Beginning in the 1990s, optimistic organizational gurus, such as Peter Drucker, have tried to make sense of this interplay between globalization and segmentalization by focusing on the “growing incongruence between economic reality and political reality”:[ix] The world economy is increasingly becoming global. National boundaries are impediments and cost centers . . . [B]usiness—and increasingly many other institutions as well—can no longer define their scope in terms of national economies and national boundaries. They have to define their scope in terms of industries and services worldwide. But at the same time, political boundaries are not going to go away. In fact, it is doubtful that even the new regional economic units, the European Economic Community, the North American Free Trade Zone (NAFTA) or Mercosur, the proposed economic community in South America, will actually weaken political boundaries, let alone overcome them.
Drucker further noted that the predictions of a global community have been long-standing and inevitably inaccurate:[x] There has been talk about the “end of sovereignty” since well before 1918. But nothing has emerged yet to take the place of national government and national sovereignty in political affairs. In fact, since 1914, the trend has been toward increasing splintering. . . . Since 1950 one mini-state after the other has come into being, each with its own government, its own military, its own diplomatic service, its own tax and fiscal policy, and so on. So far there are no signs yet of any global institutions, not even in the economic sphere, for example, a global Central Bank controlling the totally reckless flows of money worldwide, let alone a global institution controlling tax and monetary policies worldwide.
Drucker pushed the image of complexity and even contradiction further by suggesting that there are actually three overlapping spheres in our contemporary postmodern world:[xi]
There is a true global economy of money and information. There are regional economies in which goods circulate freely and in which impediments to the movement of services and people are being cut back, though by no means eliminated. And then increasingly there are national and local realities, which are both economic, but above all political. And all three [spheres] are growing fast. And businesses—and other institutions, for example, universities—have no choice. They have to live and perform in all spheres, and at the same time. This is the reality on which strategy has to be based. But no management anyplace knows yet what this reality actually means. They are all still groping.
