ABSTRACT
Globalisation is arguably among the most potent shaping forces of the contemporary study of business and management. Open any management or economics textbook and it will leap out at you from the pages; type the word ‘globalisation’ into the search engine of any business research database and you will get literally thousands of ‘hits’. As we will consider shortly Globalisation is a highly contentious and indistinct concept and many commentators disagree on its extent, nature and virtue (Baalam and Veseth, 2005). However, there can be no doubt that in the
last decades of the 20th century and the first of the 21st century, the international domain has become an increasingly more important dynamic in the work of those concerned with Human Resource Management (HRM) and workplace organisation. The prominence and importance of multi-national corporations (MNCs), the liberalisation of world markets, the integration of markets and business systems and the all-pervasive influence of information and communication technologies (ICTs) amongst many other factors have meant that the world has become more interconnected and in a metaphorical sense a smaller place. As a result, business and management activities, however localised, have an enhanced sensitivity to the potential impact of international phenomena. Furthermore, some commentators have argued that these developments have changed the operating environments of the world’s ‘developed’ economies, industries and labour forces (such as the USA, the UK and Europe, and their manufacturing sectors) and increased the risks and challenges they face such as competition from other regions of the world and the imperative to innovate and find new ‘flexible’ ways of working in order to ensure competitiveness and survival (Eaton, 2000).
