Introduction: Companies and Countries, Changes and Choices

Abstract

This book, the eighth volume of the Palgrave series, is based on some of the best papers delivered at the 27th Annual Conference of the Academy of International Business (UK Chapter) which was hosted by the University of Strathclyde. The emergent theme of the conference, as in the previous year at the University of Stirling, was globalisation in all its aspects. The antipathetic cultural dimension of globalisation was underlined at the opening of the conference by Tom Brewer, editor of the Journal of International Business Studies. He quoted the US Ambassador to France in these words: ‘The anti-Americanism today encompasses not only a specific policy … but a feeling that globalisation has an American face on it and is a danger to the European and French view of society. There is the sense that America is such an extraordinary power that it can crush everything in its way.’