Critical analysis of weblography and online source evaluation

¶ … Diversity, Culture, and Implications for Business" provides an excellent background on the challenges that businesses face when operating abroad. With globalization and the liberalism approach in global economics also came the challenges of cultural differences. When moving around Europe, these differences may be less observable from country to country, but when it involves a country like Japan (mentioned as an example in the article), where culture plays an important role in the business approach, in terms of the ways by which you address the others, by how you present yourself etc., it becomes useful to have someone teach you the basics of the new culture.

On the other hand, the article "Withdrawal from NAFTA and WTO" brings forth a reverse perspective: globalization also means losing jobs for the U.S. individuals to the detriment of lower waged citizens of other countries. The author proposes limited bilateral agreements by which jobs and wages can be protected, an attempt to limit the global liberalization process and, with it, the outsourcing process.

Question 2: The first textbook reference presents a much vaster perspective than the article in that it actually deals with the whole framework of the global economic environment and discusses varied themes like global marketing, a global vision etc. The reference is much more useful in building the idea of a global business environment and explaining how things operate on a global marketing, including in terms of the challenges that companies face.

The article "Diversity, Culture, and Implications for Business" presents only a specific challenge, the challenge of dealing with cultural differences and with the new culture that a company discovers in the country it does business in. The article does not set for itself the objective of tackling cultural differences as a wider concept, but points out to specific challenges of cultural differences.

The second textbook excerpt makes reference to distinctive aspects of free trade agreements, including here protectionism, however, contrary to the article, it does not address the aspect of jobs protectionism or the challenges of outsourcing for different countries.

Question 3: There are several things presented as truisms in the first article, however, there are important points that raise questions as well. One of these aspects is the idea that the author proposes of identifying local citizens to help in better understanding local cultures. If by identifying the author refers to actually hiring them, in some cases this is not possible. In some countries, the local citizens do not have the right business approach and sufficiently training them often takes time and may imply higher costs than the actual results. Another important aspect that should be kept in sight is the fact that research on a foreign culture should ideally be done before the actual outsourcing to the country, so that the company will be well prepared to face any challenges that may appear.