A sobering, well-researched, elegantly written "think tank in print" about what globalization truly means. Unfortunately, corporations and their executives, to whom this book is directed, will most likely not heed the authors' gentle warnings. For, after all, the rush of big business and governments to garner international impact is, at its core, unresponsive to the needs of humanity, say Global Research author Barnet and scholar/fellow Cavanagh. By profiling five multinational players in detail (Ford, Philip Morris, Sony, Bertelsmann, and Citibank) and scores of others in less detail, they show how "one voice" in entertainment/culture, in working, and in finance leaves little room to explore the welfare of humankind. What will happen when, for example, jobs continue to disappear and infrastructures to crumble? Barbara Jacobs
From Kirkus Reviews
A measured, anecdotally documented brief for the proposition that a few hundred corporate leviathans have gained a controlling interest in the world economy--at no small cost to national and local governments striving to preserve a sense of community. Barnet (The Rockets' Red Glare, 1990, etc.) and Cavanagh (a fellow at Washington's Institute for Policy Studies) make a more complete job of tracking the advances of multinational enterprises than in reckoning the price of such progress. By the numbers, they estimate that roughly one-quarter of the world's productive assets are held by the top 300 firms in Europe, Japan, and the US. In the course of doing business, the authors claim, these companies are integrating the planet and creating a new order. They go on to assert that a handful dominate the Global Village's so-called Cultural Bazaar, Shopping Mall, Workplace, and Financial Network- -``the four intersecting webs of...commercial activity on which the new world economy largely rests.'' Getting down to cases, Barnet and Cavanagh focus on five essentially stateless organizations whose resources allow them to compete with transnational rivals in markets almost anywhere. If not paradigmatic, their choices- -Bertelsmann, Citicorp, Ford Motor, Philip Morris, and Sony--are at least representative. At any rate, the authors point out that these powerful, innovative juggernauts remain less than accountable to any higher authority. Meanwhile, as economies are drawn closer together, they caution, nation-states and other sociopolitical politics are being pulled apart by post-cold war forces of various sorts. The situation poses many challenges for governments, which can no longer rely on traditional institutions or means to protect their people and territory. Whether humankind can develop a global consciousness that permits it to adapt successfully to altered circumstances, however, strikes the authors as a very open question. Wide-angle perspectives that afford a framework for assessing a widening world's increasingly intertwined economy. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
