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This chapter investigates how global business has influenced the operation of Indian businesses. It discusses the operation of national companies in British India and describes the receptive phase of foreign investment from 1948–67, the restrictive phase from 1968–79, and the liberalization phase from the 1990s onwards. This chapter highlights the trend for Indian companies to acquire foreign companies rather than merely entering into a technical collaboration, and suggests that increased overseas acquisitions can be considered as a response mechanism of Indian firms to forces unleashed by trade liberalization and lifting of most restrictions in the Indian economy. It also provides case studies of ITC Limited, ICI India Limited, HCL Group, Motherson Sumi Systems Limited, and Ranbaxy Laboratories Limited.

In this chapter, the theologian Hans Küng looks at the various attempts to formulate an acceptable cross‐cultural (multicultural) global ethic, which might be used both as an end in itself, and a basis for the motives and conduct of the institutions that fashion global capitalism. Such an ethic (notably that proposed by Küng himself and the Parliament of the World's Religions) is designed to identify and promote an agreed set of core human values and behavioural standards as agreed by the leading faith traditions, but might also be endorsed by non‐religious persons and institutions. Küng is aware of the difficulties in identifying and practising a universally acceptable moral code, but he considers that not only is the idea of such a code gaining increasing support, but it is also undergirding and guiding the strategies and policies of many global institutions, particularly global businesses.

This chapter examines international influences on preferential trading arrangements (PTAs). Both the incidence of PTA formation and the frequency with which states have entered such arrangements have varied over time. After World War II, few agreements were established until the 1960s, at which time there was an uptick in the creation of PTAs that lasted until the mid-1970s. For the next fifteen years or so, relatively few PTAs were formed. During the 1990s, however, states flocked to join these agreements, a trend that has continued into the twenty-first century. The chapter examines four systemic factors that previous studies have linked to these outcomes: hegemony, strategic interaction among both states and PTAs, the global business cycle, and changes in the global balance of power. It also addresses whether the number of democracies worldwide has affected PTA formation and accession. Finally, it considers the effects of features of the GATT/WTO on these outcomes.

This chapter sets out by asking whether Norway, as a petro-economy, is running the risk of falling into the natural resource trap. Though there is no answer to this question, the chapter shows––through an historical account of the Norwegian business system––how Norwegian industrial development has been shaped by a distinct economic logic and how this continues to dominate the core of the economy. On the other hand, it offers examples of how Norwegian firms and employees are successfully adapting to the globalized economy. Although this was not the intention, post-war modernization programmes and continuous welfare reforms have enabled Norwegian players to renew business by tapping into global value chains.

This chapter functions as a concluding chapter that summarizes the progressive synthesis of baseball, viewed through MLB, as a sport, domestic monopoly, neocolonial power, and global business. It talks about how each of those particular elements is seen as an important part of MLB and is represented in the World Baseball Classic (WBC). The WBC is an international showcase competition initiated by MLB and MLBPA in 2006 and cosponsored by league organizations of the fifteen other participating countries. The chapter then describes the recent actions of globalization by both the MLB and individual teams, wherein there is an organizational shift from a neocolonial to a multinational and multiracial business strategy in a global economy. It relates baseball’s globalization to how the term is applied by critics and scholars such as Joseph S. Nye Jr. and Michael Denning. Denning asserts that the concept redefines modernity and signals the end of the three separate historical culture “worlds” — capitalism, communism, and decolonizing.

Television emerged as the most important commercial pillar of the Tour and global sports business after the Second World War. Chapter Six explains how, as the television economy of professional sports matured beginning in the 1980s, Tour organizers crafted the race into a made-for-television spectacle that showered publicity on its biggest sponsors and expanded the event’s global audience. The Tour’s “Frenchness” did not diminish amid its globalization. The event’s particularly French character, qualities, structures, and cultural symbolism were mimicked, reproduced, and disseminated outside France. The chapter recounts the story of American attempts to create sustainable, Tour-like cycling events including the Coors Classic, the Tour of America, the Tour de Trump, and the Tour DuPont -- to illustrate the growth of road cycling worldwide and the direct influences the Tour exerted on the sport’s global development.

