Outsourcing and Globalization 6C

Just as globalization is an agent for positive change, it also aids the growth of portentous problems such as global terrorist networks, environmental degradation, and sex and drug-traffickingin the context of “human trafficking,” it is the illegal recruitment and trade of people to be exploited against their will..

students must be able to place global happenings in proper context in order to understand how it impacts their local and international community.

The term globalization has only become commonplace in the last two decades, and academic commentators who employed the term as late as the 1970s accurately recognized the novelty of doing so (Modelski 1972).

Long before the introduction of the term globalization into recent popular and scholarly debate, the appearance of novel high-speed forms of social activity generated extensive commentary about the compression of space.

Writing in 1839, an English journalist commented on the implications of rail travel by anxiously postulating that as distance was “annihilated, the surface of our country would, as it were, shrivel in size until it became not much bigger than one immense city” (Harvey 1996, 242). A few years later, Heinrich Heine, the émigré German-Jewish poet, captured this same experience when he noted: “space is killed by the railways.

Globalization refers to those processes whereby geographically distant events and decisions impact to a growing degree on “local” university life.

Second, recent theorists conceive of globalization as linked to the growth of social interconnectedness across existing geographical and political boundaries. In this view, deterritorialization is a crucial facet of globalization

First, contemporary analysts associate globalization with deterritorialization, according to which a growing variety of social activities takes place irrespective of the geographical location of participants.

Third, globalization must also include reference to the speed or velocity of social activity. Deterritorialization and interconnectedness initially seem chiefly spatial in nature.

Fourth, even though analysts disagree about the causal forces that generate globalization, most agree that globalization should be conceived as a relatively long-term process.

Fifth, globalization should be understood as a multi-pronged process, since deterritorialization, social interconnectedness, and acceleration manifest themselves in many different (economic, political, and cultural) arenas of social activity.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Outsourcing Outsourcing most commonly known as offshoring has pros and cons to it. Most of the time, the advantages of outsourcing overshadow the disadvantages of outsourcing. The Advantages of Outsourcing Swiftness and Expertise: Most of the times tasks are outsourced to vendors who specialize in their field. The outsourced vendors also have specific equipment and technical expertise, most of the times better than the ones at the outsourcing organization. Effectively the tasks can be completed faster and with better quality output Concentrating on core process rather than the supporting ones: Outsourcing the supporting processes gives the organization more time to strengthen their core business process. Risk-sharing: one of the most crucial factors determining the outcome of a campaign is risk-analysis. Outsourcing certain components of your business process helps the organization to shift certain responsibilities to the outsourced vendor. Since the outsourced vendor is a specialist, they plan your risk-mitigating factors better. Reduced Operational and Recruitment costs: Outsourcing eludes the need to hire individuals in-house; hence recruitment and operational costs can be minimized to a great extent. This is one of the prime advantages of offshore outsourcing.

The Disadvantages of Outsourcing Risk of exposing confidential data: When an organization outsources HR, Payroll and Recruitment services, it involves a risk if exposing confidential company information to a third-party. Synchronizing the deliverables: In case you do not choose a right partner for outsourcing, some of the common problem areas include stretched delivery time frames, sub-standard quality output and inappropriate categorization of responsibilities. At times it is easier to regulate these factors inside an organization rather than with an outsourced partner. Hidden costs: Although outsourcing most of the times is cost-effective at times the hidden costs involved in signing a contract while signing a contract across international boundaries may pose a serious threat. Lack of customer focus: An outsourced vendor may be catering to the expertise-needs of multiple organizations at a time. In such situations vendors may lack complete focus on your organization’s tasks. With all these pros and cons of outsourcing to be considered before actually approaching a service provider, it is always advisable to specifically determine the importance of the tasks which are to be outsourced. It is always beneficial for an organization to consider the advantages and disadvantages of offshoring before actually outsourcing it. Take home the offshore advantage with Flatworld Solutions - your ideal outsourcing partner!

