Inhalt

Title

Diplomacy and International Business

Dr. Dimitrios P. Kamsaris

About the Author

Dr. Kamsaris is currently, actively involved as a Diplomatic, Geopolitical Advisor and instructor in diverse and multicultural environments where coordination and cultural alignment is the major success factor.

Dr. Dimitrios P. Kamsaris' family is in the shipping and transportation industry for the last four generations and member of the ship-owners club. The transnational environment gave him a global perspective of the Geopolitics and Diplomacy in business in the international setting.

Dr. Kamsaris have long professional experience in top managerial positions in multinational companies around the world. At the moment he holds the position of Vice President at Bilston College, Birmingham, United Kingdom and Senior Vice President at the International Institute of Management Professionals in Canada and member of the Harvard Alumni. Dr. Dimitrios P. Kamsaris has been a Professor of Organizational Behavior in Switzerland, UK, France, Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria and Denmark. I have been delivering academic lectures and speeches at Universities worldwide since 1990.

His approaches have proved to be of great value to the industries. Since 2010, Dr. Kamsaris is active business professional operating as an Advisor of Petroleum Corporations in the GCC countries and provides corporateb training courses and consulting services in the GCC countries (KSA, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain) for companies such as KPC, KOC, KNPC, KOTC, KIPIC, KAFCO, KUFPEC, PIC, Q8, ADNOC, ADMA OPCO, ADDC etc, and South East Asia and Asia Pacific countries (Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia). In the past he held position as Director for Shell Corporation in Europe, CEO for Olympic Constructions in Greece, Manager for Sherwin Williams Petrochemicals in Middle East and executive in Coca Cola, Sherwin Williams, Shell and Olympic Games.
Dr. Kamsaris has completed postdoctoral education at Harvard University and has been published in various business and academic journals.

Introduction

International business and globalization requires governments to operate in a context different than before, which is to integrate other participants of diplomacy in its own decision-making processes. Governments have been focusing on new strategies, such as involving ministries and non-state actors and institutions, providing greater transparency, and acting collectively. Facing the challenges of an increasingly complex world Diplomats are not the only actors involved in the diplomatic process because due to globalization, many actors such as NGOs, international organizations and individuals can be seen practicing diplomacy. Diplomacy is a course of actions, based on the exchange of ideas, values and traditions to reinforce the business relationships, improve the social cooperation and stimulate the national interests, with respects to globalization.

Diplomacy, due to globalization the mass communication technology help access between people to promote peace & stability all over the world because it influences the opinion globally of businesses, trade, individuals, communities, cultures and countries (Kamsaris, 2020). The tactics to form international relations can be described either hard or soft power and according to Nye soft power is the ability to persuade and get what you want through culture, values and ideas through attraction rather than coercion or payments, while hard power involves activating forces. Through soft power, the use of cultural diplomacy becomes significant (Kamsaris, 2020).

Regarding the international business world, the will and ability to appreciate and embrace the diverse values and needs of dissimilar cultures is important for the strategic decisions and adopt diplomacy models tactics by increasing social awareness of international companies engaged in the development of culturally sensitive marketing plans and campaigns in order to build positive public opinion, form a good image, free of local problems, conduct research regarding the cultural differences of the new country and international companies with local focus (Kamsaris, 2020).

Bound states that the internet has created a world where cultures meet and mix and reform easily and constantly and countries are increasingly finding that they need to reaffirm their sovereignty to stop their cultures being swamped or changed by access to other cultural outputs. As Mark says, a state’s international cultural mission now involves a more active role in protecting and developing country culture. A country’s cultural identity needs to be strong and constantly reinforced and revitalised, or it will be flooded and lost. A culture is the set of values which underpins a country and the way that other countries use to understand you. Culture for Ribeiro is a non-threatening, inclusive way of communicating with people. It is powerful because it is universal and is shared as it is a manifestation of human genius and achievement and is charged with symbolic meaning.

International relations referred to the study of foreign affairs and political interaction between countries and cover the complex of cultural, economic, legal, military, and political relations of all countries and their populations, actors and international organizations. The goal of this book is to introduce some of the main issues of international politics, such as war and peace, development, regional integration and security, and to familiarize with different ways to conceptualise and analyse these issues. This should allow to make a more confident decision about your own attitude towards particular issues and to analyse these issues more thoroughly, but it should also make you question both your own as well as others’ representations of the world.

