The doctrine of globalization asserts that the world is a homogeneous global village, where people live in a "Republic of Technology [whose] supreme law ... is convergence, the tendency for everything to become more like everything else" 1 Technology seems to be able to cross the barriers that legal and ideological differences erect across the globe. Telecommunications in particular bring into everybody's living rooms ideas, events, products, lifestyles, working conditions, and life in general from places tens of thousands of miles away. Thus a marketing effort to sell a product in Atlanta, Georgia creates a demand for the same product in Hamburg, West Germany; Sydney, Australia; and Buenos Aires, Argentina. The managerial implications of this globalization of people's needs and wants are many. In Theodore Levitt's words, "the commonality of preferences leads inescapably to the standardization of products, manufacturing, and the institutions of trade and commerce. Small nation-based markets transmogrify and expand. Success in world competition turns on efficiency in production, distribution, marketing, and management, and inevitably becomes focused on price." 2
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