Convergence forces: the slow march toward homogeneity, or de facto standardization?

• Author: Fatehi, Kamal

INTRODUCTION

Everything that we do has both positive and negative outcomes. Very seldom does anything have just positive or negative results. There are always unintended consequences to any action. Actions and activities have residual outcomes. No matter how small, the residual outcomes are present in all of our undertakings.

For long, we have strived to increase standardization in our organizations. While we are aware of the associated costs of standardization, so far, the benefits have overshadowed the costs. It is well known that there are certain benefits to standardization. Among these benefits are economic gains and efficiency. However, there are other associated costs, much of which are not clearly evident. We praise diversity and variety not only because of the benefits they bestow but because we know the associated costs of similarity and standardization. While homogeneity and standardization could reduce the final production costs, it creates sameness and eliminates variation. We crave differentiation and variation. For example, to attract attention and increase the interest of audience, we introduce variation and multiplicity of items into our oral presentations.

If variety is spice of life, sameness is bland and boring. It may not be apparent what globalization is doing to our lives. This paper attempts to shed light on our slow march toward homogeneity and standardization. It appears that we are becoming more similar. In effect standardization is creeping into our global community in ways that are not quite evident. The following is an elaboration on these issues.

CONVERGENCE FORCES

Due to globalization, we are moving in the direction of more similarity and sameness for everything. There are certain forces that move us in the direction of more standardization, similarity, and homogeneity. A number of factors contribute to the global standardization. Global dynamics in which "convergence forces" (Hinds, Li, & Lyon, 2011) engage us in intercultural collaboration resulting in continuous movement toward similarity, homogeneity, and standardization. There are three major convergence forces: ease of travel, information explosion, and economic imperatives.

1. Ease of travel. Today, it is much easier and more convenient to travel to far-away places that were previously inaccessible or very difficult and expensive to reach. Travel to far distances used to be only available to a very wealthy minority in any society. The travel difficulty had created regional differences and even local differences. Each community had its own ways of doing things and relating to environmental phenomenon. Variation in life style, beliefs and behavior, and mental frameworks for processing information were more or less regional and even local. Now all of these factors are becoming global. The ease and speed with which we move around and reach even remote places has reduced the local/regional differences.

2. Information explosion. "Information age" is the term often used to describe our time and the influence of information in our lives. Information is the dominant force which governs everything around us. Now, with the advent of the Internet, information is available inexpensively to all humanity. With widespread availability and accessibility, we are connected to far corners of the world as if they exist within our physical reach. We have more information about almost every aspect of peoples' lives no matter how far away they live. All of this has created unprecedent familiarity, and sometimes understanding, bringing us closer to each other. We know more about various people and how they live than previously possible. All of this has brought us closer to each other virtually when actual close proximity is out of reach. If we are afraid of the "unknown," we are more comfortable with the "known." Information availability enables us to turn most of the "unknown" into "known." While we still consider some places and people "exotic", no longer we consider those who are "different" as necessarily "deficient" and undesirable. Information availability enables us to evaluate, compare and contrast different phenomenon and decide which fits us better. This results in the adoption of "functional" and "practical" in everything around us. In effect, global homogenization and standardization is well underway.

3. Economic imperatives. Whenever and wherever there is a new method of production or conducting business in a certain way, be it the use of technology, a way of performing jobs, or interacting with others either across the firms or across the borders, that results in improved productivity and increased efficiency, it would be adopted by competitors all over the world, this is economic imperative, there is no choice to business enterprises but to emulate those practices. This would bring us all toward similarity and standardization. Such a phenomenon is accelerating continuously because of increased global business activities.

While collaboration among nations and business organization is nothing new, the past two decades have been marked with unprecedented intensity and growth of global work. The growth of global work is attributed to a relatively orderly international relationship among nations, an integrated global economy, and dramatic advances in technology (United...