Multinational : March 2017

Monday, March 27, 2017

Related WikiProjects and regional noticeboards

There are several WikiProjects and regional notice boards that have potential to help out in our efforts. We may also eventually want to create new WikiProjects as part of this effort.

Wikipedia:WikiProject Football/Women's football task force

Wikipedia:WikiProject Women scientists

See also:

Category:WikiProjects relevant for countering systemic bias
{{Infobox WikiProject}}, which has a |csb=yes parameter putting projects in that category

Selection based on notability of article topics

The eight major categories of study for maladaptive organizational behavior as they apply to maintaining and supporting Wikipedia are:

(1) Counterproductive work behavior, or CWB, consisting of behavior by editors that harms or is intended to harm Wikipedia or its editors' constructive contributions – usually identified as "edit warring" or "disruptive editing";^[19]
(2) Mistreatment of the people who edit and maintain Wikipedia. There are several types of mistreatment that editors endure – along with a large contingent of corrective measures and norms of editing policy available as countermeasures;
(3) Abusive supervision; that is, in most organizations, the extent to which a supervisor engages in a pattern of behavior that harms subordinates: In Wikipedia this term would be applied to abusive editors who are entrusted with corrective procedures or referrals to others for correction;^[20]
(4) Bullying. Although definitions of bullying vary, it involves a repeated pattern of harmful behaviors directed towards individuals, and in Wikipedia this would mean any individual editor;^[21]
(5) Incivility, or low-intensity discourteous and rude behavior with ambiguous intent to detract from productivity and violate norms for appropriate behavior in the workplace, such as that which may be found while editing contributions;^[22]
(6) Gender bias, behavior that denigrates or mistreats a worker because of his or her gender, that creates an offensive workplace or that interferes with anybody being able to do the job. The gender gap at Wikipedia is well recognized as an issue deserving of attention, as discussed in the subsection above. Although an effective counter-measure to this gender gap has yet to be fully identified at Wikipedia, several programs have been examined for their potential in moving towards achieving gender equality;^[23]
(7) Occupational stress, or the imbalance between the demands of a job and the resources that help cope with them. In Wikipedia, this term would cover the editing process, which requires mental and physical effort;^[24] and
(8) Maladaptive standards and practices, in which the accumulation of piecemeal standards adopted over time begin to show a cumulative negative effect.^[25] In Wikipedia these dimensions would include WP:Instruction creep.

Countering systemic bias task forces

Some task forces that focus on particular aspects of systemic bias are linked below:

Tasks

There are many things you may do, listed roughly from least to most intensive:

