ABSTRACT
The term ‘globalisation’ is as polarising as it is confusing. There are as many defi nitions of the word available as there are opinions. Every industry has a personal take on the term.
By the late 1980s, ‘international integration’ was an acceptable synonym for globalisation as improvised by Resnick (1989) and originally developed by Davidson and Harrigan (1977), and Levitt (1980) and many others after that, including Hamel and Prahalad (1985). Medina and Duffy (1998) provide an extensive history of the defi nition. Resnick’s defi nition was more process oriented, one that described globalisation as the phenomenon that allowed fi rms obtaining raw materials from one market with fi nancial support from another and so on and so forth while selling the fi nished product in yet other national market. This act of making products worldwide in scope and application was further clarifi ed in research by Medina and Duffy (1998), who defi ned globalisation as the process of adopting country and target-market dictated product standards – tangible and/or intangible attributes – from environments around the world to achieve a highly uniform product. Thus, in the words of Mertl (2013, p. 31), globalisation is ‘the sum of all phenomena, which lead or refer to a status of permanent and unlimited possibilities of interaction between all cultures’.
