Globalisation and Deregulation

Globalisation

The world is rapidly migrating to one very large network, whose attraction is irresistible. Improvements in distribution logistics and communications have allowed many local businesses to become global ones overnight–including discount distributors of everything from contact lenses to bathroom tiles. It is also now common for companies to draw on a global network of partners and suppliers. Customers, meanwhile, are happy to engage in border-less shopping for everything from entertainment to software to cars and electronics. So, competition has kicked into overdrive.

Meanwhile, for time-sensitive processes, organizations in industries as varied as manufacturing and high finance take advantage of the rotation of the earth by passing work back and forth between Asia, Europe and the Americas, allowing for true 24-hour operations. (Source: http://www.contextmag.com)

Again, the result is disruption on a scale that the traditional approach to strategy just can’t handle.

Deregulation

The current mania for deregulation reflects a belief by governments and regulated industries alike that the disease (open, international competition) is better than the cure (laws to protect local economies). This shrinking of government can be seen in the airline, communications, utilities and banking industries in the U.S. and Europe; in the passage of GATT and NAFTA; in the development of the European Union; and in the dramatic collapse of the highly regulated economies of the former Soviet republics. The open market, which adopts information technology more quickly than did industries with a legacy of regulation, is becoming a viable alternative for many activities. The change is contributing to the radical shrinking, outsourcing, and restructuring of traditional enterprises.

Impressive enough on their own, the New Forces feed off each other. Digital technologies make it easier to manage larger numbers of buyers and suppliers, thus speeding up globalisation. As the economy becomes more global, countries find they need to roll back more regulations if they want to participate profitably. As deregulation takes hold, previously protected companies find they have to step up sharply their strategic use of digital technology. And the whole cycle starts over again. What results is a fundamental redefinition of markets–and the pace of change is accelerating.

The international telephone market, for instance, was neatly segregated for decades among heavily regulated national carriers. But technological improvements led by leased data lines, satellites, and automated call-back systems gave customers a way around the high monopoly prices they were being charged. Governments responded by deregulating. Companies then began expanding internationally, as evidenced by British Telecom’s attempt to buy MCI. Now, with competition intensifying, telecommunications companies are investing more in technology.

One telecommunications expert was quoted in the New York Times as saying that customers will save $1 trillion in phone costs over the next 10 to 12 years because of increased competition. (Source: http://www.contextmag.com)

While commercial banking isn’t as far along, the pressure is building for a similar upheaval. Banks invested in technologies such as ATMs, telephone banking, and now Internet banking largely as means for cutting costs. As electronic banking improved, banks found that customers derived little value from in-person branch banking. So, two years ago, Security First Network Bank opened a bank that operates only on the Internet–becoming the first virtual bank. While banks are ferociously merging to reduce the number of branches they operate, Security First doesn’t have any. (Source: http://www.contextmag.com)

Deregulation will now pick up speed. Competition will spread throughout the U.S., then the world. Soon, your choice for basic checking may be the savings and loan down the street or your very own Swiss bank account.

No doubt the foremost difference between strategy in the Porter world and in the world of the New Forces is in the role of information technology. In the old world, technology was a tool for implementing change. Planners decided how they wanted the business to change, then tossed requirements over the wall to the I/S department. This approach largely fails today; in the future, the problems will get worse.

Technology, in other words, isn’t the solution. It is the problem

Shapiro and Varian explain in their book „Information Rules“ that the economical laws that apply to products and services cannot be simply transferred to the new category information good.

Language and Globalization

“Globalization” is a social process “characterized by the existence of global economic, political, cultural, linguistic and environmental interconnections and flows that make the many of the currently existing borders and boundaries irrelevant”. Steger’s book Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (publ. date: 2003) Oxford University Press. Globalization is not as recent a phenomenon as economists have generally led us to believe, although it has undoubtedly operated in faster and more complex ways since the late 1980s

Globalization is readily increasing in today’s world. This increase in globalization has many effects on language, both positive and negative. These effects on language in turn affect the culture of the language in many ways.

However, with globalization allowing languages and their cultures to spread and dominate on a global scale, it also leads to the extinction of other languages and cultures.

Language contributes to the formation of culture, such as through vocabulary, greetings or humor. Language is in a sense the substance of culture. Languages serve as important symbols of group belonging, enabling different groups of people to know what ethnic groups they belong to, and what common heritages they share. Without a language, people would lose their cultural identity.

