When Corporations Rule the World (Korten)

I have taught eCommerce for many years and a number of books have struck me as significant. Two are The Digital Economy (Tapscott, 1995) and The World is Flat (Friedman, 2005,2006).

The first suggests pervasive change will arise through digitizisation. The second suggests pervasive change in human communication will arise through democratisation.

But an even more profound change is taking place simultaneously since the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9th November 1989. (Notice the irony: not 9/11 but 11/9). It is the rise of the multinational corporation that knows no national boundaries. The implications of this state of affairs is brilliantly analysed in When Corporations Rule the World (2nd edn)(Korten, 2001). The outlook is not pleasant for the change arising through a removal of checks and balances in the global economy will lead to a pervasive tyranny.

Let Korten speak:

Through deregulation and the removal of national economic borders we have created a global economy more powerful than any national government - and it is flying on autopilot right into the face of a great mountain.

His target are the recently created World Trade Organisation and its preoccupation with greed. Korten prefers to talk about the movement that has arisen to oppose this crushing Globalization as The Movement With No Name.

The movement has been referred to by many labels, including the Fair Trade Movement, the anti-Globalization Movement, the pro-Democracy Movement, and the Living Democracy Movement. Given that the movement's clearest underlying themes are life and democracy, I've chose for the purposes of this book to use the name "global movement for a living democracy" or "living democracy movement," which is the name of India's Living Democracy Movement. It remains to be seen what the global movement will choose to call itself, which is why I express the name in lower case letters rather than capitalising it in the normal convention for proper names.