College kids not so smart when it comes to geography, product origin

That study is awesome. I'll admit that I forgot where a few things were from, like Heineken. For some reason I was thinking it was just the worst Belgian beer ever produced. The fact that it's Dutch makes total sense that it's a crappy beer. That study did reinforce my love of Sweden though. I would be so patriotic if I lived there - all driving a Volvo, talking on an Ericsson phone, sitting on IKEA furniture*, and vacationing at the Ice Hotel.

I don't know what my whole point was with this post, other than to maybe voice my love of Sweden. I even find myself reluctantly liking Peter Bjorn and John, as well as Robyn. Now I'm just rambling.

*Seth would never actually let me purchase IKEA furniture, but I'm sure we could get some lamps from there.

The conclusions you're drawing from that are bs. I didn't know the specific countries most of those brands were from (although I did know the region), but that is because I don't purchase from those brands. I buy local, don't own a television, and only hear about brand specific globalization issues if independent media writes about it. Do you really think that in order to care about globalization issues, you have to know which country Lexus operates out of?

By the way, whenever statistics come out claiming to have come from "college students" I always get a little suspicious. Don't you think that the bias of the researcher in choosing "typical" college students could play a major role in the results?

Ah, yeah:

online survey by marketing company with its own little ad on the last page of the report =/= valid research.

I think I'm missing something. What does this report actually say? That college kids do not know where the corporate headquarters of some multi-national corporations are located? What does it matter that IKEA is a "Swedish" brand if their stuff is made in hundreds of different manufacturing facilities throughout the 3rd World (and in 2008 a new one in Virginia)? I always assume that every time I buy a piece of furniture from a place like IKEA, or a $20 DVD player at Wal-Mart, there's some slave labor somewhere making up for my big savings. I try to avoid doing too much of this passive exploitation, but sometimes it's pretty hard to avoid...

Totally agree with Miranda. If anything, this speaks positively about the relative degree of brand obsession among young people.

What's wrong with Anne Elizabeth's analysis is that it doesn't really grasp the nature of modern globalization. It's not just that now we purchase things from more places around the world -- rather, the sites of resource procurement, manufacture, sales, corporate headquarters, and investors have become so fragmented as to make "countries of origin" meaningless.

For example, what's the point of identifying Toyota as a Japanese company when all of the cars they sell in the United States are manufactured in Alabama, Kentucky, Indiana, Texas and West Virginia, and while the raw materials are gathered and processed all over the globe?

Modern industrial products come from everywhere and nowhere.

ey! das wot oy sed!

Yeah, but things sound so much more intelligent when filtered through Aaron (especially if you use a funny Elmer Fudd voice when you read it).

Being in Uganda always underscores the complicated processes at work with globalization. I don't believe anuthing in this room was made in Uganda or by Ugandans (except the Ugandans themselves, of course). But very few of the companies behind the products are based in the US either. Mostly cheap hi/lo tech products made/assembled in Asia and the Gulf States, with MNC ownership based there as well. Globalization is a many headed hydra, if you will.

My favorite product to discuss is the soft drink, so forgive me while I ramble... The town of Mbarara has long had established dairy and fruit drink industries. The dairy industries were moderately industrialized and invloved local, regional and national interests. The fruit beverage industry was strictly local (dude making the mango slurpee right there in front of you from the mango his buddy picked). A few years ago, Coca Cola built a plant outside of town. Like most Coke bottling plants in Africa, it was joint venture between Coke USA, South African Beverages (a major beverage powerhouse from back in the apartheid days) and a few national economic (ie political) elites. The Coke plant brought all their equipment from the US, brought the semi-skilled work force up from South Africa. Even imported the security firm to guard the facility. To the best of my knowledge, not a single person from Mbarara was employed inside the plant. The locals got next to nothing from the "foreign direct investment." In fact, within a few years 2/3 of the dairies were out of business and ALL the fruit beverage dealers were out of business. By being active consumers of Coke products (the profits from which have done nothing to enrich the region, except for a few nice stands built at the soocer stadium) the locals have been complicit in their own exploitation. But of course. Who wants to drink stinky old bush banana juice when you can be hip, modern and Western by drinking a Coke? The exploited willfully internalize the desires and practices of the exploiters. And this ends my discussion of Gramsci's concept of hegemony as played out in contemporary globalization.

