Framing Modernity and Globalization

For quite a while now, I have been looking for the right set of frames to get me started on understanding geopolitics and globalization. For a long time, I was misled by the fact that 90% of the available books frame globalization and the emergence of modernity in terms of the nation-state as the fundamental unit of analysis, with politics as the fundamental area of human activity that shapes things. On the face of it, this seems reasonable. Nominally, nation-states subsume economic activity, with even the most powerful multi-national corporations being merely secondary organizing schemes for the world.

But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve been pulled towards a business-first perspective on modernity and globalization. As a result, this post is mostly woven around ideas drawn from five books that provide appropriate fuel for this business-first frame. I will be citing, quoting and otherwise indirectly using these books over several future posts, but I won’t be reviewing them. So if you want to follow the arguments more closely, you may want to read some or all of these. The investment is definitely worthwhile.

§ The Corporation that Changed the World by Nick Robins, a history of the East India Company, a rather unique original prototype of the idea

§ Monsoon by Robert Kaplan, an examination of the re-emergence of the Indian Ocean as the primary theater of global geopolitics in the 21st century

§ The Influence of Sea Power Upon History: 1660-1783 by Alfred Thayer Mahan, a classic examination of how naval power is the most critical link between political, cultural, military and business forces.

§ The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria, an examination of the structure of the world being created, not by the decline of America, but by the “rise of the rest.”

§ The Lever of Riches by Joel Mokyr, probably the most compelling model and account of how technological change drives the evolution of civilizations, through monotonic, path-dependent accumulation of changes

I didn’t settle on these five lightly. I must have browsed or partly-read-and-abandoned dozens of books about modernity and globalization before settling on these as the ones that collectively provided the best framing of the themes that intrigued me. If I were to teach a 101 course on the subject, I’d start with these as required reading in the first 8 weeks.

The human world, like physics, can be reduced to four fundamental forces: culture, politics, war and business. That is also roughly the order of decreasing strength, increasing legibilityand partial subsumption of the four forces. Here is a visualization of my mental model:

Culture is the most mysterious, illegible and powerful force. It includes such tricky things as race, language and religion. Business, like gravity in physics, is the weakest and most legible: it can be reduced to a few basic rules and principles (comprehensible to high-school students) that govern the structure of the corporate form, and descriptive artifacts like macroeconomic indicators, microeconomic balance sheets, annual reports and stock market numbers.

But one quality makes gravity dominate at large space-time scales: gravity affects all masses and is always attractive, never repulsive. So despite its weakness, it dominates things at sufficiently large scales. I don’t want to stretch the metaphor too far, but something similar holds true of business.

On the scale of days or weeks, culture, politics and war matter a lot more in shaping our daily lives. But those forces fundamentally cancel out over longer periods. They are mostly noise, historically speaking. They don’t cause creative-destructive, unidirectional change (whether or not you think of that change as “progress” is a different matter).

Business though, as an expression of the force of unidirectional technological evolution, has a destabilizing unidirectional effect. It is technology, acting through business and Schumpeterian creative-destruction, that drives monotonic, historicist change, for good or bad. Business is the locus where the non-human force of technological change sneaks into the human sphere.

Of course, there is arguably some progress on all four fronts. You could say that Shakespeare represents progress with respect to Aeschylus, and Tom Stoppard with respect to Shakespeare. You could say Obama understands politics in ways that say, Hammurabi did not. You could say that General Petraeus thinks of the problems of military strategy in ways that Genghis Khan did not. But all these are decidedly weak claims.

On the other hand the proposition that Facebook (the corporation) is in some ways a beast entirely beyond the comprehension of an ancient Silk Road trader seems vastly more solid. And this is entirely a function of the intimate relationship between business and technology. Culture is suspicious of technology. Politics is mostly indifferent to and above it. War-making uses it, but maintains an arms-length separation. Business? It gets into bed with it. It is sort of vaguely plausible that you could switch artists, politicians and generals around with their peers from another age and still expect them to function. But there is no meaningful way for a businessman from (say) 2000 BC to comprehend what Mark Zuckerberg does, let alone take over for him. Too much magical technological water has flowed under the bridge.

Arthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but technology (and science) aren’t what create the visible magic. Most of the magic never leaves journal papers or discarded engineering prototypes. It is business that creates the world of magic, not technology itself. And the story of business in the last 400 years is the story of the corporate form.

There are some who treat corporate forms as yet another technology (in this case a technology of people-management), but despite the trappings of scientific foundations (usually in psychology) and engineering synthesis (we speak of organizational “design”), the corporate form is not a technology. It is the consequence of a social contract like the one that anchors nationhood. It is a codified bundle of quasi-religious beliefs externalized into an animate form that seeks to preserve itself like any other living creature.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 805