The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century Thomas L. Friedman Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005 Thomas Friedman is a widely-acclaimed journalist, foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, and author of four best-selling books that include From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989). His eminence as a journalist is clearly demonstrated in the way he prepared for The World is Flat. He traveled throughout the world, interviewing in depth the political and business leaders who have the most direct, hands-on knowledge of the truly incredible developments occurring in the business structures and technology of globalization. Only a journalist who moves freely at the highest levels could interview the likes of Sir John Rose, the chief executive of Rolls-Royce; Nobuyuki Idei, the chairman of Sony; Richard Koo, the chief economist for the Nomura Research Institute; Bill Gates of Microsoft; Wee Theng Tan, the president of Intel China; David Baltimore, president of Caltech; Howard Schultz, founder and chairman of Starbucks; Nandan Nilekani, CEO of Infosys in Bangalore - and many others, each of whom gave him the inside story of how, specifically, the barriers of time and space separating economies, workforces, sources of capital, and technical abilities are crumbling. The result of this unfolding story, already far along but with much farther to go, according to Friedman, is that "the world is flat." With some notable exceptions in sub-Saharan Africa and the Islamic swathe, everything is connected with everything else on a horizontal basis, with distance and erstwhile time-lags no longer mattering. Friedman describes in detail the galloping globalization that has unfolded in even so limited a time as the past five years. Under the impetus of a worldwide network of interconnectivity, the world economy is much-changed from what it was at the turn of the century a mere half-decade ago. Friedman quotes the CEO of India's Infosys: "What happened over the last [few] years is that there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables," while (Friedman paraphrases him) "computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there was an explosion of software - e-mail, search engines like Google, and proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part to Bangalore, and one part to Beijing...." Microprocessors today have 410 million transistors compared to the 2800 they had in 1971. And now, "wireless is what will allow you to take everything that has been digitized, made virtual and personal, and do it from anywhere." The effect on productivity is revolutionary: "It now takes Boeing eleven days to build a 737, down from twenty-eight days just a few years ago. Boeing will build the next generation of planes in three days, because all the parts are computer-designed for assembly." The most strikingly informative aspect of this book, however, is not about technology. Most especially, Friedman explores the rapidly evolving global business systems, each constantly regenerating itself to keep ahead of the others. These are systems that span the continents seeking the lowest-cost providers of everything from expert scientific and engineering work to the lowliest grunt work. Friedman points out that India produces 70,000 accounting graduates each year - and that they are willing to start at $100 a month. It is no wonder that Boeing employs 800 Russian scientists and engineers for passenger-plane design when "a U.S. aeronautical engineer costs $120 per design hour, a Russian costs about one-third of that." Friedman describes a call center in India where outbound callers sell "everything from credit cards to phone minutes," while operators taking inbound calls do "everything from tracing lost luggage for U.S. and European airline passengers to solving computer problems for confused American consumers. …

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

THE PRESS AND FOREIGN POLICY' IT IS a defect of some of the studies of the diplomatic background of the Great War that they tend to ignore the influence on pre-war diplomacy of public opinion in general and of the press in particular. Based primarily on official documents such studies unconsciously tend to overemphasize the parts played by the leaders with whose activities the documents are so largely concerned and to neglect some of the less obvious forces that affected the course of events. The influence of the press, it is true, can never be measured accurately. \"No diviniiig rod can locate it,\" says Miss Salmon, \"no plummet sound its depth, no instrument of precision measure it, no astronomer compute its orbit.\"2 And yet that influence in pre-war Europe was very real and very considerable. Professor Fay goes so far as to list \"the poisoning of public opinion by the newspaper press in all the great countries\"3 as one of the chief underlying causes of the war. If the influence of the press cannot be exactly determined, however, it can at least be roughly estimated; and even where no attempt is made to estimate influence, a kniowledge of newspaper views on questions of foreign policy is of assistance in clarifying the atmosphere out of which the Great WYar came.

The Press and Foreign Policy

This article traces the origins and continuing development of a research tradition that conceptualizes public relations as a strategic management function rather than as a messaging, publicity, and media relations function. The tradition began serendipitously with the development of the situational theory of publics in the late 1960s, followed by the application of organization theory to public relations, the symmetrical model of public relations, and evaluation of communication programs. The Excellence study, which began in 1985, brought these middle-level theories together and produced a general theory, a theoretical edifice, focused on the role of public relations in strategic management and the value of relationships with strategic publics to an organization. Since the completion of the Excellence study, scholars in this research tradition have continued to improve and furnish the edifice by conducting research to help public relations professionals participate in strategic decision processes. This re...

