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When Romeo Turcan and I started exploring the concept(s) of “late globalization”, it became clear to us that the qualifier “late” can have many variations, depending on what aspect/entity is late, and what the ‘lateness’ is in relation to (and equally, what is ‘early’ and early in relation to what?).

One very macro and historically elongated sense of “late” was discussed in my TBRP Perspectives post titled “Late Globalization Flavors and Stripes: Culture Theory Aspects”. In that posting the perspective discussed was of globalization as a long process that has been happening for over two millennia. We are well past the early, growth, and mature phases of globalization – and now have entered the “late” phase of globalization. This long historical view has its value in terms of providing stage-setting overall context; but its usefulness is limited when – in the contemporary world – nations, sectors, industries, companies, specific individual or institutional actors are grappling with practical aspects of late globalization affecting their situations, fortunes, and prospects.

So, in this posting, I want to turn to some of the possible ways in which the notions of late globalization play out in the contemporary, current-history sense.

First, a few words on the distinction between globalization and internationalization that Romeo Turcan has proposed in some of his writings. Globalization is often an outside-in process: strong external forces (generally a giant global corporation) motivate a supplier firm to go international, to support the global giant’s operations and strategic goals. Internationalization, by contrast, is inside-out: forces inside the nation motivate (sometimes compel) a firm to go to foreign markets.

For this note, let us focus on globalization in time frames that can be considered “recent” by historical standards – the past couple of centuries. In terms of late globalization, in such time frames, at the most macro level, the entity of interest is the nation. Some nations – UK, France, USA, Japan – globalized early (although in case of Japan, after Meiji Restoration, the internal compulsions to internationalize were extremely strong – so internationalization occurred in first few decades and then globalization processes took hold). If we look at the post-World War II period, most of the so-called developing and emerging nations were late globalizers. Import-substituting industrialization was a key goal of developing nations, and of the nations in the Soviet bloc. Internationalization of firms from such nations was slow, and globalization practically non-existent for many decades. Then, going with the ‘outside-in’ idea of globalization, some na tions enacted policies to ease and accelerate the globalization of their firms. Comparing China and India, for instance, China started these processes in 1971 and was an ‘early globalizer’ compared to India, a ‘late globalizer’ that opened the doors to outside-in forces and processes only in 1991.

At a somewhat less macro level of analysis, we can look at industries. Some industries – many consumer goods, computers – are early globalizers. The footprint of major companies in these industries becomes global relatively early in the life of such industries. Other industries – cars or even more so, steel – are late globalizers.

Next, we can turn to companies within an industry. In soft drinks, Coca-Cola was an early globalizer on its own and, during the Second World War, the decision to “follow the troops wherever they are” (a decision encouraged by the U.S. government and military), made the bottling and distribution of Coca-Cola extremely global. By contrast, PepsiCo was – in relative terms – a late globalizer.

The qualifiers early-late can also be applied to the functions or aspects of the business of a company. A company can be early or late in terms of globalizing its market-seeking, manufacturing, distribution channel development, supply chain development, talent recruiting and management composition, etc.

The act of being late in whatever aspect of globalization – whether it is deliberate, serendipitous, or for other reasons – often means many opportunities were grabbed by the early globalizers and are thus scarce or closed for the late globalizer. There may be benefits to lateness also – the timing of a late globalizer may correspond so well with some external events that the late globalizer can grab a very large share of opportunities. For example, the massive needs to reprogram computers for “Y2K” century-end date change arose precisely when India’s software industry was beginning to globalize; allowing India to develop a very large and world-class software service sector in a relatively short time. Other similar possibilities could arise: U.S. policy changes are creating outside-in pressures for Cuba (the nation, some of its industries, its companies and individuals) to globalize, and there are prospects for Cuba to avoid some of the mistakes of ea rly globalizing Caribbean nations.

At this blog site and in our work at TBRP, we will continue to explore the various aspects of ‘late’ in late globalization; and will keep the readers informed as we discover new aspects, ideas, and connections.

 Nikhilesh Dholakia

Rhode Island, USA

July 20, 2015

When Romeo Turcan and I started to work on “late globalization”, we realized that the term has many connotations, meanings and usages. This sub-category, which will start with “Late Globalization Flavors and Stripes:” as the first part of the Subject Heading, is being created to explore the many variants of the term “late globalization”.

Nikhilesh Dholakia

Rhode Island, USA

The multiple meanings and variants of the term “late globalization” arise from the fact that both components of this term – “late” as well as “globalization” – can take on different meanings depending on the context of use. In this post, I want to introduce the notion of “late globalization” as some culture theorists are beginning to interpret it (perhaps more accurately, “sense it”, since there is not much interpretation available yet).

To culture theorists, “globalization” has been happening for a very long time, even a couple of millennia if we take the early perilous journeys of Silk Road and similar merchant-adventurers, traveling long routes by long caravans or in very early sailing boats. With Europe’s explorers, merchants, and conquerors – facilitating by new technologies that came out of Europe, such as multi-mast sailing ships, steam ships, and powerful gunboats – the center of globalization efforts came to be located squarely in Europe, first southern Europe and later northern Europe. As we well know, for more than a century, Britannia ruled the waves and the sun never set on the British Empire. From late 19^th century, the rise of America gradually shifted the center of globalization initiatives across the Atlantic into the United States, with the U.S. global dominance – the Pax Americana – reaching a zenith in the late 1960s. Since then, we are living in a steadily multi-polarizing world that is an arena for many contests in economic, military, and cultural terms.

Culture theorists – these folks are of course very different in their perspectives from international business theorists who mainly want to use “culture” as an explanatory and strategic concept – therefore have been interested in how the changes in globalization have shaped tastes, styles, aesthetics, and other elements that shape culture (and particularly popular culture, the culture with a small “c”, rather than Culture with a capital “c” or high culture). Culture theorists have been reflecting on for a while that globalization has accelerated cultural traffic across national boundaries.

Indeed, from the culture theory perspective (or at least the way I conceptualize it from the culture theory perspective), globalization has gone through a long life cycle – incipience in the early adventure-explorer days, growth in the long European phase of first merchant and later gunboat explorers, and a maturity phase that lasted through much of the 20^th century, with American ascendance contested to some extend by Japan and Germany. In this sense, globalization is now likely in a late maturity phase, with the intensity of cultural traffic at an all-time high.

While he did not use the term “late globalization” explicitly, the influential work of Arjun Appadurai – recognizing the five cross-national interconnecting and intermingling “scapes” (ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes) – provided a first major window on what late globalization (in the “lifecycle of globalization” sense) looks and feels like. In the waning decade of the 20^th century, Appadurai could sense the changing character of globalization – of late globalization, in my view – and penned the very influential essay “Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy” where he introduced his now-famous five “scapes”. Literary theorist Christian Moraru has gone a step beyond, and introduced the term “late globalization”, in a lifecycle-of-globalization sense, in his 2011 book “Cosmodernism: American narrative, late globalization, and the new cultural imaginary”. The work by Moraru is focused squarely on “late global” literary genres and styles. There is clearly a need to push the cultural lifecycle-of-globalization concept(s) of late globalization in several other disciplinary dimensions – economic, political, sociological and more. In our work at TBRP, we plan to do so, and will keep the readers here posted as we make further progress in our work, in this “TBRP Perspectives” space.

Nikhilesh Dholakia

Rhode Island, USA

July 12, 2015

I would like to felicitate Dr. Romeo Turcan and the associated faculty and staff at TBRP on establishing this new blog site.

Nikhilesh Dholakia

Rhode Island, USA