Exporting the American Model

The late 1990s was a period of Panglossian optimism. The world, we were told, was getting smaller, increasingly seamless and it all had to do with ‘globalization’ (Ohmae 1994, Held et al. 1999, Giddens 1999, Friedman1999). From this perspective, the movement seemed to lead inexorably to the worldwide convergence of economic,technological and institutional conditions, fostering in the process a homogenization of organizational recipes and national systems of economic organization. This process was seen to be significantly accelerated, if not driven, by the internet revolution.