Expansion at Volkswagen: Minimizing Risk in E.U.?

It is perhaps common among gigantic corporations, such as the major automobile manufacturers, to assume that current profitability is likely to be augmented by expansion. Economies of scale are presumed to outpace diseconomies as even a large company expands. At a more basic level, it is generally assumed that if a company is not expanding, it is necessarily facing its downfall. The notions of equilibrium and steady state are fundamentally at odds with the more, more, more mantra of mammon. Accordingly, it can be asked whether efforts to strengthen a company’s equilibrium are more in line with long-term profitability. The very expression, strengthening an equilibrium is étranger or foreign to business parlance.


The full essay is at "Volkswagen in 2012: Minimizing Risk in the E.U."

Google Executives Evaded Jail Time in Brazil: Is Business Too Powerful?

In late September 2012, the Brazilian state police detained the head of Google’s operations in the state after the company’s management failed to act on an electoral judge’s order to remove videos from its YouTube site criticizing a candidate in a rural county election. Separately, a judge ordered Google to remove a religiously-offensive video, which had sparked riots in the Middle East, within ten days or face fines. Google’s lawyers claim that the company is not responsible for what users upload. Earlier in the year, Brazil’s government threatened the head of Chevron’s operations there with arrest and passport-confiscation after a small leak occurred in the company.

The full essay is at "Are people in international business above national laws?"

The United States as Religious and Secular Societies

E pluribus unum, or “Out of many, one,” is a motto for the United States—the American States that are united. The many can refer, I suppose, to the sheer number of inhabitants stretching across a continent and beyond. The word could also refer to the diversity of people living even in a large American city. Finally, the word could refer to the Union consists of many different socio-political societies, or republics—again possibly referring to the number of states or the fact that they differ so from one another.  It is the last interpretation that I want to explore here, for it alone gets at the fact that the U.S., like the E.U. and China, are at the empire-level (or scale) in twentieth-century (rather than medieval) terms (i.e., scaling).

The complete essay is at Essays on Two Federal Empires, available at Amazon. 

Hollywood Bribes China

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, known as F.C.P.A., “forbids American companies from making illegal payments to government officials or others to ease the way for operations in foreign countries.”[1] The practical difficulty facing American companies doing business around the world is that in some cultures bribes are so ubiquitous they are simply a part of doing business.  For American companies to refuse to participate in what is generally expected can be a competitive disadvantage, particularly if substitutes exist and the practice is widespread.

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business: A Malignant Mentality of Mendacity, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.

1. Edward Wyatt, Michael Cieply, and Brooks Barnes, “S.E.C. Asks if Hollywood Paid Bribes in China,” The New York Times, April 25, 2012.