International business paper exam - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages It is a capitalist world-economy because the accumulation of private capital, through exploitation in production and sale for profit in a market, is its driving force; it is "a system that operates on the primacy of the endless accumulation of capital via the eventual commodification of everything" (Wallerstein, 1998).
A polity is a "system of creating value through the collective conferral of authority" (Meyer, 1980). Nation-states are, of course, the invention of early modern times, institutions produced by the rise of capitalism. Capitalism required a jettisoning of the feudal regime with its patchwork of autonomous sovereignty. Difference was absorbed into the homogeneity of the nation-state, producing a unified legal code that protected private property and the investment of the capitalist and allowed for the circulation of a single currency. This economic act was, of course, represented as the creation of a harmonious community of people with a common language and a coherent culture and worldview.
World culture theory is a label for a particular interpretation of globalization that focuses on the way in which participants in the process become conscious of and give meaning to living in the world as a single place. In this account, globalization "refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole"; in other words, it covers the acceleration in concrete global interdependence and in consciousness of the global whole (Robertson, 1992).
From economic point of view globalization theories are devided into two theories: neoclassical and Marxist. Reassessing economic theories of globalization. Attention to the economic processes that shape positionality alters our ideas about the spatial dynamics of globalization. Much of the received wisdom of how markets work, both in neoclassical and Marxist economic theory was developed under the assumption that economies have no spatial extent. This received wisdom can be questioned, however, because the production of positionality challenges some key theoretical claims emanating from economics: the stability of market-based equilibria, the possibility of regional economic equality, the social benefits of free trade or land markets, the likelihood that rational choices lead to expected outcomes, the stability of class alliances, and the theory of value (Harvey 1982; Sheppard and Barnes 1990). It follows that the contrasting grand narratives about globalization associated with these two economic theories, of globalization as modernization and globalization as polarization, respectively, are also questionable. The global capitalist economy is better conceived of as an out- of -equilibrium, complex and contested spatiotemporal system whose long-term outcomes are unknowable.

2. Differences in national business systems
Initially differences in national business systems (NBS) could be explained by institutional differences. In order to be effective, business firms would not only have to behave rationally toward the market and be technologically efficient as organizations, they would simultaneously have to behave effectively toward the institutional context in which they operated. Thus, if the different European states constitute different formations of institutions, business firms will in effect organize differently ...Download file to see next pagesRead More