Introduction

Book outcomes

Book outcomes

This book provides a broad introduction to the study of international business and encompasses a diverse array of topics, from the politics of development, the international companies institutions to the environment, events, issues, and processes of international relations in order to provide the general knowledge and analytic tools necessary to understand, evaluate, and respond to a complex group of problems in the contemporary world. We will develop a broad understanding of some of the most important ideas, issues and events in international relations, and be able to better comprehend and articulate their thoughts on issues of major current significance.

Furthermore, the book will help the reader strengthen research and analytical skills by identifying the main actors in international politics and relate them to the contexts in which they operate.

The study and practice of international relations is valued due to these facts:

promotes successful international business and trade policies between countries.
encourages international companies related to business, tourism, and providing people with opportunities to enhance their lives.
allows international companies and host country governments to cooperate with one another, share information to face global issues include pandemics, the environment etc.
spreads human culture through cultural exchanges, diplomacy and policy development.

International Business and International Relations

International Business and International Relations

International companies in order to conduct business overseas should be aware of all the factors that might affect their business activities such as the differences in the systems affecting the law, the politics and government, the economic policy, the language, the accounting standards, the labor forces, the living standards, the environment, the culture, the organizational culture, the foreign exchange markets, the tariffs, the import and export regulations, the trade agreements, the climate, and of course the education.

Business has become an international activity where international business have played a serious role and foreign direct investment is increasing worldwide. Business diplomacy increases the skill to earn the sentiments and thoughts of stakeholders to support the company mission, by playing an essential role in identifying threats and opportunities in the external environment, and in modelling responses across all functions of the companies (Henisz, 2016).

There is also the opinion that on how business diplomacy contributes to improve the legitimacy and impact of international companies to adapt to the host country environment, and the trials an international company deals with to be accepted overseas and get assimilated in the culture (Henisz, 2016).

The diplomatic practices rising from fluctuations in the international economy changed relations between countries, international companies with having international companies as persuasive players in worldwide relations (Strange, 2000).

The international business is synonymous to dealing with a multifaceted international business environment, where the companies need to accomplish endurance in a speedily changing political and commercial environment that requires interface with numerous stakeholders. Business diplomacy recognize that companies can work for their profit benefits and use their resources and power to deal with public and political concerns (White, 2015).

The running of the international company is connected to old-styled national diplomacy and the foreign policy functions of the host countries and the soft power of society, the diplomacy of citizens, of companies and of organizations (Oliver, 2010).

Business diplomacy incorporates companies’s policies and activities to decrease political pressures within a host country (Westermann, 2015).

Business diplomacy (covers the representation and communication undertakings arranged by international companies with host country government representatives to establish and sustain a encouraging association to sustain legitimacy and a authorization to function (Ruel and Wolters, 2016).

Commercial diplomacy is diplomacy that focuses on development of business between two countries (Naray, 2008). It aims at generating commercial gains in the form of trade and inward and outward investment by means of business and entrepreneurship promotion and facilitation activities in the host country (Stoddard, 2016). Commercial diplomacy is pursued with the goal of gaining economic stability, welfare, or competitive advantage (Ruel and Visser, 2012). As a term, commercial diplomacy emerged in the second half of the twentieth century (Corbet, 1972), but the concept certainly existed in previous centuries (Otte, 2016). In literature the concepts of economic diplomacy and commercial diplomacy are often used interchangeably (Curzon, 1965). Definitions of both concepts vary, and consequently the relationship between them is also described differently. Some authors argue that commercial diplomacy is a subset of economic diplomacy (Kotabe and Czinkota, 1992). It is certain, however, that both kinds of diplomacy are irrevocably intertwined and thus distinct but obviously closely related to each other (Berridge, 2001).

Functioning effectively amid these complicating conditions requires the cultivation of business diplomacy skills and knowledge. Most of the international companies hire diplomats and trusting on their experience in managing complex relationships worldwide. In the global setting, international companies should be aware to anticipate stakeholder conflicts, communicate interest organizations, influence host country authority decision makers and sustain constructive relations with peripheral parties. Business diplomacy is a mechanism that supports environments favorable to the interests of the company through the effectiveand efficient management of their political impact and their association in the host country society, due to the tools of country diplomacy (Egea, Parra, and Wandosell, 2017).