Sign up as a participant and mention any interests you may have related to "Countering systemic bias" (CSB).
Add the Open Tasks box ({{WikiProjectCSBTasks}}) to your User or User talk page to let other people know about the issue.
Read news articles in as many languages as you know, from as many news sources as you can find, from as many political view points as you can find (especially those that you would normally not read) when examining a topical or recent event or editing an existing article related to a particular subject.
Don't overlook the official news outlets of a country. Certainly they will be more one sided than Wikipedians may like, but they may provide a different way of thinking about an article. They may also be useful as a primary source of information about why the government of that particular country has its opinion on a subject and why it acts the way it does. The readers of Wikipedia could benefit from this, regardless of whether they agree with that view or not (if they don't, they may use it to find errors in its logic or thinking). For example, official news outlets may be useful indicators of how Mainland China thinks about Tibet or Taiwan. Secondly, they may provide relevant non-controversial information about the country or its leaders which could help in improving the article on that topic, for instance, date and place of birth, occupation of leaders, cultural heritage of, links to and other tidbits which may not be available elsewhere.
See if there are web pages on a particular subject which were written by people from other countries or cultures. It may provide you other places to look or other points of view to consider.
Be more conscious of your own biases in the course of normal editing. Look at the articles you work on usually and think about whether they are written from an international perspective. If not, you might be able to learn a lot about a subject you thought you knew by adding content with a different perspective.
Occasionally edit a subject that is systemically biased against the pages of your natural interests. The net effect of consciously changing one out of every twenty of your edits to something outside your "comfort zone" would be substantial.
Create or edit one of the articles listed on the CSB template.
If you don't particularly like any of the subjects on the template, our open tasks list has a wide array of articles in need of attention.
Add to the open tasks list. No one person can fix a system-wide problem, so be sure to tell people when you find needy articles.
Rotate articles from the open tasks list to the template, and other helpful tidying tasks.
Check articles to see if they still need work, and if they've been improved move them to the right section or leave a note.
Give feedback on this WikiProject on the talk page.
If you're multilingual, add information from Wikipedia articles in other languages to their English Wikipedia counterparts.
Contribute to articles on under-represented topics that you are familiar with.
Be careful not to worsen the bias with your deletion nominations. If you are not familiar with a subject area, or it has meaning outside your experience base, discuss your concerns on the talk page or another appropriate forum before making an AfD nomination.
Change the demographic of Wikipedia. Encourage friends and acquaintances that you know have interests that are not well-represented on Wikipedia to edit. If you are at high school or university, contact a professor in minority, women's, or critical studies, explain the problem, and ask if they would be willing to encourage students to write for Wikipedia. Contact minority or immigrant organizations in your area to see if they would be interested in encouraging their members to contribute. The worst they could say is, "No". But keep in mind that immigrant organizations may well have a different point of view than the majority of people in the countries they emigrated from (their members may, for example, be members of a minority themselves or may have emigrated because of a disagreement with the government not shared by the majority of the populatio

Systemic bias in coverage and selection of articles

This section has been copied and pasted from Criticism of Wikipedia § Systemic bias in coverage.

Wikipedia has been accused of systemic bias in the selection of articles which it maintains in its various language editions. Such alleged bias in the selection of articles leads, without necessarily any conscious intention, to the propagation of various prejudices. Although many articles in newspapers have concentrated on minor factual errors in Wikipedia articles, there are also concerns about large-scale, presumably unintentional effects from the increasing influence and use of Wikipedia as a research tool at all levels. In an article in the Times Higher Education magazine (London) philosopher Martin Cohen frames Wikipedia of having "become a monopoly" with "all the prejudices and ignorance of its creators", which he describes as a "youthful cab-driver's" perspective.^[2] Cohen's argument, however, finds a grave conclusion in these circumstances: "To control the reference sources that people use is to control the way people comprehend the world. Wikipedia may have a benign, even trivial face, but underneath may lie a more sinister and subtle threat to freedom of thought."^[2] That freedom is undermined by what he sees as what matters on Wikipedia, "not your sources but the 'support of the community'."^[2]
Critics also point to the tendency to cover topics in a detail disproportionate to their importance. For example, Stephen Colbert once mockingly praised Wikipedia for having a "longer entry on 'lightsabers' than it does on the 'printing press'".^[3] In an interview with The Guardian, Dale Hoiberg, the editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica, noted:

People write on things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. In the past, the entry on Hurricane Frances was more than five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on Coronation Street was twice as long as the article on Tony Blair.^[4]

This critical approach has been satirised "Wikigroaning", a term coined by Jon Hendren^[5] of the website Something Awful.^[6] In the game, two articles (preferably with similar names) are compared: one about an acknowledged serious or classical subject and the other about a topic popular or current.^[7] Defenders of a broad inclusion criteria have held that the encyclopedia's coverage of pop culture does not impose space constraints on the coverage of more serious subjects (see "Wiki is not paper"). As Ivor Tossell noted:

That Wikipedia is chock full of useless arcana (and did you know, by the way, that the article on "Debate" is shorter than the piece that weighs the relative merits of the 1978 and 2003 versions of Battlestar Galactica?) isn't a knock against it: Since it can grow infinitely, the silly articles aren't depriving the serious ones of space.^[8]

