Employee Empowerment

Shifting of business practice: from Command and control corporate culture to employee empowerment

In the past, most of the organizations organized work based on the traditional Taylor model which is reducing a process to individual steps so that everyone is only focusing on their tasks and only the top management will make the decision. However, since 1990s, after the concept of employee empowerment has been invented, more and more Companies are redistributing power, authority and responsibility so that even junior staff has decision-making capability. For instance, company like AT&T, Federal Express, Johnson and Johnson are all practicing employee empowerment.

Among all the companies, one of the most famous successful examples of employee empowerment is Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Co. (3M), which is a diversified manufacturer. 3M found that increasing employee empowerment is not only a good thing to do; it is a “business thing” to do. There are mainly three changes in the work practice: the work system is changed into a full participation of the people doing the work, work groups in line divisions are moving into self-directed, and functional departments are becoming increasingly team-based and self-directed. 

For instance, in 1994, 3M’s new Brockville, Ontario, facility came on-line as the organization’s first “Greenfield” site. It was designed and built to operate with self-directed work teams. Many work groups in line divisions and staff groups are moving more and more into self-direction. 3M’s commercial office supply divisions, finance, logistics, are becoming increasingly team-based and self-directed.

What are the global forces for employee empowerment?

1.     1. Fast Changing World

With the advancement of technology, the information could now be transmitted freely and the world is changing rapidly. Managers are now having the problem of information overloaded and they could foresee that if managers are the only one who is making the decision, they won’t be able to respond to the change efficiently. Hence, it is necessary to empower the employees to be engaged in the decision making process so that more qualitative ideas could be reached through collaborative thinking to respond to the changing world. For example, in 3M, a diversified manufacturer who is famous for their innovative products has already established a culture of for empowerment. Their employees not only are strongly encouraged to submit new ideas at 3M, but they also spend 15% of their work time on research projects of their choice. In this way, by involving employees to innovate, they won’t be eliminated easily in this fast changing world and maintain their competitiveness.

2. 2. Increasing mobility of employees

Because of globalization, company could recruit people from world-wide which increases the mobility of the employees, making the job market more competitive. As said in the article, “baby boomers, the competitive job market and the multigenerational workforce … [are] factors [that] are pressing organizations to find ways to retain their top talent and that are necessitating the need for engaged workers.” (Ketter, Jan 2008) Hence, in order to retain employees, especially those knowledge workers, it would be better to empower them to increase their commitments.

      3. Higher needs of customers

Globalization intensifies market competition. While at the same time, with the emergence of internet, customers can compare organizations’ products or services with their competitors easily without incurring high cost. Hence, customers now have more choices than before. In this situation, the bargaining power of customers has increased and would be normal to lose customers easily if company’s service cannot satisfy their needs within a short time. Hence, in order to retain customers, it is important to delegate some authority to frontline staff so that they can act on their own to take care of customer’s needs efficiently. For instance, the Universal Cards Services (UCS) of AT&T has a strong culture of concern for its people. They tried to make their staff feel that they are the keys to “delighting the customer”. Hence, all customer-contact employees already have considerable authority to act on their own such as they can grant credit line increases and adjust customers’ bills without management approval.

How can the employees being empowered??

After knowing why it is important to empower employees, we have to know the way to empower them. According to the book “Empowerment Takes More Than a Minute”, one of the keys of empowering employees is to replace the old hierarchy with self-managed teams. (Ken Blanchard, 1998). However, the organization has to face a lot of challenges when developing the teams. As teams have to go through several stages of increasing involvement on their way to self-management. This journey can take between two and five years, and is never-ending from a learning and renewal perspective. For instance, in order to be empowered, not only the self-managed teams have to adapt to the new leadership style, develop skills in decision making in ethical manner and intra-team communication, but the organization has to develop a systematic process to manage knowledge as well. The following will show how each area is interlinked with each other.  

