基本信息·出版社：PublicAffairs 1st edition ·页码：313 页 ·出版日期：2000年07月 ·ISBN：1891620614 ·条形码：9781891620614 ·装帧：精装 ·开 ...
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The Global Me: New Cosmopolitans and the Competitive Edge |
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The Global Me: New Cosmopolitans and the Competitive Edge |
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基本信息·出版社：PublicAffairs; 1st edition
·页码：313 页
·出版日期：2000年07月
·ISBN：1891620614
·条形码：9781891620614
·装帧：精装
·开本：0开 Pages Per Sheet/20
·正文语种：英语
·外文书名：国际人
内容简介 Why is Japan, a country that looked economically invincible a decade ago stagnating, while long-moribund Ireland booms? What qualities will insure the continued dominance in the new millennium of U.S. culture, society and business?
In The Global Me, The Wall Street Journal's G. Pascal Zachary provides a provocative roadmap to the new civilization arising out of sweeping shifts in the world economy. He reveals-through vivid examples of individuals and institutions--that the key new determinants for economic, political and cultural success are, surprisingly, national diversity and a "mongrel" sense of self. Roaming the globe, Zachary shows how the rise of new forms of identity and migration are helping to determine exactly who will win and lose in the next century. Zachary's thesis isn't just about countries, but about individuals, too. In his tour of a new global civilization, we meet a fascinating gallery of characters who possess an intriguing mix of "roots" and "wings." Strong enough to know who they are, they are nevertheless ceaselessly becoming someone else-and in the process bestowing the gifts of creativity and social harmony on the cities and states that they call home.
Social critics, pundits, politicians and economists will argue about The Global Me this season. Years from now they will realize the prescience of Zachary's original and compelling vision of a world where nations who embrace multiculturalism win big and those who do not are doomed to stagnation or worse.
作者简介 G. Pascal Zachary is a senior writer at the Wall Street Journal, which he joined in 1989. His writings have appeared in other publications, including the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Mother Jones and Washington Quarterly. He is a contributing editor to the radical newsweekly In These Times, for whom he writes about political economy and jazz. He also writes a column on innovation for Technology Review. He is the author of two previous books: Showstopper, a 1994 account of the making of a software program at Microsoft, and Endless Frontier, a biographer of Vannevar Bush, organizer of the Manhattan Project. Zachary lives in London.
编辑推荐 Amazon.com "Diversity," declares Wall Street Journal senior writer G. Pascal Zachary in his opening to The Global Me, "defines the health and wealth of nations in a new century." Changes in economics, technology, and identity, he argues, have made diversity an increasingly common thread among successful people, thriving countries, and "the world's biggest, richest, most profit-hungry corporations." Zachary examines our growing propensity to lay claim to both "roots" and "wings"--meaning specific "ethnoracial affiliations"--as well as an openness to new ties, leading to creativity and economic strength. He goes on to show how this is playing out in the United States, Germany, Ireland, and Japan; the benefits and drawbacks involved; and how leaders can advance the former while constraining the latter. Zachary uses the terms "mongrel," "hybrid," and "cosmopolitan" interchangeably to describe the new world citizen, and kicks off every chapter with illustrative vignettes spotlighting real-life examples from England, Switzerland, California, Moldova, Germany, Canada, and Thailand. In the future, the author concludes, hybrid cultures at all levels will prevail over their counterpart monocultures "in the intensifying global competition for trade and technology, wealth and jobs." His argument is provocative and original. --Howard Rothman
From Library Journal This is the third book by Zachary, a senior writer at the Wall Street Journal's London bureau, whose previous works include Showstopper, a 1994 account of the development of Windows NT, and Endless Frontier, a highly regarded 1997 biography of Vannevar Bush. Here he changes gears and considers how, under the right conditions, individuals, groups, organizations, and nations that foster an acceptance of diversity can triumph in the global marketplace over those that don't. Punctuating his narrative with life stories drawn from "new cosmopolitans" living in England, Ireland, Germany, Japan, Korea, Israel, Macedonia, Borneo, and the United States, he shows how individuals who cross traditional cultural bounds bring new opportunities and innovation to those with whom they work. Most telling is his condemnation of the Germans and Japanese, who erect barriers to the cross-cultural activities he advocates, and his praise of the Irish and the companies in Silicon Valley for encouraging such activities. Recommended for both academic and larger public libraries.DNorman B. Hutcherson, California State Univ. Lib., Bakersfield
专业书评 From The Industry Standard More than a third of the engineers in Silicon Valley hail from beyond America's borders. Far from tired, poor or huddled, these immigrants are major contributors to new-economy dynamism. Since 1980, Chinese and Indian immigrants alone have founded 2,700 companies there, according to G. Pascal Zachary in his new book, The Global Me, accounting for a sixth of the total sales seen in the Valley in the last 20 years.
Simple economics dictates that tapping the best people from the widest pool will lead to greater economic returns. Zachary, a senior writer at the Wall Street Journal, takes the argument further, though. Drawing on anecdotal evidence and his own notions of the greater good, he proposes that diversity - or mongrelization, as he likes to call it - "defines the health and wealth of a nation in the new century."
By diversity, Zachary is, of course, referring to all of those liberal bugaboos that would send the likes of Pat Buchanan running for the door: intermarriage; porous borders (immigrants stealing our jobs); loosening of nationalist ideology (one-worldism). For a certain reader, this is delicious.
Unfortunately, Zachary's argument, appealing though it may be, is not a serious one. The essence of the book is a sort of reverse syllogism: Some nations are diverse and those nations happen to be prosperous right now, therefore all nations must be diverse to be prosperous. In support, Zachary provides not statistics or deep logic, but rah-rah enthusiasm and endless anecdotal evidence.
Zachary's examples are many and varied: the Chinese woman born in Pakistan and raised in Berkeley, Calif.; the Canadian who marries a New Zealander only to settle happily in Scotland; the Indian woman who beats the odds to achieve a successful engineering career in the United States.
But for all these trees, Zachary provides little in the way of a forest. As a result, he misses the obvious point that these strikingly cosmopolitan characters are just that - striking. The stories of brave and lucky immigrants are hardly instructive in a world where five out of six people struggle not with issues of identity, but with access to running water and a regular income.
While it is possible that intermarriage, migration and other hybrid pursuits may improve the lot of the impoverished masses, Zachary fails to show the reader exactly how this will happen. In lieu of such an argument, Zachary provides meaningless mantras like "the hybrid is hip" and "people are awakening to the primacy of impurity." Missing is any discussion of population, climate or natural resources - factors that obviously and heavily affect a nation's progress.
To his credit, Zachary briefly detours to discuss countries like Germany and Japan, in an attempt to reveal how these countries would have benefited economically had they opened their respective doors and collective hearts to the world's migrants. But again, he offers little in the way of quantitative evidence - and the reader, by now awash in emotional stories, finds himself hungry for it. There is ample discussion of the stereotypically stiff German and the inward-looking Japanese, but no real evidence to prove that either country would be more prosperous had its immigration policies been different.
Zachary is winningly enamored of his idea, a wide-eyed journalist in love with the struggles of his subjects. But economic progress is difficult to prescribe without numbers to support and instruct - and sadly for readers equally enamored of the idea, Zachary does not provide them here.