This chapter explores the prevalence of business groups in Britain. It shows that during the nineteenth century British merchant houses established business groups with diversified portfolio and pyramidal structures overseas, primarily in developing countries, both colonial and independent. These business groups were resilient and successful until the late twentieth century. In the domestic economy, the business-group form had a more limited role. Large single product firms were the norm, which over time merged into large combines with significant market power. This reflected a business system in which a close relationship between finance and industry was discouraged, but there were few restrictions on the transfer of corporate ownership. Yet large and successful diversified business groups did emerge which had closely held shareholding and international businesses. Especially between the 1970s and the 1990s, large diversified conglomerates also flourished. This evidence shows that diversified business groups can add value in mature markets.

This chapter examines the development of open strategy practices from the late 1990s. Open strategy involves greater transparency about strategy to internal and external audiences, and greater inclusion for internal and external stakeholders. The contemporary rise of open strategy is supported by three exogenous forces: the dissolving of organizational boundaries internally and externally, a newly democratic working culture, and new technologies, especially social media. Nevertheless, open strategy’s development still involves two kinds of arduous and fallible institutional work: ‘rule-making’ and ‘resource-organizing’. As examples of the first, Gary Hamel’s Strategos Consulting promoted new kinds of democratic strategy norms, while corporates such as IBM developed internal openness through its jams. Under the second, new consulting firms were created such as Global Business Network, while established corporations such as Barclays Bank, Nokia, and Shell had to organize new kinds of participative strategy process.

The end of the Second World War was another major turning point in the global insurance industry. Not only communist countries but also former colonies were restricting the activities of foreign companies. Asian countries such as South Korea and Taiwan, and even Australia, protected their own insurance markets against foreign competition, while at the same time fostering local development. While the Bretton Woods system operated, restrictions on the transfer of international capital had prevented many insurers from operating outside their own countries. For a long time afterwards, insurers were confronted by obstacles that they were powerless to overcome—xenophobia, products tailored to specific countries, special distribution organizations and restrictions placed on majority control of domestic companies by foreigners. Only reinsurers managed to keep operating on a more or less global scale, thereby compensating for the lack of international risk distribution brought about by insurers concentrating on their home markets.

Using a connectedness measurement technology fundamentally grounded in modern network theory, the chapter measures real output connectedness for a set of six developed countries, from 1962 to 2010. It shows that global connectedness is sizable and time-varying over the business cycle, and it studies the nature of the time variation relative to the ongoing discussion about the changing nature of the global business cycle. It also shows that connectedness corresponding to transmissions to others from the United States and Japan is disproportionately important. The data used in this analysis is quite different to earlier works; industrial production indexes at monthly intervals allows the connectedness of business cycle shocks to be captured much faster.

Inclusive capitalism is a hot topic and for the right reasons. It has been the focus of discussions both in academic and development circles around the world. “The role that business plays in society, and the expectations about the role it should play, has shifted dramatically in recent years. Called to a higher purpose, or sensing that externalities can only be ignored at their peril, many businesses are increasingly open to the notion that they have a responsibility for creating more inclusive economic systems” (Tufano et al. 2016). This statement is an indicator of rigorous research being carried out on the capital and social impact of global business. This chapter highlights the work of the best thinkers and primary players in the world of global business and economics.

The three films dealt with in this chapter are all about ‘entrepreneurs’ who embark on careers embracing different kinds or degrees of illegality. The important factor is that all three films deal with personal aspiration as a motivating factor and this is recognized by the agents of the state in the film as initiative and they are eventually let off. The films extend the tendencies of Lage Raho Munna Bhai to make illegality acceptable and conceding that such ‘initiative’ is even a virtue, the veiled justification being that it is necessary for the state to ‘indulge’ entrepreneurship to bring it up to global standards. The indulgence of the state towards entrepreneurial illegality eventually weakens it and this weakening is also examined in the chapter.