Related Links:

Where Does Globalization Come From?

Who’s in Charge? Rethinking Sovereignty for a Global Age

How to Resist Transplanted Law: China

Why Has the IMF Failed Its Mission?

Sovereignty over Global Markets Becomes More Complex

In his book, The World is Flat, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Thomas L. Friedman identifies ten world “flatteners”—that is, ten events, developments or processes that have lead to increasing globalization in the past decade. Of course, notes Friedman, globalization has been occurring in fits and starts since the mid-nineteenth century (with a notable timeout during the Cold War ). However, the most recent phase of globalization (what Friedman calls Globalization 3.0) is characterized by a set of processes distinct to this last phase.

Three of the ten globalizing factors (“world flatteners”) comprise what Friedman calls the “flat world platform.” These three factors provide the conditions—or platform—upon which the other seven globalizing processes proceed. The platform provides the vision, know-how, and technological capacity for the other processes of globalization.

Seven Forces that Flatten the World

1. Uploading: Community Created Information

Answers to questions that affect entire populations, news, encyclopedic information, and computer source code all used to be the product of experts. However, says Friedman, in a new world where communication technology has flattened the playing field, expert views and opinions are giving way to the creation of a democratically created global store of knowledge. According to Friedman, almost anyone (for instance, a teenager with a video phone, a computer and internet connection in his basement) can create content that may be read by billions of people world wide.

Friedman refers to the ability to share all kinds of information, videos, software code, pictures, etc. via the internet as “uploading.” He also notes that one of the most powerful aspects of this capacity to upload is that it is not merely isolated individuals putting their content on the web, but ad hoc communities have formed to create and self-police the quality of the content. Friedman identifies four different “uploading” communities.

• Open source code. Friedman describes how communities of software programmers formed very early to begin solving problems and enhancing the capacities of the Internet, the Web and computer software. By creating and sharing programming code free of charge, these communities have expanded not only the resources available to the average person, but also have built the base for many for-profit companies to develop and enhance their own products.
• Community answered questions. Friedman notes a couple of instances where corporations or political organizations have presented a problem to web communities. Friedman notes that this is a huge reversal in the way that populations have typically approached answering questions and solving problems. In the past, it was expected that administrators or elected officials would provide the answers to people’s problems. Now a company or any other organization can present the problem back to their readers and solicit input and valuable options and approaches.
• Community created news: blogging. Friedman says that news is increasingly created via blogging. Individuals are able to upload their accounts, opinions and digital content on events. Friedman says that this has created an army of “citizen journalists” who provide valuable (if not always entirely accurate) accounts of their lives and the events around them.
• Community created knowledge: Wikipedia. This online encyclopedia is created from input from individuals across the globe. One key idea behind Wikipedia is that content is presented from a neutral perspective. An article may have a number of creators and editors from different backgrounds and different perspectives. The final product, ideally, is a brief article that presents a consensus-based, neutral point of view. Friedman notes that while the information contained in this community created encyclopedia can be useful, the ideal of accuracy and neutrality is not always realized.

Friedman notes that there are dangers to a flat playing field when it comes to creating global knowledge and information. Though communities may self-police to try to ensure that what is released as news, software, or encyclopedia information is true and reliable, since no one is in charge quality control is not perfect. “Volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects” now have the ability to pass off inaccurate or just down right false information as true, thus misleading millions of people. Of all the forces flattening the world, says Friedman, uploading has the potential to be the most disruptive.

2. Outsourcing

Friedman describes “outsourcing” as the ability to take a specific but limited task or function that is performed within one company and having the same function performed by another company. The outsourced task is then reintegrated back into the overall operation.

What is particularly notable about the outsourcing within the current phase of globalization is that it is no longer bound by the same geographic and time constraints as previously. Companies can not only outsource to other companies on the other side of the globe, but because of differences in time zone, are not limited to an eight hour work day. When project is parsed up among work teams around the globe, work can proceed 24 hours a day.

Friedman describes the example of how India became a major outsourcing destination for a range of high-skill jobs and tasks. During the Internet boom of the late 1990s investors poured huge sums of cash into purchasing and laying fiber optic cable around the world. This provided a very fast way to connect, share data, share information, etc. across the globe. When the Internet bubble burst, however, man American companies were forced into bankruptcy and the miles and miles of fiber optic cables were sold for pennies on the dollar. Suddenly, the cost of using these fiber optic cables was almost nothing. India was now positioned to offer the services of a highly trained pool of labor to the American (and world) market at very inexpensive rates (compared to what it would cost to do the same job in the U.S.).

3. Offshoring

Friedman defines “offshoring” as the situation where a company moves or builds an entire factory or production facility in another country. Friedman says that while outsourcing involves farming out a particular task or function to another company, offshoring involves moving, for instance, an entire production facility to another country and then integrating it into the company’s global processes.

Friedman notes that when one corporation is able to offshore production of a product to a country (for instance China) where there is a large, inexpensive labor pool, other corporations with similar products will be pressured to do the same in order to remain competitive.

