To coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Global Network for Advanced Management in April 2017, Global Network Perspectives asked faculty across the 29 schools in the network: "What do you think the future of globalization looks like? How will this affect the economy in your country or region? How is your school preparing students for this world?" Read all of the responses. Also, in a session at the anniversary symposium, a panel of experts—including former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry—led a discussion of the future of globalization and its implications for business and management education. Watch the video.
The sociologist Robert K. Merton sounded an alarm about globalization more than a half-century ago in his 1949 book Social Theory and Social Structure. In that book, he reported interviews he made of residents of a randomly chosen small town, Rovere, Massachusetts. What struck him then was that the residents of the town could be neatly divided into two types, as he called them, locals and cosmopolitans. The locals were deeply committed to their town. They knew a lot about the town. When asked about the other locals in the town, they were ready with praise and admiration. The cosmopolitans, on the other hand, had little interest in or appreciation for the town. They viewed themselves as a part of a larger world. When asked about locals in the town, they had little to say.
The world today is increasingly polarized into locals versus cosmopolitans. My concerns about our college and graduate school education today is that we are further developing a sense of cosmopolitan community for some people, excluding others.
Modern communications technology tends to increase this polarization, by enabling people to relate only to their group. Locals may be falling further behind on income measures. The modern multinational corporation, and the tendency for cosmopolitans to migrate between countries, further intensifies the polarization.
There are dangers to such a polarization, dangers of a divided society, a society which has two distinct worldviews that can come into conflict. This division comes just as the distribution of income strongly favors the cosmopolitans.
We must, in our efforts as educators, continue to find a place in our theories for both groups, and support the personal identity of both groups.
Economic policy needs to contain an element of protection of the interests of locals. I have written, including in my books The Subprime Solution: How Today's Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about It and Finance and the Good Society, that we need social insurance devices for them, including devices that I there called livelihood insurance, home equity insurance, and inequality indexation.
But we need more than such risk management. We need, as educators, to promote the idea that we are all citizens of the same society, and that we care about each other.