INTERNATIONAL BUSINESSES

International Businesses

Introduction

Despite being one of the topics of fashion, from the last decades of the twentieth century, globalization appears to us as a difficult subject to grasp intellectually: as a result of indefinite nebula formed around the issue, the theoretical positions tend to polarize. The issue of globalization is both a topic of intellectual reflection and a critical matter undoubtedly powerfully influence the economic, political and cultural life of our societies, as our material and economic borders are opened and as you expand the frontiers of knowledge and information.

Globalization is a term that has, in many instances, come to replace the older and no less complex notion of “development.” In fact, Edelman and Haugerud (2005) have argued that globalization has replaced the term development as the new action word of contemporary international governance discourse. Not simply a term that describes an inevitable process that is shaping the modern world, globalization, when conflated with development, is a meta-policy guiding the way to social and economic well-being in the global South (Edelman & Haugerud, 2005).

The replacement of development by globalization is also evident in South American contexts like Venezuela and Bolivia, where supposed anti globalization social movements and nationalization policies have been viewed by many Northern countries and transnational organizations as detrimental to international peace and global economic stability. In contrast, these Northern governing bodies espouse state-led implementation of globalization-friendly principles for the sake of individual nations' prosperity, as well as prosperity for the world. Thus, it is by ultimately opening up borders and financially connecting to the wider world that nations soar themselves out of poverty and into the global marketplace, developing in the process.

The two most influential anthropological works on development, Ferguson's The Anti-Politics Machine (1994) and Escobar's Encountering Development (1994), challenge this widespread thinking. Ferguson argued that in fact such development schemes usually fail and in the process further embed countries in the exploitative systems that were intended to help them. Ferguson also faulted these schemes for overlooking the social and historical specificities of countries and favouring techno-managerial solutions that are generally applicable to all “developing” countries (Ferguson, 1994).

In his influential book, Escobar attempted to denaturalize “development” by situating it in the political aftermath of World War II, when, in 1949, President Harry Truman argued for “developed” nations of the world to systematically restructure the global South, reconfiguring the world in the image of “advanced” nations. Following Walt Whitman Rostow and his work The Stages of Economic Growth (1960), many policymakers and social scientists in the years following Truman's speech came to view development as the establishment of preconditions for the “take off” from traditionality to modernity. Escobar examined how this language and categorization of development problems becomes the official knowledge of international development experts and how this expertise subsequently becomes unanchored to any political, cultural, or historical context (Escobar, 1994). He ultimately argued that this categorization, or naming, of peoples and places as objects of development interventions has devastating material effects: Targeted “underdeveloped” communities are often left ...