Oral History and Globalization: Lessons from GE

• In Event: Narrating Globalization

Abstract

Oral history is a particularly valuable tool for understand the complex history of economic globalization in the last half-century. Looking at General Electric as a case study, I utilize oral history to reveal how more than goods, services, and money were exchanged and were required in forging international trading relationships. Too many studies of globalization are ideologically driven and fail to delve into the many complex social and cultural dimensions of transnational capitalism.

I believe we need to approach the study of economic globalization as a multidimensional dynamic that subsumes a host of obvious and not so obvious interlocking social, cultural, political, and economic factors. Such an approach requires a comprehensive analytical historical framework that takes into account such topics as: the impact of economic globalization on workers and managers over time; its transformation of family life and personal relationships; the varied managerial cultures that intersect and sometimes collide in the course of globalization; the cultural exchanges that are precipitated by new global economic relationships; nationalisms and diverse political institutions; science and technological exchanges; the emergence and growth of environmental movements and their impact on multinational corporations; and much more. Fundamentally, such an approach needs to recognize that globalization was not just process, but it was also people, and my approach, heavily reliant on oral history research -- is very people-centered.

Borrowing from insights from several disciplines—economics, sociology, communication, psychology, anthropology and, of course, history—I utilize oral history to delve into GE’s experiences abroad in the last half-century to point to new directions for multinational business history scholarship in general: toward a synthetic and comprehensive paradigm of economic globalization that makes sense not only of the core economic and political dimensions of transnational business as it evolved over the last century, but also of the social, cultural, and interpersonal dynamics that accompanied it.

Author

• Gerald Zahavi, University at Albany, SUNY