Help on Globalisation paper?

Hi guys,
I've not used this site much but when I've been here I've found useful information each time, so fingers crossed you guys can help me again :smile:

I'm working on a paper for my Foundation in Business & Management, and the title given was "Critically evaluate the impact of globalization on a particular business or industry in a country of your choice", and I've chosen to do the decline of British manufacturing.

I'm thinking of opening with a quote from Wealth Of Nations, discussing theories of competition via price/quality, the EU, UKIP's recent election successes, and the introduction of new markets due to globalisation and the recession, the rise of the BRIC economies etc.

I'm not too sure, however, which theories and case studies to use? I'm going to do some research on it, but I was wondering if anyone here had any pointers?

Thanks in advance :smile:

Tom

(edited 10 years ago)

Reply 1

Salgoud

Hey Tom,

There's been quite a bit of research on this, as you might well imagine! What year of university are you in? I'm asking as it would affect the recommendations I give. As a general answer, though, I'd recommend that you quite simply focus on an industry that interests you. I personally wrote a similar essay on the impact of globalisation on the development of SMEs in the West in general, and there is quite a lot of information available there. This was a few years back now, but if I remember correctly I looked into:

-the factors underlying globalisation (i.e. technological advancements and deregulation)
-how these have changed the nature of (X) for smaller firms, where X could be:
*competition
*recruitment
*access to knowledge/information
*sourcing
*customer niches

I linked that quite heavily to the "born global" phenomenon, and ended up with a pretty solid A.

Based on your question, though, you'd need to focus in a bit more on a particular industry/business, and there are quite a few that shouldn't be too hard to research. You could look at clothing, for instance, where globalisation has lead to Western firms sourcing their products almost exclusively from cheap, Eastern countries at the cost of Western producers. Lots of studies on that. You could also look at Zara as an example of a firm that does thing slightly differently (they source their clothing from Turkey, if I remember correctly (which I may well not), with the result being that they have shorter lead-times for popular items, a sort of JIT-approach).

On a more general level I'd propose that you look into the concept of "focus," as that is really what globalisation has lead to. In a broad sense countries have had to focus more on their main competitive advantages (the UK on things to do with education, so knowledge and finance etc. - china on cheap manufacturing, you get the idea); similarly, industries have had to focus more (UK textiles on things like high quality wool, tweed); and individual firms have to focus more on core competencies (Prahalad & Hamel, if memory serves me right). That's what I'd build my argument if given your essay topic today.

Help on Globalisation paper?

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