Archive for the 'Globalization' Category

Dec 21 2004

John Yunker: Web Globalization Goes Mainstream

John Yunker, author of Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies, makes a few predictions for the year ahead:

    – Web Globalization Goes Mainstream
    – Amazon.com Adds Spanish
    – Apple Launches iTunes Korea
    – The Global Gateway finds the “Sweet Spot”

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Dec 06 2004

The ‘Blog’ Revolution Sweeps Across China

It took a chance online encounter between a software engineer from Shanghai and a teacher in a remote province of China to start shaking up the power balance between the people and the government of the world’s most populous nation.

In August 2002, Isaac Mao, who worked at the Shanghai office of the chip maker Intel, was one of only a handful of people in China who had heard the word “blog”. A regular web surfer, he was fascinated by the freedom these online journals gave to ordinary people to publish both their own and their readers’ views online.

Surfing the US website blogger.com, Mao was thrilled to find Zheng Yunsheng, a teacher at a technical school in Fujian province. He left a message on Zheng’s blog, and two weeks later Mao and Zheng started CNBlog.org, China’s first online discussion forum about blogging technology and culture.

They soon gathered a small but devoted group of participants, many of whom went on to develop the technology that makes blogging possible for China’s half-a-million bloggers.

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Hat tip: Going Global

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Nov 09 2004

Diversity Key Idea

Bettina Byrd-Giles, program director for the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Office of Diversity… defined globalization as “networks of interdependence at worldwide distances,” noting McDonald’s Corp.’s reach around the world, Mercedes’ arrival in Alabama and the outsourcing of customer call centers to India and elsewhere as examples of those networks.

With globalization will come increasing diversity, Giles said. According to research, the U.S. population should hit about 325 million by 2020, including 70 million immigrants, Giles said. The percentage of white non-Hispanics in the population will shrink to about 64.3 percent, while the percentage of blacks, Asians and Hispanics will all rise to 12.9 percent, 6.5 percent and 16 percent, respectively.

That means a changing work force and customer base and with it, the need for a better understanding of cultural differences, Giles said. For example, Americans tend to be individualistic, while many other cultures are collective. Societies that behave more collectively tend to make decisions as a group and to take longer doing it. They also tend to rely more on relationships.

While individualistic thinkers tend to be direct communicators, people who live collectively use less direct means of making a point in order to maintain the harmony of the group, she said.

Awareness of such differences can help you better understand how people behave and react to one another — and do business, she said.

“It’s a lot more than just being polite to each other.”

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Oct 10 2004

Can Corporations Erase National Culture?

Many people (both supporters and critics) say globalization will lead to a homogenization of culture — people around the world, enticed by McDonalds and Hollywood movies, will devalue their local culture and adopt American ways instead. I don’t know if that will happen or not, but some recent articles and studies got me thinking about one way to test this theory.

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