In the case of China, Friedman describes how the foreign desire to access China’s cheap labor pool served to motivate China to join the World Trade Organization (WTO). By joining the WTO and agreeing to operate according to WTO procedures, China became much more attractive to outside investment. However, Friedman points out, while offshoring may make economic sense it is not without its hazards—for example, the pressure to compete with China is driving wages and labor standards lower across the globe.

4. Supply-Chaining

Friedman describes supply-chaining as “a method of collaborating horizontally—among suppliers, retailers, and customers—to create value.” Supply-chaining is not about products so much as about information. Information on what a customer purchases is relayed almost instantly back to the producer who then knows what to make and ship to the retailer who also knows which store or outlet to direct the product.

Friedman identifies a series of characteristics of supply-chaining:

• It forces a set of common standards (all partners in the supply chain must be able to communicate seamlessly),
• It eliminates friction at the borders (companies in the supply chain must be able to communicate and interact as efficiently as possible),
• It increases the likelihood that efficiencies in one company get adopted by others in the supply-chain,
• It encourages global collaboration (since the country with the most efficient production situation is not always the country where the most demand is).

Two challenges facing supply-chaining are:

Global optimization. The costs of getting products from all over the globe has to be low, but, for instance, using the cheapest trucking company doesn’t always mean using the most reliable. Optimization means that the needs of the various steps in the supply-chain must be balanced against all others.

Coordinating supply and demand. Purchasing tastes and fashions can change very quickly. This presents a challenge for producers and distributors who do not want to be stuck with products that they cannot sell. One way of dealing with this challenge, says Friedman, is “postponement”—or waiting to create and distribute a product until the last minute.

5. Insourcing

Friedman says that creating supply-chaining efficiencies can be prohibitively expensive or simply outside the core competency of many companies. A new form of horizontal collaboration, which Friedman calls “insourcing,” has developed (Friedman uses UPS as an example) where a company will work with other companies to not only “take them global” but to make them feel local. For instance, UPS may be asked by one of its customers to come in and not only advise them on manufacturing, packaging, and delivery processes, but even take over managing the company’s global supply-chain process.

Friedman describes this process as “insourcing” because it involves bringing another company (like UPS) deeply into another company to carry out certain supply-chaining functions (sometimes taking over other functions of the other company). In a sense, UPS has taken the supply-chaining insights and techniques pioneered by Wal-Mart, and created a standalone service. A company that does “insourcing” does not sell a product through a supply-chain. It packages the supply-chain technology and service and sells that.

6. Informing

Friedman says, “There is no bigger flattener than the idea of making all the world’s knowledge, or even just a big chunk of it, available to anyone and everyone, anytime, anywhere.” The ability for individuals to use web-based search engines to find almost any kind of information they want is a total equalizer. Individuals no longer have to rely on editors, libraries, television, or movie theaters to get the information and entertainment they want.

Before the search engine empowered web, an individual’s access to information was limited by such things as geography (rural towns didn’t fare so well), access to repositories of information (for instance, university libraries were limited to students and professors), and time. Friedman says that by providing almost instant access from a home computer to an increasingly vast amount of information and other resources (e.g., music, video, maps, photographs, etc) makes individuals into their own supply-chains. Individuals are now their own researchers, editors, and consumers. Friedman calls this ability, “informing.”

7. Steroids: Flatteners that Enhance other Flatteners

Friedman calls the new technologies that amplify and increase the effectiveness of all other flatteners “steroids.” Friedman identifies six “steroids” which increase the speed, capacity, and efficiency of other “flatteners.”

1. Computing advances. Friedman notes that dramatic increases in processing speed, storage capacity and speed of input/output have made it possible for individuals to access, manipulate, store and send information faster and more cost efficiently than ever before.
2. File sharing. Advances in technology now allow computers to access each other’s files. This, in effect, creates an enormous database of information. Friedman uses Napster’s music file sharing as an example.
3. Internet phone service. Voice over Internet protocol service (VoIP) digitizes a voice message, transmits it over the Internet, and then reassembles the message as a voice at the other end. The effect is that this makes the cost of a phone call around the world about the same as a phone call to the next door neighbor. VoIP makes voice to voice communication virtually free.
4. Videoconferencing. Through new advances in videoconferencing technology, companies will be able to meet with people in distant locations in a way that preserves the richness and subtlety of face-to-face communication—sharing “thoughts, facial expressions, feelings, ire, enthusiasm, and raised eyebrows.” And all of this at a cost much less than the airfare and hotel costs associated with in-person meetings.
5. Recent advances in computer graphics. New advances, driven in part by advances in computer games, enhance video conferencing and computing in general by providing not only sharper images, but also increasing the ability to manipulate those images.
6. New wireless technologies and devices. Friedman calls this group of technologies super steroids. Wireless technologies and devises take the benefits of the other steroids and make it possible to use them anywhere with anyone.

Full Text Availability:

Available for purchase at

Other Keytexts from this source

A Technological Platform for Globalization