ABSTRACT
New centuries, new beginnings. The launch of a new journal of Asian business management is a timely contribution to the diffusion of useful techniques, and the spread – and often fruitfully clarifying confrontations – of values and ideologies which are among the more benign aspects of globalization. They are not aspects much appreciated by the fire-in-the-belly protesters on the streets of Seattle and Genoa for whom ‘globalization’ has become the portmanteau embodiment of all evil that ‘capitalist’ was for their grandfathers in the depression of the 1930s. ‘Fruitfully clarifying’ is not the way they would see the confrontations of different values and ideologies that the transnationalization of production and property ownership brings. Rather – if they think of it at all in those terms – they see such confrontations as a process in which one dominant form of capitalism sweeps all before it; transforming both institutions, and, through the brain-washing of business schools, values and ideologies. It is a process which they see as tending to one sole end – to reinforce the dominance – ‘hegemony’ is becoming the standard term – of American business in the world economy, of the American state in world geopolitics, and in world culture of the doctrine that maximization of shareholder value should be the objective, and is the moral duty, of corporate managers.
