Final blog ---Globalisation & CSR

Time is elapsing so fast, our first term is almost finish. During these two months, I gained a lot in different aspects.  Not only in my study, but also in my personal developing.

In the business and management lessons, we learnt something about globalisation and CSR. I found that very interesting as it is very close to our daily life. It is already be a trend and is going to invade all over the world. 

This is a funny but meaningful video that i want to share with you: 

For the globalisation, it is no longer be the new topic anymore as economic globalisation is everywhere nowadays. No matter the food, service, products, information, technology or labour are already become almost the same. There are serval reasons that make this happen includes political, technological, market and costs, rising real living standards and competitive.

Globalisation can be seen as a positive, negative or even marginal process. However, some may argue that globalisation is not a positive tendency as it will lead to the problem of lack of characteristic which means that everywhere will be the same. I agree with this opinion as I think that globalisation is a good thing somehow, but if over-globalisation it will become negative in contrast. For instance, whenever and wherever we go to any country or city, from China to Africa, we can find a McDonald's or Starbucks very easily as they are already spread throughout the rest of the world. When we go shopping in a shopping mall, we can always see the same brands such as TOP-SHOP, LV, PRADA, GAP everywhere includes in Asian counties like singapore, Japan or Thailand, in Western countries like Sweden, France or Spain. 

shopping centre in Lyon France 

 shopping centre in Bangkok

I think this is not a healthy situation as the brands are slowly to monopolise our world. The problem of globalisation is that we are losing some special and featured local boutiques because they cannot competitive with the commercial companies. I had read an article which is about the globalisation of economic and I think that is very interesting, the book called Jonathan Perraton, David Goldblatt , David Held & Anthony Mcgrew (1997) The globalisation of economic activity, New Political Economy, 2:2, 257-277.

Talking about CSR which means that corporate social responsibility, it divided to two parts internal and external responsibilities. In the internal responsibilities, it's about the business itself should bear the responsibility to make sure pay equally and fair to the every employee and do not use child labour. But nowadays, still have some companies are using child labour which is really unethical and inhumanity. For instance, NIKE is one of the companies who using the child labour. Nike is using child labour in the production of its soccer balls in Pakistan. But with the problem of child labour, did we really look into the matter of this problem? No, we didn't! Even the government in Pakistan, they didn't take enough actions to combat this serious situation. And other organisations such as WTO, did they do enough to solve this problem? Yes, but it's really inadequate. They do try to boycott NIKE, but it does not helpful. I think that we should really aware of the problem that child labour and cheap labour. 

http://www1.american.edu/TED/nike.htm

When talking about the external responsibilities, we should bear the responsibility on protect the environment and avoid animal cruelty. But tracing back to the reality, did we really do that? The answer is obviously----NO! Most of the people are just care about the profits but not the environment! Therefore, we should really support the company who will protect the environment. For example, Rockwood Lithium company which is doing some special metals, they will use anhydrous lithium hydroxide which can remove carbon dioxide from closed air circulating systems. Other examples are Oxsilan, Gardobond and Naftoseal. These companies will aware about the importance of protect the environment. We should give more support to those companies who will support the environment. I think that is not only the government's responsibilities, but also everyone's responsibility as we all living in the same globe, that is our collective responsibilities.  

http://www.rockwoodspecialties.com/rock_english/she/she_companies.asp