Has Globalization Reached Its Peak? *

Summing Up
The global corporation and globalization in general are poised to achieve new and different heights, if responses to this month's column are to be believed. As Greg Bownik put it, "for globalization to peak businesses would have to stop communicating, marketing, and selling on a global basis . . . nothing short of dismantling the global economy could reverse the trend." Nari Kannan commented, "Clamping down on globalization by any country or company will ensure its own demise that much quicker."
How will we know when globalization has truly peaked? Mark Opperman suggests that "Globalization will have reached its peak when we have global citizens who can pay their taxes where they please and enjoy the benefits of the government that serves them best no matter their geographic location . . . will it be any different from those of ages past who paid their taxes to Rome?" Sunil Unni echoes this point of view: "Globalization is an ongoing process that can only peak when citizens across the world enjoy its benefits without any barriers whatsoever." Henrique Plöger Abreu approaches the question from another direction in commenting, "If we look at all the regional trade barriers, subvention politics, protective measures, and legal and fiscal barriers that exist worldwide, I think one can assume that globalization is far from having reached its peak."
Elisio Neto proposes an interesting notion that "Globalization comes in waves. We are just seeing the aftereffects of one peak . . . this wave will be different from the one before . . . natural resources will play a strong role, and immigration will be an issue." The next step of globalization, according to Akhil Aggarwal, will involve companies currently performing outsourced tasks sending much of their work abroad, enabling them to "further outsource non-strategic work so as to concentrate on strategic issues that their audiences (the U.S. firms) would be more interested in." Gregory Black describes another aspect of change while sounding a cautionary note: ". . . the elephant in the room is the assumption of the availability and cost of petroleum . . . the economics of globalization will change dramatically in the decades ahead."
Will what is true for the world turn out to be true for individual global corporations? Biju Cherian weighs in with this comment: ". . . there could be a rise and fall in global corporations—a rise of corporations from new economy nations and a fall in corporations in old economy nations." As M. P. Jayaprakash puts it, "Like water finding its own level, globalization will go on until such time that disparity between the haves (U.S., Europe, etc.,) and the have-nots is significantly bridged."One theme common to several of these comments is that globalization (and the outsourcing it promotes) will turn out to be an equalizing force between have and have-not countries and corporations. This is a far cry from the claims of the protesters at the World Trade Organization summits. Is it possible that globalization will be the catalyst that speeds up a process by which the poor get richer instead of poorer and that this process has just fully gotten under way? What do you think?

* This is a transcription of a text originally published by Professor James Heskett at the Harvard Business Review , Working Knowledge