Publishers have churned out books on globalisation, the interdependence of states and markets, by the dozen in recent years. And these books fall into two slots: pro-globalist and anti-globalist.
Up to now, anti-globalist works -- Nobel Prize winner, Joseph Stiglitz's Globalisation and its Discontents springs to mind -- have had the upper hand. They heavily outnumber books advocating or celebrating globalisation.
Multiply titles by sales and their preponderance is overwhelming.
On the other hand, many pro-globalisation books were so badly argued, using anecdote rather than evidence to discredit their own claims, till Jagdish Bhagwati's In Defence of Globalisation came along last year to redress the balance.
So you would wonder whether with this surfeit of literature in today's rapidly globalising world we needed another book exploring the implications of the rapid globalisation of the world economy.
Fortunately, Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Globalized World in the Twenty-First Century (Allen Lane, special Indian price, £8.50) is not an either/or study: he sets out the dynamics of how and why the world became so integrated because of the explosion of advanced technologies that have caused the "death of distance."
Thomas Friedman, three times winner of the Pulitzer Prize (awarded annually for outstanding literary or journalism work) and a widely syndicated columnist, is eminently qualified to write on globalisation because of his wide travels in India, China and Europe -- wherever, in fact, globalisation is impacting on the lives of people.
Earlier, he had written The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalisation but this updates the study on the ground.
Beginning with Bangalore -- he knows everyone who is anyone in IT there -- Friedman says that what the explosion in communication technologies has done is to have created "knowledge-pools and resources that have been connected all over the planet, levelling the playing field as never before, so that each of us is potentially an equal -- and competitor -- of the other. The world is wired so that Indian accountants or software engineers can now share an idea, team their skills or compete head-on with their U.S. or European counterparts."
In other words, the earth has flattened out. And the world has been flattened out because of the convergence of ten major political events, innovations, and companies.
The first three forces provided the genesis for flattening out the world: the fall of the Berlin Wall in September 1989, Netscape going public in September 1995 connecting millions of PCs and sparking the Internet revolution; the creation of Workflow Software, which "seamlessly connected applications to applications, so that people could manipulate all their digitized content, using computers and the Internet, as never before."
All the ten flatteners had been around for quite some time but somewhere along the line the work flow software and hardware converged in a way that allowed, "scanning, e-mail, printing, faxing, and copying all from the same machine."
The net result of this convergence meant an individual could enter into multiple forms of collaboration on his own without being tied down to any organisation. Hence you see the rapid emergence of SOHO (small office, home office) with techno-savvy individuals breaking out on their own.
Does all this high-tech gadgetry lead to greater productivity? Not immediately, Friedman says, because, "it always takes time for all the flanking technologies, and the business processes and habits needed to get the most out of them, to converge and create the next productivity breakthrough. . . The big spurts in productivity come when a new technology is combined with new ways of doing business."
Business processes are being "reconfigured", which "flattens out" the earth even more.
How do the new technologies and business practices impact on the lives of ordinary people? The answer to that is all the "stuff" is in place but it will take time to filter down. PCOs in every nook and corner have shown it is not a distant dream.