A resource-based systems approach to globalization, organization and people: a case study in the outsourcing sector of the US-based global pharmaceutical industry
As an interdisciplinary attempt to explore and demonstrate the complementarity of natural and social sciences and to achieve synergy effects in the contemporary global scholarship of humanistic social and behavioral sciences, this dissertation proposes a resource-based systems approach to the study of globalization. According to this approach, globalization is viewed as the emergent pattern of the resource organizing dynamics of the global ecosystem including human activity systems and their wider context of life support systems. For systems at the global level, global integration and its seemingly homogenizing effect are the strategic structural responses to the constraints and uncertainties caused by world resource attenuation and inequality as well as their interactions with human perceptions and behaviors where rationality is bounded by cognitive and affective limitations. This theory is built upon the principle of self-organization--a natural system’s evolutionary capabilities to self-organize in terms of reducing its internal entropy or increasing the efficiency of its organizing dynamics. Therefore, the resource-based systems approach to globalization is in essence an approach to theorizing the nature of organization in any human activity systems. Concepts and definitions such as resource, knowledge, uniqueness, innovation, learning, culture, social network, personality, identity, life and the spirit of entrepreneurship are discussed under this theory and are substantiated by an ethnographic study of the outsourcing sector of the US-based global pharmaceutical industry, where firm is particularly emphasized as the point of entry. Systems analysis was applied to the transformations under the impact of contemporary globalization and the interacting dynamics at the various constituent levels and dimensions of the global pharmaceutical industry and its environment. Though demonstrating uniqueness and idiosyncrasies, they all exhibit the nature of organization, which refers to a system navigating through complexities and uncertainties and innovatively exploring strategic structural responses to transform constrained relations with the environment to achieve efficiency in its resource organizing dynamics or coherence in the meaning of its living that is essential to its sustainable mode of being. Implications for policy-making are discussed.
systems approach, globalization, culture, organization, firm, sustainability, efficiency, resource, Knowledge, innovation, social network, International Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), transnational entrepreneurship, strategy, learning, China, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), identity, life satisfaction, industrial restructuring, outsourcing, offshoring, pharmaceutical industry, financial crisis, Ethnography
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign