International business is about connections. It’s a web of reverberations, of effects with more than one identifiable cause, of complex ripples flowing through the myriad interconnected threads binding this globe together. Trump is both a result of these ripples and a stone cast into the already turbulent pond.
It comes as no news that the most fundamental building block of the economic growth as we’ve known it, the middle class, is one of the threatened species in the contemporary economic ecosystem. The jobs of the middle class are becoming extinct at a rate competing with the disappearance of other threatened life forms in this planet. It’s not only the technological advances that drive out the old ways of doing, but also the profound social changes promoted and enabled by the tools now reaching out to touch our fingertips through the screen.
There is no way of unraveling the beginning points of the threads now forming the tangle of global socio-political unrest, climate issues and economic instability we find ourselves in. The middle class individual who was born into a world that made sense if you just worked hard, raised a family, and trusted institutions to look after you in times of trouble has been like a frog simmering in a kettle initially filled with cold water. Now the water is boiling, and the frog fights with his last breath to take the leap out of that kettle.
The disillusioned and struggling middle class of US saw Trump as the final catapult that might help them jump out of the water – or at least as someone who might turn off the heat to let the water become nicely lukewarm again. However, to me as a scholar of international business, it seems that the heat doesn’t come from a nice stove with an on/off switch, but from the whole house burning around the kettle.
Maybe Trump can help the frogs of middle class jump out of the kettle – but the result may be death by fire. The path to survival lies elsewhere.
Like we know from evolution, it’s not the fittest that survive, but the most adaptable. The frogs that will adapt to living in near boiling water will be left to tell the tale of a world where the water was still cold. Can Trump help the struggling middle class of the US to adapt to the permanently changed global realities? Can he ease the transition to wherever it is that we’re headed on this planet?
If the answer is no, I dare to take a peek into the crystal ball polished by history: the era of the US as the most dominant engine of global activities is coming to an end. Like so many empires of past, the failure to adapt to the changed circumstances leads to merciless implosion. But maybe this time around the history will rebel against repeating itself?
As a European, I could refuse to be scared, and to shrug this collapse of an overseas empire as something happening “out there”. But as a scholar of the intertwined threads, webs and tangles we call international business I cannot avoid the fear creeping in: we have our fair share of the frogs in each society, and we all reside in the same burning house we know as the planet Earth.
How do we put down the fire – or adapt to living in boiling water?
Milla Wirén
Doctoral Candidate
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