May 1, 2000 - The State of the World, Part I The spring semester is almost over. It's time for a brief survey of events around the world--a poor man's version of the nightly news with Dan Rather minus the advertisements for arthritis pain relievers and laxatives (if you need either try http: //www.drugstore.com)--as they relate to international organizational behavior.
Global Snapshots
- A picture in the New York Times depicts a Jewish man praying at Jerusalem's Western Wall. He is holding a cell phone as he prays.
- An article in the New Republic has the headline: "Why China will get democracy too."
- American labor unions struggle to develop a position toward the global economy.
- Russian bureaucrats abruptly stopped the construction of an overpass that would permit access to an IKEA just outside the Moscow city limits. Apparently, they decided that the location of the store would deprive Moscow of city taxes.
- A Wall Street Journal article proclaims: "Retired Salarymen, Japan's 'Garbage,' Clean Up Their Act: Couch Potatoes No More, They Cultivate New Passions; Walking With the Mrs."
- Will Kymlicka, a philosophy professor at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada has become a global guru. In his view, "Globalization has made the myth of a culturally homogenous state even more unrealistic, and has forced the majority within each state to be more open to pluralism and diversity."
- Tom Redburn in the New York Times observes that the new economy has made Asian values irrelevant. He writes that "...few in Asia are listening these days to sermons on "Asian" virtues of thrift, strong extended families, personal connections and deference to elders. Instead, the continent has fallen in love with the Internet."
These observations comment on current events and are not significantly different that the nightly news--or even newspapers or newsmagazines--that present snippets of information often as fact, sometimes with covert opinion, and at other times clearly identified as opinion.
Information, The Net, and Thinking
The World Wide Web and the Internet can help us locate information and observations of various types. Indeed, one of the problems of the Net is that it overwhelms--or at least has the potential to overwhelm--us with information. But can the World Wide Web and the Internet help us locate data and information that can be viewed critically and developed into explanations of organizational behavior? Some interesting questions are:
- What information do we want to retrieve?
- How should we evaluate the information and facts we gather?
- How do we make sense of the information?
- How do we extend our use of the Internet beyond information, examples, illustrations, and facts?
- Is it possible to create meaning from information to identify patterns of behavior?
- How can we decide which patterns are important and which are not?
- Can we explain events that form patterns?
- Can we develop theories that tie the complex social processes that affect organizations and organizational behavior into some framework that helps us understand things better and possibly predict behavior?
Web Exercise
Select one of the topics from the list above--or a topic of your choosing--to develop by using the Internet and World Wide Web. Use the questions listed above--and others that you think are relevant--to explore the topic.
- Are you able to find information that is rich enough for describing behavior in organizations and explaining it?
- Does the Web let you get "below the surface" of important issues? If not, what other sources of data would you need and where would you get them?
- How do you know that you have located a significant pattern of organizational behavior or activities outside organizations that affect them?
- How can you have confidence that you have explained patterns you identified satisfactorily?
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