However , there is a growing debate over globalization. Governments are in favour of globalization because the economy can grow. Other people are not so sure that there are only advantages. Here are some arguments from both sides:

Many experts say that we need a different kind of globalization in our world today. There must be ways to make sure that all countries profit from the good sides of globalization. We should help poorer countries by giving them better education and showing them how new technology works. Every year, leaders of the world’s biggest industrial countries get together to discuss economic problems. This meeting is called the G8 summit. In the last few years groups against globalization have organized protest marches and demonstrations to point out that not everyone is happy with how the world’s economy is developing.

advantage = the good side of something age = period of history argument =reasons business = company cause =lead to cell phone = a mobile telephone close down = to stop producing goods connect = to link together create = make customer = a person who buys something debate = discussion develop =grow developed countries = rich , industrialized countries disease = illness distance =space economic =about the economy

economy =the system of producing goods and products in a country and selling them educated = if you have gone to school and learned a lot environmental = everything that is about the air, water or land around us especially =above all, more than others exchange = to give someone something and get something else in return factory = building in which you produce goods farther =here: over greater distances firm = company focus on = concentrate on G8 = Group of 8 = the most important industrialized countries in the world goods = things that you produce and sell government =the people who rule a country however =but in favour of = for something investor = a person who gives money to a company and expects to get more money in return

Ideas Travel the Globe Explore how ideas and imagination from  across the globe have come together to shape our world.  

Global Governance Global connections have grown for thousands of years but ways to manage them have been slow to develop.  

7. 1492 and 1498: Columbus and da Gama travel west and east to the Indies, inaugurating an age of European seaborne empires.

11. 1929: the great depression hits all parts of the world at the same time -- in contrast to depression of late 19th century, but following rapid, simultaneous price rise in most of the world during the 1920s. Preceded by first event called World War and followed by first really global war across Atlantic and Pacific. 12. 1950: decolonization of European empires in Asia and Africa produces world of national states for the first time and world of legal-representative-economic institutions in the UN system and Bretton Woods. --- perhaps 1989 and the end of the cold war and globalization of post-industrial capitalism which appears to be eroding the power of the national states is on a par with the watershed of the 1950s -- we'll see ,Part II

Part II: globalization since the fourteenth century 1. The Segmented Trading World of Eurasia, circa 1350 By 1350, networks of trade which involved frequent movements of people, animals, goods, money, and micro-organisms ran from England to China, running down through France and Italy across the Mediterranean to the Levant and Egypt, and then over land across Central Asia (the Silk Road) and along sea lanes down the Red Sea, across the Indian Ocean, and through the Straits of Malacca to the China coast. The Mongols had done the most to create a political framework for the overland network as attested by both Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo. The spread of Muslim trading communities from port to port along the littorals of the Indian Ocean created a world of sea trade there analogous to the world of land routes in Central Asia.

Coercion and state power was critical in producing stable sites of trade and accumulation along routes of exchange and in protecting travelers on the long overland routes between sites. There does not seem to have been any significant military power at sea. Exchange within the various regional parts of the system was connected by networks of trade to commercial activity within trade and power relations in other parts -- in a segmented system of connections, like pearls on a string -- and observers made it very clear that states took a keen interest in promoting and protecting trade, even as rulers also used force to extort revenues and coerce production here and there. In South Asia, it should be noted, the Delhi Sultanate and Deccan states provided a system of power that connected the inland trading routes of Central Asia with the coastal towns of Bengal and the peninsula and thus to Indian Ocean trade for the first time. Ibn Battuta as much as the Khaljis and Tughlaqs represent the nature of the agrarian environment in the fourteenth century, and though warriors did use force to collect taxes, there was also substantial commercial activity in farming communities over and above what would have been necessary to pay taxes. Agrarian commercialism inside regions of trading activity clearly supported increasing manufacturing and commercial activity -- and also a growth spurt in the rise of urbanization.

Ibn Battuta (1350) -- like Abu-l Fazl (1590) and Hamilton Buchanan (1800) -- viewed his world in commercial terms, and standing outside the state, he does not indicate that coercion was needed to generate agrarian commodities. At each stop in his journey, he observed everyday commercialism. "Bangala is a vast country, abounding in rice," he says, "and nowhere in the world have I seen any land where prices are lower than there." In Turkestan, "the horses ... are very numerous and the price of them is negligible." He was pleased to see commercial security, as he did during eight months trekking from Goa to Quilon. "I have never seen a safer road than this," he wrote, "for they put to death anyone who steals a single nut, and if any fruit falls no one picks it up but the owner." He also noted that "most of the merchants from Fars and Yemen disembark" at Mangalore, where "pepper and ginger are exceedingly abundant." In 1357, John of Marignola, an emissary to China from Pope Benedict XII, also stopped at Quilon, which he described it as "the most famous city in the whole of India, where all the pepper in the world grows."1

