Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
is becoming unimportant, and many others have argued that big multina-
tional enterprises are dinosaurs while networked small and medium-sized
enterprises (SMEs) are the mammals and flowering plants that will take
their place. Let us take a quick look at each of these claims on its own.
Some Victorian observers saw the railway as the agent of the oblitera-
tion of time and distance. Similarly, in the early 1990s, a new generation
of observers made the same claim for the Internet and low cost air travel.
Commentators argued that technological improvements meant that geog-
raphy and distance had become of little or no importance, and that the
likely impacts of the emergent information and communication technolo-
gies would be to promote dispersal away from areas of population con-
centration (Warf 1995; Gaspar and Glaeser 1998). These arguments were
increasingly bolstered by widespread contemporaneous observations of a
process of urban-rural shift, whereby increasing numbers of people and
firms in advanced economies appeared to be moving away from major
cities and into smaller cities (Fothergill et al. 1985). The death of distance
applied at any scale: at the level of a single city, a region, a nation state, or
the world. In the last case, it becomes part of a view that has been called
'hyper-globalization' (Amin 1997; Ohmae 1995) that can be applied to
many areas of human activity, from popular culture to politics, and there
have been several variants of this line of reasoning.
For the purposes of this topic we are particularly interested in the
application of such claims to the study of multinational enterprises. In this
respect, in 1983 Theodore Levitt (1983) heralded the arrival of the global
corporation as one which sells the same thing in the same way everywhere.
From a slightly different perspective, Kenichi Ohmae (1999) sees the
problem facing MNEs as being the achievement of the 'Anchorage per-
spective'; in other words seeing the world - or rather the parts that matter
such as the markets of Europe, North America, and East Asia - as if from
Anchorage, Alaska, equidistant from the three. Finally, the 1990s saw the
emergence of a small fan-club or cult in some business schools and some
parts of the business press which admired and was devoted to the model
of ABB, a multinational corporation which was Swedish in origin, head-
quartered in Switzerland, and which constituted of acquired businesses
on every continent while using English as its working language. To these
advocates, this stateless entity seemed to represent the ideal shape of the
future global company.
What these visions of the global corporation share is that in all of
them distance is seen as an obstacle to the homogenization of the world
economy, and that improvements in information and communications
technologies and also in transportation technologies, have the effect of
reducing (and perhaps eliminating) this obstacle. National borders are
