I have just written a short piece for the Navigator, a magazine of the USC Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis, about globalization and higher education. For convenience, I have pasted it in below (with references replaced by links), but the entire Fall 2006 issue in which it appeared can be accessed in PDF.
Globalization is a much used term in the world today, but its meaning is not particularly precise. The differences between globalization and internationalization are also not consistently defined, with the two words are sometimes being used interchangeably although they generally refer to rather different concepts. In the world of higher education, a dizzying variety of definitions of both words are to be found.
Rather then try to define what the words should mean in the abstract, I find it provides an interesting perspective to use these words in the way that Samuel Palmisano, Chair of the Board and CEO of IBM recently did in describing historical periods in the development of the modern corporation. “Internationalization”, in Palmisano’s view, describes the hub and spoke industrial networks of the last half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These networks focused on home country manufacture with international distribution, and in many cases international supply of raw materials. “Globalization”, on the other hand, describes a late 20th century process in which corporations have modularized the production process, and use new modes of information technology and the relative absence of protectionist national barriers to find the most effective and efficient global means of producing and assembling the individual production modules. In between these two periods was a time of “multinationals”, which sprang up when protectionism in the 1920's and 1930's made the spokes of the international companies ineffective - companies had to move from home country manufacture with international distribution to local production distributed in attractive markets.