Leading and motivating employees

First of all, in order to empower the employees, the leadership style has changed. Before, managers were using traditional leadership which leaded the teams by providing instruction, conducting communication, developing action plans and giving orders on what is to be accomplished. But now, the manager delegates specific responsibility and decision-making authority to the team itself. Even though no formal leader is designated by the authority within the self-managed team, leadership is still a critical element in the team process so that group activities could be unified. Yet, as a team leader, he or she maintains equal status with other members of the group and is not in a position to give orders or to make decisions independently. Instead, the team leader should provide group process facilitation, coordination and support like how can the leaders help create a working environment where their team members are willing to exert themselves to meet personal and team goals. However, because leadership is not designated in self-managed teams, it is possible that the self-managed teams emerge with a collective sense of leadership where the functions of leadership are shared among the team members. No matter which leadership style is chosen, every team member would have greater responsibility and accountability to the outcome of the decision eventually.

The following is a real life example of shared leadership in the company called AT&T. In 1981, AT&T was planning to open a new office without supervisors in Tempe. Ed Murdock, district manager for operator services for AT&T decided there would be one manager who would handle administrative and personnel matters. This manager was to be a resource person and a mentor rather than an overseer of the employees’ work. Instead, day-to-day operating decisions were made by a six person office committee. They wrote a statement of purpose based on self-management and problem solving through teamwork and the office committee took care of all of the tasks that would normally be handled by supervisors and managers.

In addition, by working in a self-managed team, the employees would also be motivated to perform better too. According to the article “What’s the Big Deal”, the author mentioned “The top drivers of engagement come down to employee’s connection between their work and the organization’s success. The second driver is an employee’s belief that his work matters to the organization.” (Ketter, Jan 2008) Since working as a self-managed team would have greater authority in making decisions and larger impact on company’s performance. Hence, employees would be more engaged and motivated to perform better as their performance could be projected from company’s performance.

Although employees could now have a chance to lead themselves and decide things in the way they want, employee empowerment could not be implemented successfully if employees do not have knowledge to make decision. Hence, it is important for the organization to know the knowledge management well.

Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is a process to develop a set of practices to create, capture, share and use knowledge to advance organizational goals. It ensures information can be shared with everyone within the company so that employees could access to the knowledge they need immediately and they could learn in a self-directed manner such as controlling both the learning objectives and the means of learning. Through this method of learning, their competence can be enhanced which increases their capabilities to make decisions.

However, one thing should bear in mind that the knowledge management system won’t work if it doesn’t fit the corporate culture. The cultural factors that impact knowledge management initiatives are information systems, organizational structure, reward systems, processes, people, and leadership. Take people as an example, the core value of people includes employee competence, trust and teamwork. Among these three, trust is the most important one. As persuading people to share their knowledge required not only new processes, but also a new covenant between employers and employees, as well as between employees and employees: Employees needed reassurance that they were still valued after they gave up their knowledge (Williams,2002; De Long and Fahey, 2000; Martin, 2000; Davenport and De Long, 1998). The level of trust that existed within an organization greatly influenced the amount of knowledge that was shared.

Leadership is also an important element. According to the article “Dynamic organizational learning: a conceptual framework”, the author said “To initiate Organizational Learning, the need and desire of organizations to advance and the will of management have been described as critical drivers.” (Kris M.Y. Law, 2009) The program cannot be successful if it does not receive the endorsement of top management, and if it is not pushed hard throughout the organization. Knowledge sharing is not necessarily easy and it will not work if the company management hierarchy is not committed to begin with.

For example, the top management in 3M specifically uses train-the trainer approach to enable 3M employees to develop high involvement in many of its businesses. 3M trains people to go back into their departments and provide teams with the knowledge and skills to manage their work process. The intent is to transfer as much of the capability as possible. With leader’s support, the knowledge management system could be implemented.

