Globalisation and the multinational enterprises' corporate strategy in the third millennium

At the dawn of the new millennium, globalisation has become the most popular agenda in the economic, political and social lives of individuals, firms and nations. When we think about globalisation, we think of the remarkable convergence of tastes in consumer goods and the pervasive culture of consumption sweeping the world. We also think of webs of information, resources, people and products; electronically woven through networks of firms spread all over the globe. We think of the political and economic transformations changing the very structures and strategies of firms, and new manifestations of resources, such as knowledge and information, replacing traditional factors of production, such as land, labour and capital. We also think of the nation-state, an institution embraced by mankind in the last two centuries, giving way to the global corporation, the economic transformation agent of the new century, leapfrogging firms and peoples, including those from the developing world, into market prosperity. We think of this corporation, an economic value chain loosely managed by knowledge and information webs, as perhaps the most precious productive resource known to mankind (1; 94; 95). There has been a sea change in the world economy, with perceived far-reaching consequences on all aspects of human civilisation (75). We are moving progressively further away from a world in which national economies were relatively isolated from each other by barriers to cross-border trade and investment; by distance, time zones and language; and by national differences in government regulation, culture and business systems. We are moving towards a world in which national economies are merging into an interdependent global economic system, commonly referred to as globalisation (43). The transformation now taking place in the global economy is unprecedented. The increasing availability of global capital, coupled with advances in computing and communications technology, is serving to speed up the processes of globalisation. Concurrently, the barriers to globalisation are increasingly disappearing in most countries of the world (22). Meanwhile, globalisation has accelerated the process of increasing interconnectedness between societies, so much so that events in one part of the world have more and more effect on peoples and societies far away. In other words, a globalised world is one in which political, economic, cultural and social events become more and more interconnected, and also one iri which they have a wider impact (11). In this research article, an attempt is made to provide a conceptual analysis of globalisation from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Explanation is provided in terms of why firms are motivated to go global. Finally, implications emerging from the globalisation of multinational enterprises, in terms of formulating corporate strategy, are explored