Commentary

Globalization Tales

Today you can find “American” cars with mostly foreign parts and you can find “foreign” cars with mostly American parts. Japanese companies like Toyota build cars in the U.S. and then ship some of them back to Japan. Are these cars imports or exports? The other day I read an article that highlighted U.S. job security anxieties and Japanese automakers. But it wasn’t the old foreigners-are-taking-our-jobs tale. Here Californians worried that a Nissan office would move, not across the globe to Japan, but across the nation to Tennessee. What makes this globalization tale all the more interesting is that a French company recently bought a large portion of this Japanese company that employs so many Americans. Oh, and Nissan’s CEO is Brazilian. Of course you can find similar mixing in other industries. This year Sony made a Welshman its first non-Japanese CEO. Also this year, China’s Lenovo purchased IBM’s personal computer division – home of the Think line of notebooks, desktops, and monitors – for $1.8 billion.

… though the new company has more employees in China than anywhere else, Lenovo chose to make American IBMer Steve Ward its CEO and to move headquarters from Beijing to a new location in Purchase, New York, just a few miles from IBM’s venerable home in Armonk.

And Fark points to globalization’s influence in beauty pageants:

[B]ehold the Miss Universe Contest, where Miss Germany is Vietnamese, Miss Norway is Iranian and Miss Namibia is white.

Wiredblog post and pics here.