Ethical Decision Making

A good knowledge management system enables the self-directed teams to access the knowledge they want immediately when making decision. Although they can refer to the data from the system for decision making whenever they want, having good decision making skills is also an important criterion to make sure employees can make decision efficiently and effectively. A team ‘s decision-making effectiveness depends in part upon its members’ cooperativeness in providing information and in fully airing differences in assumptions and interpretations (Schweiger, Sandberg, & Rechner, 1989). The normative rational model of strategic decision making has focused on the production of high-quality decisions as a means of enhancing organization performance (Hitt & Tyler, 1991; Porter, 1980). On the other hand, a more complete view of effective decision processes should not only consider the quality of decisions but also the impact of such processes on team members’ affective responses, such as commitment to the decision, attachment to a team, and trust in its leader.

However, able to make decision in a team-based does not mean that they know how to deal with the ethical dilemmas. In fact, employees often face difficult ethical dilemmas, such as whether to cut corners on quality to meet a deadline or to cheat customers in an unethical way to achieve sales target. In our complex global business climate, ethical decision is rarely easy. ( POZNAK LAW FIRM LTD)When it comes to shaping ethical behavior, companies must be guided by three principles. (Donaldson, 1994)

• Respect for core human values, which determine the absolute moral threshold for all business activities.
• Respect for local traditions.
• The belief that context matters when deciding what are right and what is wrong.

Nevertheless, getting work done through others requires a free flow of accurate information and open, productive relationships with employees. But that’s easier said than done in a diverse workplace where many cultures collide. (Gardenswartz & Rowe, 2001) Hence, it is also important to know the skills of cross-cultural communication as well.

Cross-cultural communications

Because of globalization, there is a higher chance that there are team members coming from different cultural background. Hence, problems and block may occur because of cultural difference, for example, unclear roles among teammates, lack of trust between teammate, bias, etc. These may eventually create conflict in team and negatively effect on productivity. Hence, training should be given to this self-managed team so that cultural differences could be minimized. For instance, according to several articles, “Diversity should be understood as the varied perspectives and approaches to work that members of different identity group brings” (J.Ely, 1996) “; Also, [shouldn’t] interpret their behaviors through their own cultural background. (Gardenswartz & Rowe, 2001)

Besides, apart from noticing the cultural difference, constant communication is also important within the team, so it is better to have a formal communication channel even the team members are far away. For instance, Fedex Express established a FXTV (Federal Express Television Network) so that management and staff around the world can immediate contact with each other.

Conclusion

To conclude, the benefits of employee empowerment include helping the company to deal with fast changing world, increasing employees’ commitment and maintaining customer’s relationship. In order to make the self-managed team works, four components namely leadership, knowledge management, decision making in ethical manner and intra-team communication must be present. If not, the work team will have a high chance of failure if either one of the elements is absent.

Bibliography

Company Culture Impacts Knowledge Sharing. (2003, April 14). Retrieved 3 30, 2011, from TenStep: http://www.tenstep.fr/02_UtilisateursEnregistres/90.3_EspaceDeLaQualite/Anglais/700CompanyCultureImpactsKnowledgeSharing.pdf

Holowetzki, A. (2002). The relationship between knowledge management and organizational culture: An examination of cultural factors that support the flow and management of knowledge within an organization.

Ken Blanchard, J. P. (1998). Empowerment Takes More Than a Minute. Penguin.

Ketter, P. (Jan 2008). What's the Big Deal - About Employee engagement.

Kris M.Y. Law, A. G. (2009). Dynamic Organisational learning: a conceptual framework. Industrial and Commervcial Training , 315.

POZNAK LAW FIRM LTD. (n.d.). Business Ethics: Approches to Ethical Decision Making.

Donaldson, T. (1994). When is different just different, and when is different wrong?

Gardenswartz, L., & Rowe, A. (2001, March). Cross-Cultural Awareness. HR Magazine , p. 139.