Furnishing the Edifice: Ongoing Research on Public Relations As a Strategic Management Function

Although the attention being paid to the new digital media may be the latest fad in public relations, these new media have the potential to make the profession more global, strategic, two-way and interactive, symmetrical or dialogical, and socially responsible. However, many practitioners are using the new media in the same ways they used the old—as a means of dumping messages on the general population rather than as a strategic means of interacting with publics and bringing information from the environment into organisational decision-making. For public relations to fully use digital media, practitioners and scholars must reinstitutionalise public relations as a behavioural, strategic management paradigm rather than as a symbolic, interpretive paradigm. This article provides a model of strategic public relations and offers suggestions for the use of digital media in each phase of this model.

Paradigms of Global Public Relations in an Age of Digitalisation

Language and globalization

In keeping with the trend of international-intercultural public relations practice, research in this area has also been mostly top-down, "outside-in," or etic in nature. This study combines a cultural analysis approach with ethnographic fieldwork in an attempt to move away from the culturally constituted metanarratives of the 4 models and practitioner roles of public relations, and it provides an "inside-out" or emic analysis of the cultural context of public relations in India. In doing so, it is able to foreground some of the assumptions that underlie these metanarratives, assumptions that are not always congruent with the Indian cultural context. Overall, this study emerges as a critique of unquestioning global applications of public relations metanarratives in culturally diverse settings.

Rupturing Public Relations Metanarratives: The Example of India

Using postcolonial and decolonial theory as a framework, this study focuses on the lived experiences of international students of color entering the United States for the first time in their lives from the global South. Our goal was to understand how they communicate/perform their dis/located identities in relation to “race” when immersed for the first time in a White settler society context. Findings from this qualitative study underscore discomfort with U.S.-centric race logics, production of ambiguity in relation to identity and race, and the growth of compassion for cultural Others as a result of becoming racial Other. The decolonial implications of such dis-identification with U.S. colonial race categories are discussed.

A Post/Decolonial View of Race and Identity Through the Narratives of U.S. International Students from the Global South

Since the onset of globalisation, many multinational corporations (MNCs) have been increasingly opening up subsidiaries in several host nations. While the entry of MNCs in some nations has been generally unproblematic, that has not been the case in every host nation. Fears of neocolonialism and postcolonial anxieties are very real phenomena in many parts of the world. When it comes to such resistant environments, MNCs need to be especially careful in how they conduct their public relations activities. This qualitative study of two MNC subsidiaries in India – Hindustan Lever Limited (of Unilever) and Maruti Udyog Limited (of Suzuki Motor Corporation) – explores, in context, the phenomenon of MNC public relations in this host nation that has a history of resistance to MNCs. The authors conclude that MNCs can be successful in potentially resistant host environments through culturally attuned involvement, intervention and respect for the local that is proven through socially responsible performance over time....

Multinational corporations and public relations in a historically resistant host culture

Public relations in India has witnessed a significant growth since the early 1990s. Based on the combined research of both authors over a period of 13 years, this article provides a meta-analysis and tracks recent changes within the profession keeping in mind the reconfiguring economic, societal, political and global/ local climate, we focus in-depth on the impact of societal culture and media environment on public relations in India.

Public Relations in India Review of a Programme of Research

This study is a theoretical as well as empirical exploration of the power and cultural differentials that mark and construct various intersecting discourses, specifically media discourse, on global AIDS/HIV. It applies the language and concepts of public relations to understand how the press coverage of the pandemic is associated with the variables that impact the newsmaking process as well as the public and policy implications of macro news frames generated over time. Theoretical work in the areas of agenda setting and news framing also instruct the conceptual framework of this analysis. Narrative analysis is used as a methodology to qualitatively analyze three pools of accounts-from people either living with AIDS/HIV, involved in AIDS/HIV work, or discursively engaged in the media construction of the pandemic; from transnational wire service journalists who cover the issue at global and regional levels; and policy shapers and communicators who are active at the global level. These three communities of respondents represent important stakeholders in the AIDS/HIV issue. The findings are analyzed from a public relations standpoint. Perhaps the most important finding of this study is that the public relations approaches used to address AIDS/HIV related issues need to be grounded in context-specific research and communicative practices that bring out the lived realities of AIDS/HIV at grassroots levels. The findings also posit that those situated at critical junctions between various stakeholders need to cultivate a finely balanced understanding of the etic and emic intersections and subjectivities of global/local AIDS/HIV.

Nilanjana Bardhan

Papers

Rupturing Public Relations Metanarratives: The Example of India

A Post/Decolonial View of Race and Identity Through the Narratives of U.S. International Students from the Global South

Multinational corporations and public relations in a historically resistant host culture

Public Relations in India Review of a Programme of Research

Accounts from the field: a public relations perspective on global AIDS/HIV.