Abstract

Editor's Desk Editorial Preface Paul S. Licker, Oakland University, licker@oakland.edu It is a cliche now to speak about globalization as though it were a standard element of business strategy and that almost anything involving movement of goods, people, cash, products or information across national boundaries constituted some aspect of "globalization." And it is hardly a cliche for readers of this journal that the internationalization of information systems both contributes to globalization as well as stands as a result of this globalization. In some regards, international IT is the poster child of globalization, since all of those previously mentioned aspects (goods, people, etc) are in fact components of informational IT. Nonetheless, on a practical level, "globalization" is definitely not precisely equal to international IT, despite our most earnest efforts to identify these two. First, globalization is nothing new. Globalization is a characteristic of empire- building, after all, and throughout history most empires have been built on a model of propagating a central culture or ethnicity throughout a geographic region with little regard for local values or desires. The pharonic Egyptian, classical Greek and Roman, Chinese, Indian, Inca, Assyrian, Babylonian, Russian, Zulu, British, French, Spanish, Polish, Dutch, and American imperial powers