Criticism of multinationals

Main articles: Anti-globalization movement and Anti-corporate activism

Anti-corporate advocates criticize multinational corporations for entering countries that have low human rights or environmental standards.^[31] In the world economy facilitated by multinational corporations, capital will increasingly be able to play workers, communities, and nations off against one another as they demand tax, regulation and wage concessions while threatening to move. In other words, increased mobility of multinational corporations benefit capital while workers and communities lose. Some negative outcomes generated by multinational corporations include increased inequality, unemployment, and wage stagnation.^[32]
The aggressive use of tax avoidance schemes allows multinational corporations to gain competitive advantages over small and medium-sized enterprises.^[33] Organizations such as the Tax Justice Network criticize governments for allowing multinational organizations to escape tax since less money can be spent for public services.^[34]
The 5 Cons of Multinational Corporations
1. The Market Dominance of Multinational Corporations - The market dominance of multinational corporations makes it hard for the local small firms to succeed and thrive. For instance, there are arguments stating that the larger supermarkets squeeze out a notable margin of the local corner stores that lead to lesser diversity.
2. Consumer’s Expenses - Companies are usually interested at the consumer’s expense. The multinational companies commonly have the power of monopoly that gives them the chance of making excess profit.
3. Pushing Local Firms Out Of Business - In the developing economies, these giant multinationals use the economies of scale for pushing the local firms out of their businesses.
4. Criticized For Using "Slave Labor" - Multinational corporations are being criticized for using the so-called slave labor wherein the workers are paid with very small wages.
5. Environment Threat - For the sake of profit, these global companies commonly contribute to pollution as well as make use of the non-renewable resources that can be a threat to the environment.

Multinational corporation and colonialism

See also: Charter company and Neocolonialism

The history of multinational corporations is closely intertwined the history of colonialism, with the first multinational corporations founded to undertake colonial expeditions at the behest of their European monarchical patrons.^[17] Prior to the era of New Imperialism, a majority European colonies not held by the Spanish and Portuguese crowns were administered by chartered multinational corporations.^[18] Examples of such corporations include the British East India Company,^[19] the Swedish Africa Company, and the Hudson’s Bay Company.^[20] These early corporations facilitated colonialism by engaging in international trade and exploration, and creating colonial trading posts.^[21] Many of these corporations, such as the South Australia Company and the Virginia Company, played a direct role in formal colonization by creating and maintaining settler colonies.^[21] Without exception these early corporations created differential economic outcomes between their home country and their colonies via a process of exploiting colonial resources and labour, and investing the resultant profits and net gain in the home country.^[22] The end result of this process was the enrichment of the colonizer and the impoverishment of the colonized.^[23] Some multinational corporations, such as the Royal African Company, were also responsible for the logistical component of the Atlantic slave trade,^[24] maintaining the ships and ports required for this vast enterprise. During the 19th century formal corporate rule over colonial holdings largely gave way to state-controlled colonies,^[25]^[26] however corporate control over colonial economic affairs persisted in a majority of colonies.^[21]^[25]
During the process of decolonization the European colonial charter companies were disbanded,^[21] with the final colonial corporation, the Mozambique Company, dissolving in 1972. However the economic impact of corporate colonial exploitation has proved to be lasting and far reaching,^[27] with some commentators asserting that this impact is among the chief causes of contemporary global income inequality.^[23]
Contemporary critics of multinational corporations have charged that some present day multinational corporations follow the pattern of exploitation and differential wealth distribution established by the now defunct colonial charter corporations, particularly with regards to corporations based in the developed world that operate resource extraction enterprises in the developing world,^[28] such as Royal Dutch Shell, and Barrick Gold. Some of these critics argue that the operations of multinational corporations in the developing world take place within the broader context of neocolonialism.^[29]
However, multinational corporations from emerging markets are playing an ever-greater role, increasingly impacting the global economy.[3

Transnational corporations

A transnational corporation differs from a traditional multinational corporation in that it does not identify itself with one national home. While traditional multinational corporations are national companies with foreign subsidiaries,^[14] transnational corporations spread out their operations in many countries to sustain high levels of local responsiveness.^[15]
An example of a transnational corporation is Nestlé who employ senior executives from many countries and try to make decisions from a global perspective rather than from one centralized headquarters.^[16]
Another example is Royal Dutch Shell, whose headquarters are in The Hague, Netherlands, but whose registered office and main executive body are headquartered in London, United Kingdom.