Languages are the essential medium in which the ability to communicate across culture develops. Knowledge of one or several languages enables us to perceive new horizons, to think globally, and to increase our understanding of ourselves and of our neighbors. Languages are, then, the very lifeline of globalization: without language, there would be no globalization; and vice versa, without globalization, there would be no world languages.

“Cross-cultural contact, therefore, is often viewed as a potential source of unmanageable, or at least undesirable, culture change and of language shift, given that power differentials are to be expected between ethnic groups in interaction” (Fishman, 1989).

Today there are about 6,500 different natural languages. Eleven of them account for the speech of more than half the world’s population. Those eleven are Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Hindi, French, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, German, Japanese, Arabic, and English. According to Garrick Bailey and James People in their book Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, estimates for extinct languages range from 4,000 to 9,000 since the 15th century. Other estimates for the future predict that only 10 percent of the present languages will continue into the 22nd century.

The global language system is very much interconnected, linked by multilingual persons who hold the various linguistic groups together. The hierarchical pattern of these connections closely corresponds to other dimensions of the world system, such as the global economy and the worldwide constellation of states.

English is distinguished from the other languages by having very significant numbers of non-native speakers, I think it’s going to be the one most affected by globalization.

At the opposite end of the scale there are languages teetering on the brink of extinction. More than half the world’s languages have fewer than 5,000 speakers, and there are many hundreds that have as few as a dozen. Languages are disappearing all the time — it’s estimated that a language becomes extinct roughly every two weeks.

We can say that almost everywhere language is used as an identity to be part of the “world system” now, and the thing about any system that integrates people is that it benefits its architects. Imported cultures are going to push out indigenous ones.

It’s clear that globalization is making English especially important not just in universities, but in areas such as computing, diplomacy, medicine, shipping, and entertainment. No language is currently being learned by more people — there may soon be 2 billion actively doing so — and the desire to learn it reflects a desire to be plugged into a kind of “world brain.”

To many people, then, the spread of English seems a positive thing, symbolizing employment, education, modernity, and technology. But to plenty of others it seems ominous. They hold it responsible for grinding down or homogenizing their identities and interests. It tends to equalize values and desires, without doing the same for opportunities.

So far, so unsurprising, you might say; but globalization may well have a kind of revenge effect. There’s a distinct chance, I think, that it will actually undermine the position of the very native speaker who, by virtue of having a mastery of this obviously valuable language, thinks he or she is in a strong position.

Why? Because one of the intriguing consequences of globalization is that English’s center of gravity is moving. Its future is going to be defined not in America or Britain, but by the new economies of places like Bangalore, Chongqing or Bratislava.

“The great difficulty is thus considering the unity of the many and the multiplicity of the unity. Those who see the diversity of cultures tend to overlook the unity of mankind; those who see the unity of mankind tend to dismiss the diversity of cultures”. Edgar Morin, L’identité humaine.

This endangerment of languages can have a drastic effect on the cultures that loses there identity. Effects on language loss on cultures might include: dismay at the realization that the native language is lost; anti-social behavior as minority will desperately try to preserve their language; loss of self-esteem. Therefore, it is important for cultures to preserve their language. Despite the increase in globalization, this is possible in many ways, such as language classes, promoting the native language in homes, schools, art, promoting though a strong national identity.

The most problematic issue is how to make these two seemingly contradictory facts compatible: continuity of the linguistic diversity created by humanity through its Diaspora all over the world, and the need for intercommunication between these groups of linguistically-diverse individuals in the new – ‘glocal’ – era of positive re-unification of the species

Actions and representations and discourses on language diversity (cultural identity), integration and intercommunication are therefore primordial, promoting the search for new principles and ways of looking at situations of language contact.

Capra therefore suggests dealing with the columns of the table below complementarily, in order to rectify, particularly in Western culture, the predominance of assertive thought and values at the expense of integrative ones:

Thinking Values
Self-assertive – Integrative Self-assertive – Integrative
Rational – Intuitive Expansion – Conservation
Analysis – Synthesis Competition – Cooperation
Reductionist – Holistic Quantity – Quality
Linear – Nonlinear Domination- Partnership

This change in paradigm does seem urgent because it is clearly coherent with the main problems of modern societies. Now that we are getting to know ourselves better genetically too and that we are sure that human are a unique species and that the genome of other species is not so different, perhaps we can enter another planetary era with more solidarity between the diverse cultural groups and the other species with which we share the biosphere. Biologically and linguistically, as Edward O. Wilson says, “soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become” !!!

If we have a deep look inside us we will come to the conclusion that Art can be the bridge that can make compatible Language and Globalization.

Herve Delhumeau