Business diplomacy is a module of cultural diplomacy, the soft power instrument of a country’s public diplomacy for the attainment and growth of influence (Bier and White, 2020). Business diplomacy creates a business value and when there is a peripheral hunt for prosperity and where there is a crash between the company, the policymaking, and the culture (Henisz, 2014).

International business is all money-making transactions that take place among different countries where companies undertake such businesses as sales, investments, and transportation of supplies from foreign countries for revenue (Kynge J. and Mure, 2000). These companies activated in the international environment will work on exporting and importing profit-related activities conducted across countries’ borders (Uvhitelle, 1989). The international business comprises of the recognition of the effects of several activities on local and external markets, countries, companies, and individuals (Kynge J. and Mure, 2000). These activities involves all commercial undertakings to stimulate the relocation of goods, services, resources, individuals and technologies across national borders. The success of this type of global businesses strategy and decisions are relevant to the recognition of the diversity of the world marketplace and the keenness to adapt with the uncertainties, doubts, worries and dangers of being engaged on a corporate level in a constantly altering worldwide environment (Holstein, 1990). The interesting feature of international business is businesses combine characteristics of multi-domestic and global operations (Williams, 2004). The networks of information and influence and the alliances are combined in a business diplomacy approach energized by the firm’s moneymaking objectives and the investigation of the geopolitical risks to these objectives.

In multi-domestic operations, a strategic business archetypal that contains promoting products and services in various markets worldwide and adapting these to the cultural customs and standards and taste favorites of the various markets. In multinational operations, a business strategy includes vending the products and services in different external markets without fluctuating the characteristics of the products and services to accommodate the cultural customs, standards and taste favorites of the various markets (Kynge and Mure, 2000). Business diplomacy strategies aim to shape the company’s geopolitical risk setting in a way to avoid problems rising, as it creates the environment in which policy goals can be safeguarded, commercial objectives and ambitions are more probable to be realized.

Commercial diplomacy emphasizes the government's role, being defined as "a government service to the business community, which aims at the development of socially beneficial international business ventures (Naray, 2010). It is "the work of diplomatic missions in support of the home country's business and finance sectors and includes the promotion of inward and outward investment, as well as trade (Ozdem, 2009). Commercial diplomacy thus includes "all aspects of business support and promotion" including investment, tourism, R&D, and intellectual property (Naray, 2010).

Commercial diplomacy is designed to influence foreign government policy and regulatory decisions that affect global trade, investment and commerce. It is concerned with government regulations and actions that affect international commerce—including standards in areas such as health, safety, the environment, and consumer protection; regulations covering services such as banking, telecommunications and accounting; competition policy and laws concerning bribery and corruption; agricultural support programs; and industrial subsidies. Commercial diplomacy is a value-creating activity due to its usefulness in dealing with managerial and government concerns (Potter, 2004).

International Relations

International Relations

International relations constitute a branch of political science, and as global society evolves and expands, it continues to search new way to link our complex world as a whole. The dimensions of international relations related to international peace and prosperity include diplomacy, arms control, alliance politics, international political economics, environmental politics, refugee and migration issues, and human rights.

Today’s complex world demands professionals skilled in international relations, which is interdisciplinary in nature, mixing the fields of economics, history, geography and political science to examine topics such as culture, human rights, global poverty, environment, economics, globalization, security, global ethics, and the political environment.

In International Relations theory, norms are widely held to be the opposite of interest defined as power, so it seems, states play by the international rules or they play international power politics (Morgenthau, 1978). But why norms and why do powerful nations obey powerless rules? (Franck, 1990). Thus understood, norms are held to be scripts of freedom, and power to be a practice of domination. It is here that this paper aims to establish a critique (Franck, 1990). International Relations norms research all too often buys into this dichotomy, the problem being that norms are misconceived when limited to the two options of either being emancipatory values against the dictates of power politics or utopic scripts never standing these dictates in the long run (Franck, 1990).

While International Relations norms research has widely built upon a dichotomy of norms/power, more recently, the emphasis on the contestation of norms has effectively put into question a ready-made ontology of norms and thus established an interesting vanishing point (Wiener, 2014). Norms are misconceived as ready-made scripts. In the course of an on-going social process, they remain undetermined, for being subject to a surplus of meaning (Wiener, 2014). Norms may be put in charge for different purposes, emancipation and dominance so, building arguments upon norms does not mean to continue with a discourse, which has been depoliticized when certain norms had been formally established. By contrast, to reference a norm may always add a moment of trouble, for example in a new interpretation, which implies a contestation of the established but never fixed meaning of a norm (Wiener, 2014).