2. The European Seaborne Empires, 1500-1750 a. Phase One: the militarization of the sea, 1500-1600 Vasco da Gama rounded Africa in 1498 and forced rulers in the ports in the Indian Ocean system to pay tribute and to allow settlements of Portuguese military seamen who engaged in trade, supported conversion, acquired local lands, and established a loose network of imperial authority over the sea lanes, taxing ships in transit in return for protection. The militarization of the sea lanes produced a competition for access to ports and for routes of safe transit that certainly did not reduce the overall volume of trade or the diversity of trading communities -- but it did channel more wealth into the hands of armed European competitors for control of the sea. The Indian Ocean became more like Central Asia in that all routes and sites became militarized as European competition accelerated over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the Portuguese were joined by the Dutch, French, and British.

3. The World Empires of Industrial Capitalism, 1750-1950. a. Phase One: the formation of national economies Basic eighteenth century economic conditions continued well into the nineteenth century, until the railway and steam ship began lower transportation costs significantly, and to create new circuits of capital accumulation that focused on sites of industrial production in Europe and the US. But important structural changes in the world economy began in the later decades of the eighteenth century. First, European imperial control of the Americas was broken, first in the north and then the south. This accelerated the rise of capital and capitalists as a force in the reorganization of nationally defined states, whose professes purpose was the political representation of the interests of their constituent property owners and entrepreneurs. The independence movements in the Americas and revolutions in Haiti and France produced new kinds of national territoriality within the world economy, and states that strove for greater control of resources within their boundaries than any before. Adam Smith and Frederick Hegel were two important theorists of this transitional period -- both of whom took a universal few of national issues, and theorized a great transformation away from an age of kings and emperors toward an age ruled by peoples and nations.

Second, European imperial expansion shifted into Asia, where the use of military power by European national states for the protection of their national interests became a new force in the process of capital accumulation. Chartered companies were criticized by Adam Smith as a state-supported monopoly -- for the English East India Company had a monopoly on the sale of all commodities imported into England from the "East Indies," which included all the land east of Lebanon -- and this early version of the multi-national corporation expanded its power base in India with government support but without official permission. The British empire expanded without official policy sanction throughout most of the nineteenth century, as British troops went in simply to protect the operations of British nationals operating as merchants overseas. The national state thus became both a mechanism for the control of territory within its own borders and for the expansion of national enterprise around the world. The US expanded over land and into Latin America by the expansion of the enterprise of its citizens and expansion of its military power, as the British empire expanded into Asia and then Africa -- along with the French and Dutch. In the discourse of nationalism, the "nation" and "empire" lived in their opposition to one another; but "economic imperialism" was standard practice for economically expansive nation states, and "gun boat diplomacy" became a typical feature of economic transactions among hostile states.

The 1840s form a watershed in the institutionalization of a world regime of national expansion and international economic organization -- when the British navy forced open the interior of China to British merchant settlements with military victories waged during the Opium Wars to protect the right of British merchants to trade in opium in China; and when the US Admiral Perry forced the Japanese to open their ports to American trade.

b. Phase Two: world circuits of industrial capital The integration of separate, specialized world regions of agricultural and industrial production within a world economy of capital accumulation occurred during the nineteenth century. The industrial technologies of the factory, railway, telegraph, gattling gun, and steam ship facilitated this development; but as important were the organizational technologies of modernity, which include state bureaucracy, land surveys, census operations, government statistics, national legal systems, and the like. The result was not only the creation of regions of the world with their own distinctive economic specializations, integrated into one world system of production; but also the construction of a single world of rules and regulations for the operation of the system. This change did not happen over night, but it was clearly moving ahead at the start of the nineteenth century and well advanced by the end.

Institutional markers: (1) the abolition of the slave trade and (2) the rise of international protocols for the operation of national competition at a world scale, culminating in the treaties of Berlin that organized the partition of Africa in the 1880s. Market indicators: (1) the South Sea Bubble and the crashes of the 1820s and 1830s, (2) the depression of 1880-1900 and its impact on Africa. Regional Cases: (1) the US South, (2) the world cotton economy, (3) jute in Bengal.