Money and How It "Tick Tocks":More Recent Evidence of Local Time Thieves

Money and How It "Tick Tocks": (More Recent) Evidence of Local Time Thieves

First of all, I am not an alarmist concerning the affairs and influences, truly the great liberties global mega-corporations have taken in linking our national economies and cultures to the ends of profits and losses. If one takes the time to read through some of these reviews I have cobbled together, the links between disciplines and fields of concern to international business, and the general topic of it, are clearly supported by more than my tiny pricks concerning the cross-cultural dimension.

National cultures, and their perspectives in relationship to internalisation of the clocks of time, namely those first discussed by Edward T. Hall in "The Silent Language", those values locally have been subverted globally, being so closely and intimately linked to operations, production, and sales. I am only a mouthpiece of such a "fait-accompli chicken-littleism" and sceptics need only require a review of articles like 'Supply Chain Shackles: Globalisation, Human Resource Management, and the Flexibilisation of Labour' presented at the Irish Academy of Management Annual Conference, Walterford Institute of Technology, Waterford, Ireland in September 2002 by Dr. Mark Rix, Graduate School of Business and Development, University of Wollongong to take the word of a real academic, one possessed of the research skills to continue to progress in his chosen discipline, utilising the full resources which certain centres of higher learning richly disburse.

Rix quotes Herman Knudsen in observation of (MNEs) or Multinational Enterpises and (TNCs) Transnational Corporations that from as early as 1996, there were about 44,000 TNCs globally. These "parents" controlled nearly 280,000 affiliated enterprises (read suction-cupped tentacles) with about 37,000 nationally based in the largest fourteen major OCED nations with 90% holding head offices in the developed world.

The influence these corporations have on global national cultures cannot be underestimated. Quite simply, you cannot separate values from paychecks. If a culture does not EAT (retain earnings after taxes) it dies. Rix quotes Malhotra (1998) to say, "1% of TNCs now account for 50% of world FDI"(Foreign Direct Investment). Such figures have had nearly a decade to increase. Furthermore, "70% of global trade is controlled by a mere 500 TNCs." Another figure with eight years of increases. Now register the personal savings rates of Joe or Joanna Blow in developed nations to get a sense of their true roles in such outstanding global expansions. Fairly deliberately, their individual compulsions to consume far beyond their means has been extentuated by a smaller and smaller portion of the profits.

These are only the fully documented linkages of FDI, and as De Soto suggests more than half of a developing economy can exist extra-legally, then such a supposition could be made that as for these figures, extralegal parental controls must implicate actually higher rates of affiliations and indirect control of supply chain subsidiaries among TNCs globally. There are few ways to escape such a supposition and equally few ways to empirically prove it is so. Same with the giant squid hypothesis? I think eventually one was caught on film? It is that portion of the economic iceberg which furthermore does not generate tax benefits or support minimum labour rights or standards.

Rix quotes Knudsen (2001) that large corporations employ nearly 1 in 5 employees in developed nations, and with legitimate, empirical data provides subcontracting and franchise operations which increases the proportions of that figure to about two-fifths. Given Canada's high rates of government employment (Canada being my little pet...), and the possibility that actual data does not always reflect true values, such as those true values of gold in developing world communities, I would posit that nearly the entire non-government workforce of a country like Canada, or a digging, resource-based economy, is directly or indirectly employed by TNCs. Which explains why I have an affinity for Swiss watches?

If you hear an alarm-ringing in your head on such proportional influences on global national cultures, it is quite late (the mountains in far flung Sumatra being already quite bald) and it is only because TNCs have hijacked the benefits of cross-cultural research and continued to build their empires on the backs and bridges first built out of concerned anthropologists like Edward T. Hall and the theories they espoused. While there is research to support little effect upon local cultures due to TNC expansionism, I still have a hard time avoiding a niggling, spider-sense feeling that our global cultures are little more than rasping mouths for smaller and smaller hamburgers (read products and services), with fewer and fewer choices of culturally determined glaze-like sauces.