Theoretical background

The actions of multinational corporations are strongly supported by economic liberalism and free market system in a globalized international society. According to the economic realist view, individuals act in rational ways to maximize their self-interest and therefore, when individuals act rationally, markets are created and they function best in free market system where there is little government interference. As a result, international wealth is maximized with free exchange of goods and services.^[11]
To many economic liberals, multinational corporations are the vanguard of the liberal order.^[12] They are the embodiment par excellence of the liberal ideal of an interdependent world economy. They have taken the integration of national economies beyond trade and money to the internationalization of production. For the first time in history, production, marketing, and investment are being organized on a global scale rather than in terms of isolated national economies.^[13]
International business is also a specialist field of academic research. Economic theories of the multinational corporation include internalization theory and the eclectic paradigm. The latter is also known as the OLI framework.

Overview

A multinational corporation (MNC) is usually a large corporation incorporated in one country which produces or sells goods or services in various countries.^[4] The two main characteristics of MNCs are their large size and the fact that their worldwide activities are centrally controlled by the parent companies.^[5]

Importing and exporting goods and services
Making significant investments in a foreign country
Buying and selling licenses in foreign markets
Engaging in contract manufacturing—permitting a local manufacturer in a foreign country to produce their products
Opening manufacturing facilities or assembly operations in foreign countries

MNCs may gain from their global presence in a variety of ways. First of all, MNCs can benefit from the economy of scale by spreading R&D expenditures and advertising costs over their global sales, pooling global purchasing power over suppliers, and utilizing their technological and managerial know-how globally with minimal additional costs. Furthermore, MNCs can use their global presence to take advantage of underpriced labor services available in certain developing countries, and gain access to special R&D capabilities residing in advanced foreign countries.^[6]
The problem of moral and legal constraints upon the behavior of multinational corporations, given that they are effectively "stateless" actors, is one of several urgent global socioeconomic problems that emerged during the late twentieth century.^[7]
Potentially the best concept for analyzing society's governance limitations over modern corporations is the concept of "stateless corporations". Coined at least as early as 1990 in Business Week, the conception was theoretically clarified in 1992: that an empirical strategy for defining a stateless corporation is with analytical tools at the intersection between demographic analysis and transportation research. This intersection is known as logistics management, and it describes the importance of rapidly increasing global mobility of resources. In a long history of analysis of multinational corporations we are some quarter century into an era of stateless corporations - corporations which meet the realities of the needs to source materials on a worldwide basis and to produce and customize products for individual countries.^[8]
One of the first multinational business organizations, the East India Company, arose in 1600.^[9] After the East India Company, came the Dutch East India Company, founded March 20, 1602, which would become the largest company in the world for nearly 200 years.^[10]
The main characteristics of multinational companies are:

In general, there is a national strength of large companies as the main body, through the way of foreign direct investment or acquire local enterprises, established subsidiaries or branches in many countries;
It usually has a complete decision-making system and the highest decision-making center, each subsidiary or branch has its own decision-making body, according to their different features and operating to make decisions, but its decision must be subordinated to the highest decision-making center;
MNCs seek markets in worldwide and rational production layout, professional fixed-point production, fixed-point sales products, in order to achieve maximum profit;
Due to strong economic and technical strength, with fast information transmission, as well as funding rapid cross-border transfer, multinational companies have, so it has stronger competitiveness in the world;
Many large multinational companies have varying degrees of monopoly in some area, due to economic and technical strength or production advantages.

Multinational corporation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A multinational corporation or worldwide enterprise^[1] is a corporate organization that owns or controls production of goods or services in one or more countries other than their home country.^[2] It can also be referred to as an international corporation, a transnational corporation, or a stateless corporation.^[3] There are subtle but real differences between these three labels, as well as those labels of multinational corporation and a worldwide enterprise.