It is a field in which we exercise our moral and political opinions and scrutinizes international relations theory and research across the methodological spectrum from classical realism to quantitative and postmodernist work (Oakeshott, 1962). This uncritical view of the past has contributed to an often licentious historical method, with history serving less as an independent body of evidence than as a trove to be plundered, and which in the discipline’s most scientific work saddles history with more certainty than it can bear.

The first lesson the student of international politics must learn and never forget is that the complexities of international affairs make simple solutions and trustworthy prophecies impossible and the best the scholar can do, then, is to trace the different tendencies which, as potentialities, are inherent in a certain international situation (Morgenthau, 1948).

The complexity and uncertainty of human affairs is one of the many factors to be considered in making judgments, the dangers of abstraction, of dogmatism, of prediction, of action, and of inaction. He can better understand the abundance and variability of human values and the opportunities as well as the insecurities of any situation (Wright, 1955). Many different readings of the same reality are possible and even if all historians agreed on the facts, they would still disagree on the respective weight of those facts and any causal analysis performs, assessments of motivation and causal efficiency vary considerably As (Hoffmann, 1987). suggests that, for many years, international relations has held the dubious honor of being among the least self-reflexive of the Western social sciences and it is assumed that rationally justified assertions about the essential nature of politics can be scientifically verified by observing its historical manifestations (Lapid, 1989). The social sciences force themselves on each other, each trying to capture society as a whole, in its ‘totality’ and each science encroaches on its neighbors, all the while believing it is staying in its own domain (Braudel, 1980).

The international relations field is a historical as well in its focus on contemporary history and policy issues, and in its tendency to read the present back into the past (Buzan and Little, 1994). In international relations, the insight that contestation is the rule rather than the exception has stimulated the assumption that international norms may differ with respect to their contestability (Bueger, 2017). The function of norms depends on its embeddedness within formal frameworks like treaties, organizations, or a formal constitution and norms come to the fore in different scenarios, even beyond the confines of an international legal system, and thus differ with regard to their social function (Wiener, 2014). This emphasis on the social life of international norms acknowledges a significant process of social interaction and, in so doing, establishes a framework for the empirical analysis of norms and norms-related practice (Wiener, 2014).

The rules are empty vessels, and indeed only can be empty vessels, waiting for someone to pour contents into what are otherwise indeterminate notions (Klabbers, 2006). However, when we assume when the vagueness of objectives in international law is evident it is hard to see how or why they could be challenged because they exist at such a high level of abstraction that they fail to indicate concrete preferences for action (Koskenniemi, 2011.)

International relations or international affairs have a broad purpose in contemporary society, as it seeks to understand:

The origins of war and the maintenance of peace
The nature and exercise of power within the global system
The changing character of state and non-state actors who participate in international decision-making

International Relations and Globalization

International Relations and Globalization

Globalization is a multi-layered phenomenon which incorporates economic, social, political, technological and cultural dimensions. By looking at the contemporary feel regarding effects of globalization, it is a common practice in media and even in scholars to look at globalization as a recent trend emerged before few decades (Pieterse, 2012).

Globalization, as a complex connectivity, may situate before few decades but globalization process comprised of social, political, economic and cultural flows instigates us to go further back in times (Tomlinson, 1999). Many features of globalization can be found in the past and embedded in the evolutionary times (Pieterse, 2012). So, globalization becomes a fragment of history which places planetary evolutionary processes within cosmic evolution (Spier, 2010). The historical dimension of globalization indicates that the world had never been a place for unconnected communities rather there were strong evidences of cross cultural exchanges and interactions from the earliest times of human existence in the planet (Bentley, 2004). The basis of deep and wide infrastructure of globalization in the past era without using the term globalization (Pieterse, 2012).

Globalization refers to all those processes by which the people of the world are incorporated into a single world society (Albrow, 1990). Globalization constitutes a multiplicity of linkages and interconnections that transcend the nation states (and by implication the societies) which make up the modern world system and it defines a process through which events, decisions and activities

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Texte: Dr. Dimitrios P. Kamsaris
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 04.04.2021
ISBN: 978-3-7487-7926-1

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