Friedman’s Discussion of Globalization and Flattening Essay Example for Free

Friedman’s Discussion of Globalization and Flattening Essay Globalization is regarded by its critics as a force which is extending the gap between the world’s rich and poor. In some ways, this has been true, especially throughout the first decade of the post-Cold War Era. The opening of gateways to the East created a relationship between the corporate partners throughout the globe that concentrated the spoils of free-trade into the hands of the wealthy. But in Thomas Friedman’s 2005 meditation on the topic, The World is Flat, there is evidence that in fact, the intended products of globalization such as a greater distribution of knowledge resources and a leveling of the technological playing field are beginning to surface. This latter product of free trade, the ‘leveling’ effect is that which informs Friedman’s title theme. The world has become flat by its increasing smallness. The economic, political, cultural and tele-communicative interconnectivity of nations is gradually eroding many of the geographic obstacles to popular progress. The strands of globalization, the New York Times journalist observes, have contributed to a broadening of access to independent entrepreneurialship and opportunity. Though many of the subjects of the author’s analysis are large American multi-national corporations, there is an evident transition in which knowledge-based internet startup enterprises from across the globe are undermining the more monopolistic proclivities of the American market. In nations such as India and China, American exploitation of lower operational, environmental and labor-oriented costs in the technological sector has caused a proliferation of such resources to the general public. This, in turn, is becoming a hotbed of alternative market action which will ultimately dismantle the superiority of the American economy. According to Friedman’s analysis, a core detriment to the U. S. economy, but a boon to independent operations overseas, has been a disregard for American private conceptions of property rights. From counterfeiting of American name brand consumer goods to pirate telecommunication infrastructural apparatuses, the bureaucratic vulnerabilities to effective globalization are numerous. Both partners in a free-trade circumstance stand to lose economic opportunity in the presence of such market subversions. Thomas Friedman’s text is eye-opening insofar as so many of the matters which he discusses may be directly implicated in the experiences of our everyday lives. In fact, this is the ‘flattening’ principle of which the author speaks, dictating that the public experience rather than simply large institutional abstractions are shaping the context in which we live our lives. Such is to suggest that the technological, educational, informational and recreational freedoms which have traditionally be reserved for those on the upper echelon of both their domestic setting and international geography are increasingly becoming democratic. However, in contrast to Friedman’s general tenor of optimism, his sarcasm only hints at the current consequences of globalization for so many individuals. This discussion is a reflection on Friedman’s text as informed by my own conception of globalization which brings future opportunity at the expense of current human dignity, personal satisfaction and even American prosperity. Therefore, the discussion will be oriented toward elucidating globalization’s internally contradictory nature. Just as it enriches one demographic in a developing nation, it facilitates the targeted abuse of another. Just as it endows us with a heretofore unseen capacity for self-sufficiency, it likewise robs us of the capacity to control the level of satisfaction which we achieve when relating to the commercial world. In the flattening of the global horizon that Friedman lauds as the eventual path to a shared standard of living and prosperity, there is the need for a greater analytical emphasis on the negative forces that are driving individuals to increasingly attempt to find their own pathways to social and commercial interaction. Friedman’s discussion, as we will see, is focused on demonstrating the permeation of benefits to the collective world community in free trade. This is quite supportable from a macrolevel standpoint. Indeed, nations engaged in free trade would do well to support one another in a mutuality of benefit. Certainly, as was illustrated by the economic phenomena of the 1990s’, the expansion of a single large market through a boom of technological progress will have the effect of disseminating to the rest of the free world. This was certainly proved to be true by the dynamic of that decade, when â€Å"there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world. † (Friedman, 6) The result is what is seen as surfacing today. More than the United States, it is the world community which is producing the knowledge workforce of the future. And though Friedman is forthcoming in making that foreboding case, it is important that we expound upon this subject further in this discussion by acknowledging that globalization and the ‘flattening’ effect are not of a uniform pattern. Even as the proliferation which the author discusses is taking place, it has done so with a multitude of consequences that can neither said to have been desire nor can be said to have stimulated greater equality. Friedman, whom by his text we may suggest is a supporter of the ultimate purpose of globalization, makes the technological attribution that â€Å"it was actually the coincidence of the dot-com boom and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that launched the fiber-optic bubble. † (67) Friedman observes that the collective telecom industry invested roughly 1 trillion dollars in half a decade on ‘wiring the world. ’ (67) The deregulation in the 1996 American domestic legislation, which allowed so many larger companies to enforce hostile consolidation measures in a vast array of theretofore legally unapproachable markets, would coincide with the unfettered capital investment in global internet penetration that has ultimately elevated private sector rights over public rights while simultaneously helping to bring other nations to an eventually greater infrastructural promotion of internet access than would be found in the United States. In some manner, this is borne out by a pattern with incredibly broad-based implications for American consumer and job markets. Today, we have seen and experienced the wholesale transfer of our Customer Service industry to fledgling globalizing economies such as that in India. Here, major computer retailers, cable company operators, wireless communication device providers, bank/credit cards merchants and virtually every other monopolistic corporate industry in America is forced to maintain its competitive advantages by commissioning outsourced Customer Service agents located in India. It is their charge to replicate the experience of an American calling a support technician with an intimate relationship with the product in question. This is accomplished with, as Friedman reveals, intensive training in the adoption of linguistic, dialectic and etiquette-related behaviors designed to facilitate comfort for the American caller. â€Å"The Indian call center operators adopt Western names of their own choosing. The idea, of course, is to make their American or European customers feel more comfortable. † (22) Amongst the many indicators that cultural flattening would play a part in this transition of labor, the concept of taking on an Americanized name in the interests of facilitating the core consumer target is not only remarkable but intensely objectionable from the outside perspective, particularly when this outside perspective is informed by the sense of autonomy and individuality typically affiliated with western philosophy. However, for the subjects described in Friedman’s book, an aspect of the western philosophy perhaps more indicative of its cultural interest is the economic opportunity afforded to the hundreds of thousands of young Indian post-graduates competing for the chance to answer phone calls from Americans concerned with all manner of technical support or target marketing. This relatively low-level and typically micro-managed field in America has become amongst the most competitive entry-level positions in India. And in one sense that Friedman captures in the theoretical framing of his text, this is an opportunity for personal economic mobility which for the young student in India might have been seen as extraordinary and rarified just a decade ago. This may hardly be said to be true today, where â€Å"245,000 Indians are answering phones† 24 hours a day and charged with responsibility of representing themselves as being located somewhere in the United States. (24) From a personal perspective, this has produced an incredible dearth of quality service in the United States, where the usability of our products has become increasingly distant from the quality of the Customer Support which we have received. One of the qualities of our technology which Friedman believes has helped to diminish the relevance of geographical distance to serviceability has been the institution of automated Customer Service. For those of us who have been transferred and given insufficient options for contending with specific categories of problem, this has hardly been an added convenience. And the infallibly polite computerized operator is equally as unflappable or emotionally unresponsive as is the outsourced Customer Service representative. In a particularly telling passage where Friedman observes a woman in an Indian call center as caller after caller hangs up the phone in rage, we can see that there is something about this experience that can be excruciating and even unfair. It may be noted that Friedman does a very effective job at distinguishing between the economic, the sociological and the technological factors which have rendered our current level of global flatness. He acknowledges that there were world events which would make the type of collaboration now essential between the United States and India a natural matter of happenstance. Friedman describes the so-called Y2K crisis in which it was feared that a lack of programming foresight would result in the incorrect resetting of the world’s computer-based internal clocking mechanisms, creating the likelihood of widespread technical failure throughout the world. Thus, â€Å"with Y2K bearing down on us, America and India started dating, and that relationship became a huge flattener, because it demonstrated to so many different businesses that the combination of the PC, the Internet, and fiber-optic cables had created the possibility of a whole new for of collaboration horizontal value creation: outsourcing. † (108) So we must yield to the fact that, truly, globalization can hardly be avoided. The scope of consumer need does truly require a greater scope of consumer service, and the Indian economy does have the correct workforce makeup to address this need. But when combined with the expansion of private rights, courtesy of such legislation as the 1996 Act, this has created a frustrating sense for the consumer that ‘flattening’ requires a considerable decline from the experiences to which Americans have grown accustomed. Perhaps the overarching presence in Friedman’s text is the intimation that these factors which are impacting our lives and the affecting the shift of world order are of an inevitable nature. The ten factors which are identified as the flattening mechanisms of the changing globe are largely technological and economic forces with broad social and cultural implications. However, these latter qualities are merely the secondary consequence of a circumstance committed to by former. Such is to say that the proliferation of western culture, though certainly not accidental, is merely incidental. Referring once again to the problematic case of outsourcing Customer Support services, we can see that the imposition of American culture is only due to the need to cater to the American consumer. In reality, though Indian culture is threatened by subversion, it is American culture which is being co-opted for reasons having little to do with cultural expression. As a result, the American identity has been trivialized and largely represented as being tantamount to the conveyance of commercial interest. One of the core revelations offered by this text, at least when placed in the context of the general American’s everyday experience, is that the flattening which has occurred must necessarily come at the expense of the American’s staunch sense of individuality and belief in personal entitlement. Works Cited: Friedman, T. (2005). The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Religious and Spiritual Practices of Enslaved African Americans Essay