Moral Dilemma in Global Business

The above comic strip illustrates the recent situation that took place in Alibaba.com; China’s largest e-commerce website which provides business-to-business (B2B) services by matching buyers and sellers. Suspicion of internal fraud started in 2009 when the number of complaints they received from global buyers were on the increase. Soon after that, the senior management launched an internal investigation and found that more than 2300 vendors used its website to defraud global buyers. The frauds usually involved vendors offering small quantities of electronics at attractive prices, with payments settled using “less reliable” methods. Even worse, 100 of the company’s 5000 salesmen, as well as some supervisors and managers, were either intentionally or negligently allowing the vendors to evade the company’s authentication and verification measures to form “fraudulent storefronts” for international customers. In order to uphold the company’s core value of integrity and be responsible for all the unethical acts, the chief of the board of director, Jack Ma, decided to make the issue public.

What are the causes of the unethical behavior?

Supervisor's influence

From Alibaba B2B’s 2010 3rd season report, Alibaba’s total income was up to 1.47 billion. The premium members are over 1,000,000, which increased 45.76% compared to last year which rose from 1.06 billion to 1.47billion. On the surface, everything is great. But behind this, it implied that the top management has a high expectation on employees' job performance. This pressure would further motivate employees to improve the sales performance artificially through fraudulent methods.

 

Lax enforcement

Although the Chinese government has a series of harsh penalties (lengthy jail terms and death sentences) imposed on the frauds, most law executors in China do not enforce the law.

Failure to handle affairs according to the law is also popular in the case of corruption in China. For example, nearly 80% of the 130,000-190,000 CCP members disciplined and punished by the CCP annually since 1982 got at most a warning. Only 20% were expelled from the party. Less than 6% were criminally prosecuted. In recent years, half of those convicted of corruption received suspended sentences and did not serve any jail time. (Pei, 2007)

Eventually, since the law implementation and reinforcement in China are weak, the risks and consequences of being caught are low. 

High collectivism society

The concept of ranking is extremely important in China. As a result, many company posts weekly and monthly rankings for employee performance. Given that the Chinese culture emphasizes on collective thinking and blending in with the group, workers with low performances would be embarrassed by the posting and the pressure to avoid this unwanted attention is high. In the following chat, the Chinese rank lower than any other Asian country in the Individualism (IDV) ranking, at 20 compared to an average of 24.Therefore, in such working atmosphere, peer influences and pressure may become one of the major forces that lead some Alibaba’s sales representatives to cheat customers. 

 

Ethical Approaches

This case illustrated different ethical approaches that can be used by parties to arrive at decisions.

Sales team’s ethical approach: Egoism

The sales team is practicing egoism. People who use this approach will assess the moral worth of a behavior by looking at its consequences. For example, an act is considered morally right if the result could maximize their self-interest. In this case, since the sales staff’s commission depended on the number and total dollar value of the transactions, they thought that their involvement in helping the vendors evade the company’s verification process is acceptable as they could gain more commission. To a certain extent, it reflects that employees value job performance and personal interest more than public interest.  

The Chief of the Board of Director’s ethical approach: Moral rights

“We are just doing what we think is right. It’s that simple.” Alibaba.com said. This quote shows that the Board of Director used the Moral Rights approach when dealing with this ethical issue. “The moral rights approach concerns itself with moral principles, regardless of the consequences.” (Ltd) “Three values… respect for human dignity, respect for basic rights, and good citizenship…must be the starting point for all companies as they formulate and evaluate standards of conduct” (Donaldson, Oct 1996) Here, Alibaba.com focused on being a good citizenship by playing a role in supporting and protecting the healthy economic environment. This benchmark helped them reach the conclusion that the frauds are unacceptable and to reveal it to the public regardless of the consequences of such actions.   

Consequences and Costs

Eventually, the internal investigation led by the Board of Director led to the discovery of the fraud in Alibaba. The company made it public and the top two executives resigned to show that they nonetheless take responsibility and that such acts won’t be tolerated. In other words, the company bore the cost of the fraud generated by its employees. 

