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.
And Fark points to globalization’s influence in beauty pageants:
Wiredblog post and pics here.