The Community of Enslaved Africans and their Religious & Spiritual Practices. During a most dark and dismal time in our nations history, we find that the Africans who endured horrible circumstances during slavery, found ways of peace and hope in their religious beliefs. During slavery, Africans where able to survive unbearable conditions by focusing on their spirituality. Christianity was amongst the slave community. Being that the vast majority of the slave community was born in America, converting slaves to Christianity was not a struggle. All slaves were not Christian, and slaves that had accepted Christianity were not official members of the church. Over time Slaves made Christianity their own. There would be occurrences where church gatherings would hold both white and black members. Slave religion was both institutional and non institutional. The slave gatherings would be both formally organized and spontaneously adapted. These gatherings would usually take place at night in the woods. Slaves enjoyed their own meetings better because they could sing and pray as they wanted. In some cases slave masters would not allow attendance of church gatherings and prayer meetings, some slaves would risk flogging to attend these meetings. Christianity was transformed into by the slave community to its own particular experience. Teachings by white masters w ere usually geared towards reminding slaves that on good behavior to their white masters, they would be accepted into heaven and even then , they would be limited to a lesser heaven than there owners. Jesus was not talked about, teachings consisted only of the laws to not lie or steal from their masters. Slaves would soon start to hold their own gatherings to just sing and pray a... .... So ultimately, owners failed at this. Moreover, many owners later came to feel that Christianity may actually have encouraged rebellion (all those stories of Moses and the Israelites in Egypt, after all, talked about the liberation of the slaves), and so they began to discourage Christian missionaries from preaching to the slaves. African Americans have taken their own spiritual, religious journey. God was looked upon as a source of peace and encouragement. The community of enslave Africans were able to use religion and spirituality as a way of overcoming the mental anguish of slavery on a daily basis. To a slave, religion was the most important aspect of their life. Nothing could come between their relationship with god. It was their rock, the only reason why they could wake up in the morning, the only way that they endured this most turbulent time in our history.