Negative company image

The revelations of fraud present a black mark to the company. The internal investigation revealed approximately 100 sales representatives, managers and supervisors, accounted for roughly 2%of Alibaba overall workforce, were either intentionally or negligently allowing fraudulent storefronts to appear on its international marketplace. Shortly after the fraud reached the public, the stock price fell and most analysts changed their recommendations to "sell". Also, the investment bank lowered Alibaba's credit rating. Worse still, buyers are more skeptical and are now asking for tighter terms to compensate for the increased risk. Therefore, the fraud not only put the company into a difficult fund raising situation, but also affects the daily business transactions.

Additional compensation cost

The CEO handed in her resignation, stating that she was taking responsibility for the actions of the individuals in the company and management gave financial compensation to global buyers/ victims of the fraud. According to the investigation, between late 2009 and 2010, a total of 2,326 Alibaba China Gold Suppliers were found to have committed fraud when selling goods to users. That represented 1.9% of the company’s total Gold Suppliers and the average claim per buyer came out to around $1,200. Although Alibaba said that the fraudulent actions won’t have a material effect on its financial results, the company did lose a proportion of money which originally could be better utilized for business expansion.

What are the implications of ethical leadership in this case?

This case highlighted some of the main leadership qualities needed in managing a business in a global context including integrity, responsibility, charisma, ability to draw empathy, and satisfy the interests of different/opposing stakeholders. Most importantly, the leader must be able to manage the organizational culture so that its values and beliefs are known by every employee, thus informing them of the accepted behaviors and appropriate actions that can be taken. The following guidelines for developing an organizational culture dealing with ethical issues were illustrated successfully by the case.

1.“Company’s leaders need to refer often to their organization’s credo and code of conduct, treat corporate values as absolutes and must themselves be credible, committed and consistent.” (Donaldson, Oct 1996)

In this case, the chief of the board of director and the former CEO have done a good job in upholding the company’s value and act as a role model for other employees and customers. Even though it’s predictable that the consequences of revealing frauds happened in the company would be a huge damage to company’s image, yet in order to protect the value of integrity and to show how important it is to be a responsible staff, Alibaba.com decided to reveal the frauds and the former CEO David Wei, who were not accused of wrongdoing, resigned to take responsibility.

2. “Design and implement conditions of engagement for suppliers and customers.” (Donaldson, Oct 1996)

Sometimes it is not a company’s actions but those of a supplier or customer that pose problems, so companies could determine their relationships by accessing whether the suppliers and customers still comply with their conditions of engagement when sometimes there are moral ambiguities. For instance, in this case, once Alibaba.com found that 2300 vendors used its website to defraud global buyers which was actually an act that violated the corporate value, Alibaba.com immediately broke off the relations with the vendors.

The above measures provide some guideline for a leader to follow if they encounter ethical issues, but actually a leader could take some preventive measures to avoid unethical behaviors happen.

1.   Set attainable goals and provide guidance if needed

One of the tasks of a leader is to bring out the best in people, yet meeting overly aggressive financial or business objectives would be a cause for employees to commit unethical behavior. “Rather than setting an overly ambitious target of multiple, hard-to-achieve goals, it is better to focus on a plan with only one or two achievable goals per year.” (Byham, 2009) With sufficient training sessions and workshops to improve the skills of the workers, especially if the company uses a ranking system, this will provide workers with the support, knowledge, and opportunity to improve in an ethical way.

2.   Job rotation

The company is strongly recommended to implement a job rotation program to educate their employees of the different facets of the company and gain a better overall understanding of what it is that they are doing and working towards.

Conclusion:

All in all, people are easily tempted to commit unethical behaviors by a lot of reasons like business pressure or coworker influence, yet with different values held by each individual, people could have arrive different decisions by using different ethical approaches. There is no right or wrong approaches to make ethical decisions, but at least the decisions made would not violate the basic human values like respect for human dignity, respect for basic rights, and good citizenship. Since the cost of unethical behavior is huge, it is advisable for all leaders to have code of conduct and commit to it all the time.

