A RESOURCE-BASED SYSTEMS APPROACH TO GLOBALIZATION, ORGANIZATION AND PEOPLE: A CASE STUDY IN THE OUTSOURCING SECTOR OF THE US-BASED GLOBAL PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY BY JIANQIN YANG DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communications in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Cameron R. McCarthy, Chair, Director of Research Professor Norman K. Denzin Professor John C. Lammers Associate Professor William E. Berry ABSTRACT As an interdisciplinary attempt to explore and demonstrate the complementarity of natural and social sciences and to achieve synergy effects in the contemporary global scholarship of humanistic social and behavioral sciences, this dissertation proposes a resource-based systems approach to the study of globalization. According to this approach, globalization is viewed as the emergent pattern of the resource organizing dynamics of the global ecosystem including human activity systems and their wider context of life support systems. For systems at the global level, global integration and its seemingly homogenizing effect are the strategic structural responses to the constraints and uncertainties caused by world resource attenuation and inequality as well as their interactions with human perceptions and behaviors where rationality is bounded by cognitive and affective limitations. This theory is built upon the principle of self-organization--a natural system’s evolutionary capabilities to self-organize in terms of reducing its internal entropy or increasing the efficiency of its organizing dynamics. Therefore, the resource-based systems approach to globalization is in essence an approach to theorizing the nature of organization in any human activity systems. Concepts and definitions such as resource, knowledge, uniqueness, innovation, learning, culture, social network, personality, identity, life and the spirit of entrepreneurship are discussed under this theory and are substantiated by an ethnographic study of the outsourcing sector of the US-based global pharmaceutical industry, where firm is particularly emphasized as the point of entry. Systems analysis was applied to the transformations under the impact of contemporary globalization and the interacting dynamics at the various constituent levels and dimensions of the global pharmaceutical industry and its environment. Though demonstrating uniqueness and idiosyncrasies, they all exhibit the nature of ii organization, which refers to a system navigating through complexities and uncertainties and innovatively exploring strategic structural responses to transform constrained relations with the environment to achieve efficiency in its resource organizing dynamics or coherence in the meaning of its living that is essential to its sustainable mode of being. Implications for policy- making are discussed. Keywords: systems approach, globalization, culture, organization, firm, sustainability, efficiency, resource, knowledge, innovation, social network, international SMEs, transnational entrepreneurship, strategy, learning, China, FDI, identity, life satisfaction, industrial restructuring, outsourcing, offshoring, pharmaceutical industry, financial crisis, and ethnography iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of my college mentor Dr. Victoria J. K. Liu. Without the love and help from her and her husband, Ted, I seriously doubt I could get through those most turbulent times in my life. I also want to thank “LIUJW1,” who has been the lighthouse in my navigation for love and meaning of life over the past ten years. You led me to the first taste of complexity and uncertainty in the nature of life and cultivated my perseverance, patience, ingenuity and adaptiveness. Certainly, I’m deeply grateful to my precious parents, who have given me the wholesome body and mind. Thank you for the way you have raised me up, where you always respect and value my opinions and choices and give me all the supports that you can give. You always encourage me to remember all those people who have helped, loved, and inspired me along the way and to return the favors and honor their wishes whenever and wherever I can. Thank you for this most important lesson in my early childhood. As a matter of fact, I always consider I have more than one pair of parents in my life. Victoria & Ted are another one, so are Doug & Sylvia Ferdon and Robbin & Terry Cole, who have provided me the home away from home in the most spiritually and emotionally critical way during my six-year’s study and work in the United States. You have consolidated my passion to contribute my share to the well-being and peace of the world as a global citizen and human being. Especially Doug, though at a distance, you always seem to know at the first moment whenever my soul is in its weakest condition and warm it up in the most delicate and appropriate way. I think you are the angel sent to me by God and it is done so for a reason. Your generosity and iv genuineness in giving and sharing withstand the test by the highest standards of humanity. I will continue to carry them on in the rest of my life as the legacy inherited from you. I also greatly appreciate the world views and philosophies toward life and career the group of people below shared with me while assuming their respective roles. Though we only came across each other for a short moment in life, your inspirations and impacts on me last lifelong. I feel so blessed to become friends with many of you now. So I want to recognize your names here and the roles you assumed when we met: Mary Yoko Brannen, Visiting Professor of Strategy and Management, INSEAD Elaine Chao, America's 24th Secretary of Labor Rick Kaplan, Executive Producer, CBS Evening News, former President of CNN-US, Senior Vice President for ABC News, and President of MSNBC Rich Lavin, Group President, Construction Industries & Growth Markets, Caterpillar Inc. Yip Kowk Wah, Founder and Chairman of the Hong Kong Policy Research Institute, former Special Advisor to Tung Chee Hwa, the first Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Nan Zhou, Department Head of Marketing, City University of Hong Kong In addition to these friends and mentors, a warm thank you is given to my wonderful roommates and schoolmates at Illinois, Anna Dugarova, Sai Lan, Mary Mahaffey, and Nannaphat Saenghong. I know distance won’t do us apart and our friendships will go on. The house I lived for four years in Urbana, IL will always live in my memory. You recorded all my laughters, tears, and sweats and witnessed the most crucial transitions on my growth and life path. The house is female-only and has ten bedrooms. Girls there are from all over the world, such as Thailand, Russia, India, Ethiopia, Belgium, China and the US. I think someday I will write a story about you and your inspirations. v The last but not the least, I’m sincerely grateful to all my dissertation committee members, Dr. McCarthy, Dr. Denzin, Dr. Berry and Dr. Lammers. Thank you so much for all your supports, encouragements, and patience on the intellectual evolution of my dissertation and academic life. Moreover, the second part of this longitudinal ethnographic research would not have existed without the grants from Illinois CIBER. Special thanks as well to my friends Dale Chen from North Carolina State University and Leland Jameson from the National Science Foundation for reading the earlier drafts of my dissertation chapters. Again, thank you to all who have loved me and I have loved… vi TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Theorizing Globalization—Review the Debate .................................................................... 6 1.1.1 Immanuel Wallerstein .................................................................................................... 6 1.1.2 James Rosenau................................................................................................................ 7 1.1.3 Robert Gilpin .................................................................................................................. 7 1.1.4 Samuel Huntington ......................................................................................................... 8 1.1.5 Arjun Appadurai ............................................................................................................. 8 1.1.6 Ulrich Beck ..................................................................................................................... 9 1.1.7 Manuel Castells .............................................................................................................. 9 1.1.8 Anthony Giddens .......................................................................................................... 10 1.1.9 David Harvey................................................................................................................ 10 1.1.10 David Held.................................................................................................................. 11 1.1.11 Roland Robertson ....................................................................................................... 11 1.1.12 Saskia Sassen .............................................................................................................. 12 1.1.13 Malcolm Waters ........................................................................................................