ABSTRACT
Introduction At the dawn of the new millennium, globalisation has become the most popular agenda in the economic, political and social lives of individuals, firms and nations. When we think about globalisation, we think of the remarkable convergence of tastes in consumer goods and the pervasive culture of consumption sweeping the world. We also think of webs of information, resources, people and products; electronically woven through networks of firms spread all over the globe. We think of the political and economic transformations changing the very structures and strategies of firms, and new manifestations of resources, such as knowledge and information, replacing traditional factors of production, such as land, labour and capital. We also think of the nation-state, an institution embraced by mankind in the last two centuries, giving way to the global corporation, the economic transformation agent of the new century, leapfrogging firms and peoples, including those from the developing world, into market prosperity. We think of this corporation, an economic value chain loosely managed by knowledge and information webs, as perhaps the most precious productive resource known to mankind (1; 94; 95).
