Pages

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Globalization Then and Now: Insights from the Top MBA Colleges in Delhi NCR

Top MBA Colleges in Delhi NCR have been a part of the journey called globalization. The academicians engaged in teaching, mentoring students and researching on business in top MBA Colleges in Delhi NCR have seen the city come off age in terms of its urban infrastructure, values and lifestyles,  retail landscape and fashion trends. These factors can hardly be called metrics of globalization by any serious academic but it makes enormous good sense to refer to these as the most visible signs of change. Probably a substantial proportion of the Indian population came to terms with the term “globalization” and its tangible impact on their lives in the year 1991 when the then Finance Minister and now Ex-Prime Minister Dr.Manmohan Singh presented the Union Budget that announced India’s arrival on the big stage amid the chaos and cacophony emerging from Eastern Europe on one hand and the collapse of the Berlin Wall in the West. This is a story that has now become the stuff of legends and has been shared by most parents with their children. It seem subversive if not paradoxical that a country that has been at the centre stage of globalization for more than 3,000 years now has had to wait for so many years to know the clinical terminology of the phenomenon.

Where Does Globalization Belong?

A lot of water has passed since then under the Tower Bridge and hopefully business leaders, entrepreneurs and policy makers are no more busy debating if the world is flat or not. At Ishan Institute of Management & Technology, the top MBA College in Greater Noida, we academicians face the recurring question: “What is Globalization?” We get to face this question in primarily in the lectures of papers like business environment which is a combination of macroeconomics, Indian economy, international trade and political economy. The other paper that finds active and intellectually stimulating debates on globalization is strategic management. In reality we academicians assert and believe that the question on globalization and its discontents ought to be asked in lectures of business communication. Globalization is the integration of different nations by means of building of economic, financial, social, linguistic and political interfaces. While the interfaces may differ in form and content, the building or development of the interface is essentially a part of system design for communication. Globalization is communication at the highest level in aggregated form where by people, corporations and governments of the two or more nations are senders and receivers and there is constant feedback that allows the system to keep perpetuating the next levels of conversation. Each cycle of communication generates a feedback, gets embedded in the history of the world and sets the stage for the next level. Globalization is a dialogue among corporations and governments of different nations with people at the centre stage.

Globalization Then: In the 20th Century


If an academician from a business school had to go through the archives of globalization and read through the dust smeared annals of the phenomenon, one would have to identify events that would figure in the timeline of the world and serve as milestones to reach where we are today. As such based on literature review of some of the very known faces in studies on globalization like Prof. Amartya Sen, Prof. Joseph Stiglitz, Prof. Pankaj Ghemawat, Prof. Jagdish Bhagwati, Prof. Debraj Ray, Prof. Pranab Bardhan and Prof. Kaushik Basu that timeline shall consist of the First World War, Second World War, the independence of India and Pakistan in South Asia, the fall of the Third Reich, the formation and failure of the League of Nations, the formation of the United Nations Organization, the formation of the European Economic Council, the formation of World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the formation of NATO, the formation of the Warsaw Pact, the beginning of the Non-Alignment Movement(NAM) , the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of USSR, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the invention of the internet.


Globalization Now: In the 21st century

Globalization and the very nature of the process of integration and inter-connecting of nations has transformed in a big way. The economic and political landscape did change and beyond an iota of doubt accelerated the process by removing barriers to free trade, consolidating economic integration and move towards singular currency (like in Europe). Yet one has to accept that the most defining moment of change was perhaps the last mega-event of the 20th century. It was the invention of the internet followed by the stream of inventions of email by Ray Tomlinson that facilitated people to people connect without any censorship by governments of nations and without any deliberate attempts at gaming the system by any blue chip corporation. Post modernism which is the phrase that best describes globalization in the 21st century has been driven by the rise and rise of information technologies. The biggest drivers of globalization in the 21st century have been technological breakthroughs that have improved exchange of data and information, knowledge intensive services, free flow of information and flows of innovation in both the directions. 

While many people may add a few more inventions like the development of search engines by both Google and Microsoft, we have seen it included in the broader spectrum of the World Wide Web.


Is the World Really Flatter in the 21st Century?

After the above shown analysis there is still that one question that the devil’s advocate would bother to ask. Has the world become really flatter in the 21st century? How does the world stand today in the 21st century vis-a-vis that in the 20th century? Does globalization have the same meaning that the Washington Consensus had inferred in the end of the 2oth century? Does the world take globalization as free mobility of factors of production and networking of markets? Is there something more to globalization than just networking of markets? As long as there are people who stay disconnected from the markets and governments, the work is only half- done. The debate on the normative aspects notwithstanding here is a list of the biggest differences between the capital intensive globalization of the 20th century and the digital globalization of the 21st century.

At Ishan Institute of Management & technology, the first graduate business school of Greater Noida and one of the top MBA Colleges in Delhi NCR we have integrated these subtle changes into the academic curriculum of MBA and PGDM courses. Till date more than 50 research projects have been undertaken on the tracks of globalization, technological drivers and financial integration.