United States. Friedman believes that insourcing flattens in three ways: by letting little companies compete in the global market; by dissolving barriers between companies; and by standardizing business
Similarly, Chapter Eight, "This Is Not a Test," is a must read for every CEO, manager and government official. In this chapter, Friedman has highlighted that "lifetime employment is a form of fat that a flat world simply cannot sustain any longer" (p. 284) (Jones, 2005). He argued for a policy of "lifetime employability," which is a kind of social agreement between government and business and the people that, in
Globalization and Taxes Globalization Competition for Taxes One of the most difficult issues regarding the state regulation of their tax relations in regard to international business is the presence of various "tax havens" that are present across the globe in today's modern economy. According to some estimates, as much as half of the world's stock of money either resides in tax havens or passes through them (Palan, 2002). The term tax haven has
World is Flat" is taken from a metaphorical point-of-view to highlight the development and advancement of technology in the world. The author, Thomas Friedman, asserts that the world has become flatter because technology together with other factors has turned the world into a smaller place. The author describes the manner in which technology has made the world become more competitive and elucidates what is necessary to compete in this
The current construction of World-Systems analysis holds that core countries, including America, Europe's thriving economies, and developed nations in Africa and Asia, derive enormous economic and political power from "the axial division of labor of a capitalist world-economy (that) divides production into core-like products and peripheral products" (Wallerstein 28). Madagascar's relative abundance of untapped natural resources, in the form of massive "old-growth" tropical rainforests, and deposits of minerals like