A Response to Globalisation

One of the most notable features of the Third Way approach relates to its repeated insistence that an increased internationalisation, or globalisation, of the world economy has created a new environment within which progressive-social democratic actors need to adapt traditional programmes to remain relevant and arrest a perceived decline in the efficiency of their preferred policy instruments. Commentators on the future developments in management theory and practice have popularised the perception of the existence of a ‘borderless world’ (Ohmae, 1990; Naisbitt, 1994), within which ‘the stateless corporation’ operates, relocating the location of production facilities with relative ease on the basis of calculations that optimise profits and productivity (Holstein, 1990). For example, in The Work of Nations, Reich (1992: 136–168) argues that the complex inter-connected elements of TNCs make its ‘ownership’ largely irrelevant. This picture is reinforced by those critics of these developments, who claim that global corporations de facto rule the world (Barnett and Cavannagh, 1994; Brecher and Costello, 1994; Korten, 1995). Thus, it is claimed that globalisation has transformed economic activity, through the transformation of the strategic, organisational and operational corporate behaviour (Porter, 1990; Bleeke and Ernst, 1993; Taylor and Weber, 1996).