Engage in personal development in health, social care or children’s and young people’s setting. Essay

1.1 Describe the duties and responsibilities of your own work role. The day to day care and supervision of children aged 3months to a 1year. Planning and implementing with the staff team activities and resources to provide a rich learning environment. To be a key person I am responsible for a small group of around 6-8 children, observing and recording their learning and development. This involves taking pictures for their learning journals and commenting on their day to day activities. We also observe their current development to ensure they are at the right stage for their age in terms of speech & language. It also involves building a positive and supportive partnership with their parents/carers and families, respecting and valuing their cultures and beliefs. We aim to involve parents with all aspects of their child’s journey at Nursery including updating their individual learning plans termly. As a key worker I am heavily involved in this process, encouraging children to achieve their learning goals and to ensure I am up to date with all policies and procedures such as safeguarding, health and safety, the welfare requirements, manual handling, etc. 1.2 Explain expectations about own work role as expressed in relevant standards. Practitioner’s expectations should be to become a valuable practitioner, to be reliable and build good relationships with children and parent carers, encouraging play whilst learning, and by having children’s best interests e.g. physical activities, outings, this would help them to enjoy their growth in knowledge and assist in enhancing their development as a whole. Also practitioners should work as a team with other staff members and parent/carers in order to support the children to promote the children’s initial learning so that the children will feel confident and would be able boost up their self-esteem, and this will also help them in their future, and prepare them in further education when they move onto school. Also the expectations that are to be done in placement at a relevant standard is to supervise the children this plays a big role in child protection Act and  health and policy. Practitioners should always watch the children closely to prevent and reduce the severity of injury to children. Children often challenge their own abilities but are not always able to recognise the risks involved. Practitioners need to supervise children and identify any risks and minimise injury.

Chemical Engineer Salary and Experience

Chemical engineering is one of the highest paying degrees for entry level jobs, with even higher payscales for experienced chemical engineers. Chemical engineers tend to be in high demand and are much more employable than chemists. Heres a look at typical salary ranges for chemical engineers. Chemical Engineer Salary Survey Based on Experience Chemical engineers can earn good salaries straight out of school, but years of experience or higher education can double the salary rate. Chemical Engineer 1 Year Experience: $51,710 - $66,286 Chemical Engineer with 1-4 Years Experience: $56,206 - $70,414 Chemical Engineer with 5-9 Years Experience: $64,618 - $84,199 Chemical Engineer with 10-19 Years Experience: $74,546 - $101,299 Chemical Engineer with More than 20 Years Experience: $83,304 - $126,418 Salary survey based on experience is from PayScale.com. According to the US Department of Labor (2008), the median salary for chemical engineering was $78,860. The middle 50% of chemical engineers had salaries between $67,420 and $105,000. The UKs Institution of Chemical Engineers (2006) reported the average starting salary for chemical engineering graduates was  £24,000, with an average salary for all chemical engineers of about  £53,000.