Bibliography

Byham, W. C. (2009). Developing the next generation of Chinese Business Leaders. China business review .

Culpan, T. (2011, February 24th). Alibaba's chief Lu wants to 'Fix Mistakes, Prevent Detours'. Retrieved February 24th, 2011, from Bloomberg business week: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-02-24/alibaba-s-chief-lu-wants-to-fix-mistakes-prevent-detours-.html

Donaldson, T. (Oct 1996). Values in Tension: Ethics Away from Home. Harvard Businee Review .

Ltd, P. L. (n.d.). Approaches to ethical decision making. Retrieved February 28th, 2011, from http://www.poznaklaw.com/articles/bizethics.htm

Pei, M. (2007). Corruption Threatens China's Future. Carnegie Endownment for International Peace , 4.

Arms Industry: From National Affair to Global Business Issue

Global Indicator-The development and trend of arms industry

During the past century, the arms industry entailed a significant shift away from traditional, single country patterns of weapons production towards internationalization of the development, production and marketing of arms. For example, as shown in the picture below, the volume of the arms trade has been on the rise during the past decade from around 35 billion in 2002 to around 60 billion in 2009 in total.

http://www.globalissues.org/article/74/the-arms-trade-is-big-business#GlobalArmsSalesTrends2002-2009

Apart from increasing arms sales, there is also an increasing trend of international cooperation of arms production and development as illustrated in the figure below.

How does the development of arms industry indicate the globalization process?

Globalization refers to a shift toward a more integrated and interdependent world economy. It comprises of two components which are globalization of markets and globalization of productions. These two components have one common concept of supraterritoriality. It means that the production process and the markets of the products or services provided are not necessarily limited to one country's boundary; instead, the only territory is the globe. And logistic advancement is one of the most important dirver of globalization. (Brutto 2010) It also allows international trade of arms by using which to carry large amount and size of weapons from country to country. 

http://365painfreedays.blogspot.com/2010/04/114-see-beyond-your-diagnosis.html

This is exactly the same situation in the arms industry. In the past, most countries have preferred to be self-sufficient in arms production; arms development was perceived to be a top national secret and there was no such thing as cross border arms trade or co-development. However, as mentioned above, starting from few decades ago, countries can freely export and import arms globally and participates in arms collaboration program so that governments can jointly develop and manufacture a weapon system. “Eurocommunists and labour governments in both the case and the periphery, adopted the ideology of the “lean state,” deregulation, privatization and the notion that everything must be evaluated in terms of global efficiency and competitiveness.” (Chase-Dunn, Kawano and Nikitin n.d.) For example, major co-development programs include the West European NH-90 utility helicopter and the U.S.-Japanese FSX fighter program. All these changes show that globalization process is taking place and leading to the result that arms are more and more perceived as commodity instead of secret.

It is notable that the arms industry not only indicates the globalization process, but it also reflects the geographical expansion of the globalization process."This geographical feature of the global system is one of its uniquenesses, and it makes possible for the future a level of normative order that has not existed since human societies were very small and egalitarian" (Chase-Dunn and Hall, 1997)  This is so true when applying in the arms industry. Thirty years ago, only a few third world countries joined in the arms manufacturing, but since 1970s, more than 20 countries have participated in hundreds of  cooperative arms projects, including co-production programs between developing and industrialized nations such as K-1 tank jointly developed by Korea and the United States.

What are the implications of the globalization of arms industry?

Positive implications of the globalization of arms industry

1.     Economic benefits

By going globalized and engaging in more international co-development and coproduction programs, defense companies not only can enjoy the economies of scale in arms production, lower risks in research and development, but most importantly, can strengthen their competitiveness and chances of survival by gaining the access to foreign markets.
                                                                                                                                                         http://blog.trademart.in/

2.     As a mean to achieve political goals

By participating in international collaborative arms programs and promoting arms transfer, country can strengthen its friends and allies around the world militarily. For example, during 1950s and 1960s, as a result of the Cold War, the transfer of U.S. weapons technology to Western Europe led to the establishment of strong relationships between U.S and Western Europe.

                                                                                                                                      http://www.worldwar1.com/tlwarorg.htm

3. Military prowess could sometimes translate into economic prowess

Globalization and other collaborative arms activities could affect not only military balances and arms sales, but overall economic development and competitive postures. At least, arms collaboration can have the consequence of helping to create new competitors in the international arms market. Besides, arms industry has long been regarded as a major force behind domestic economic development since a successful transition of military technology to commercial sectors such as aerospace or electronics could result in huge economic benefits. For instance, some of the military technologies developed during World War II and 1960s have established the technological base for today’s wireless broadband networks and Internet, invading the consumer markets.  Hence, the globalization of arms industry which offers an excellent opportunity for buyers who are most likely third world countries to gain access of foreign high technologies is actually strengthening their economic positions.

Negative side of the globalization of arms industry

1.     Arms races

Arms trade is increasing. On the surface, everything is great. However, it is now increasing out of control. The global trade in military equipment reached $20.6 billion in 1978, but it rose to over $60 billion in recent years. The implication of this phenomenon tells us that more and more countries are trying to increase both qualitative and quantitative of weapons and the competition between states have become more and more intense.  In fact, technology transfers and licensed production arrangements have enable some Third World countries to build up their defense industries. The developing nation recipients (such as Saudi Arabia, India and UAE) are able to produce weapons by themselves and export those weapons to the developed countries which further contributed to arms race.

The main reason why the countries continuously increase both quantitative and qualitative of arms is that they think military power can somehow reflects their own political influence around the world. Generally, they perceive the leading-edge states such as US are more likely to have a higher status in the world. Therefore, most countries especially those developing nations have the need for substantial military arms to be perceived as a global player.

For example, with the new equipment the Saudi’s F-15s will be a serious threat to targets in Israel. To compensate Israel (and to persuade some reluctant congressmen to approve the Saudi sale), US allows Israel to add 10 F-15s to the 40 it has ordered already. (Barnaby, 1981)

2.     Security Issue

An important feature of the current global arms trade is the increasing number of Third World countries participatants. Over the past decade, several developing countries have established significant defense industries. Technology transfer and licensed production arrangements enhanced the Third world countries’ military power. However, third world weapons production could in some instances, seriously threaten regional security. (Actually, there is already an example of this- the production of Jericho missiles by Israel.) (Barnaby, 1981)

References:

Jackson, D. (2009, April 1st). commercialiaztion of military technologies. Retrieved February 8th, 2010, from The official publication of IWCE Urgent Communications: http://urgentcomm.com/mobile_voice/mag/military-communications-technology-transition-200904/index.html

Shah, A. (2010, October 5th). The Arms Trade is Big Business. Retrieved February 8th, 2011, from Global Issues: http://www.globalissues.org/article/74/the-arms-trade-is-big-business#GeopoliticalandEconomicAgendas

Bitzinger, R. A. (1994). The globalization of the arms industry; the next proliferation challenge. International Security .

Barnaby, F. (1981, Mar). Arms Industry-a seller's market. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists , pp. 11-13.

Christopher Chase-Dunn, Y. K. (July 26- August 1, 1998). Globalization: A World-Systems Perspective.

Spear, J. , 2004-03-17 "The Globalization of the Arms Trade and Security" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Le Centre Sheraton Hotel, Montreal, Quebec, Canada Online <.PDF>. 2009-05-26 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p72221_index.html

Brutto, Dan. "Globalization 4.0 and the New Logistics." Vital Speechs of The Day, 2010: 512.

Chase-Dunn, Christoper, Yukio Kawano, and Denis Nikitin. Globalization: A World-Systems Perspective. http://wsarch.ucr.edu/archive/papers/c-d&hall/wc98.htm (accessed 1 17, 2011).