I think to be anti-globalization it's pretty important to know where Lexus operates. And Disney. And Michelin and on and on. Doesn't matter one bit whether or not you use the products.

but in the end i do have to agree: if you're going to try to critique globalization, you really need to know who the players are. And it's not "countries of origin" that matter quite so much as the very idea that we might know how to find the people making the stuff.

Probably the larger problem, as Miranda points out, is that most of these kids don't give a shit where these things are located—much less manufactured, assembled, or sold—and that not a one of them likely considered it important. Probably they still don't. And when we don't consider it important, we don't ask if it works for the people making the shit. And don't bother finding out what the people getting the money from it are doing with the profits.

In other words, getting us all to agree that "that's just the way it works now" is great way of undermining our potential for dissent. Play along if you'd like; I prefer not to.

On the other hand, if you can live in a world where you genuinely feel unaffected by the doings of Toyota, or Coke, or Shell, then you are either very lucky, extremely shortsighted, or totally lying. Any of which I totally envy.

a question for kevin: no locals were employed in the plant? i find that a little hard to believe, as it strikes me as a disavowal of the colonizing opportunism at work in, well, the rest of the story.

plus, that seems to be a great way of ensuring at least a small pool of support when these issues rear one of their many ugly heads: like when wal-mart moved to Chicago they at least promised shitty underpaying jobs.

anyway, it's a great example here. even if it does suck, really.

IKEA is a privately-owned, international, low-cost home products retailer that sells modern, utilitarian design furniture, much of which is assembled by the consumer. IKEA was founded in Sweden by Ingvar Kamprad and it is owned by a Dutch-registered foundation controlled by the Kamprad family. IKEA is an acronym comprising the initials of the founder's name, Ingvar Kamprad, and home village, Elmtaryd, Agunnaryd. The owner/franchiser of the IKEA trademark and the IKEA Concept is Inter IKEA Systems B.V. It has corporate offices in the Netherlands, Sweden and Belgium. The IKEA brand is owned by another company with complex ownership via several companies and foundations in several countries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA
Actually, more interesting than wether or not it is a "Swedish company," is the fact that it is a wholly owned subsidiary of a Dutch non-profit. That's some wacky corporate strategerie!

Basically my point in the previous post is that although the corporate color scheme of IKEA is baby blue and yellow, and they serve up some damn fine Swedish meatballs, they are in fact not a Swedish corporation and the fact that 32% of colege kids can "correctly" misidentify them as such means very little. Perhaps a better question to pose is not whether the general population can identify a particular brand's "country of origin" (whatever that means), but whether they can identify which corporations are truly global in their reach and whether or not they understand the type of nefarious chicanery these multi-nationals get up to. Like the following example of IKEA's whack set up:

The central purpose of IKEA’s intricate corporate structure appears to be tax avoidance. By funneling its profits through a nonprofit foundation and through a string of shell corporations in various tax havens, IKEA drastically reduces the tax burden it would face with a more straightforward corporate organization.

In 2004, the last year that the INGKA Holding group filed accounts, the company reported profits of €1.4 billion on sales of €12.8 billion, a margin of nearly 11 percent. Because INGKA Holding is owned by the nonprofit INGKA Foundation, none of this profit is taxed. The foundation's nonprofit status also means that the Kamprad family cannot reap these profits directly, but the Kamprads do collect a portion of IKEA sales profits through the franchising relationship between INGKA Holding and Inter IKEA Systems.

Inter IKEA Systems collected €631 million of franchising fees in 2004, but reported pre-tax profits of only €225 million in 2004. One of the major pre-tax expenses that Inter IKEA systems reported was €590 million of “other operating charges.” IKEA has refused to explain these charges, but Inter IKEA Systems appears to make large payments to I.I. Holding, another Luxembourg-registered group that, according to The Economist, “is almost certain to be controlled by the Kamprad family”. I.I. Holding made a profit of €328 million in 2004.

In 2004, the Inter IKEA group of companies and I.I. Holding reported combined profits of €553m and paid €19m in taxes, or approximately 3.5 percent.[10]

[If being owned by a non-pofit meant that I could get away with paying 3.5 percent taxes on my income, I would seriously consider putting myself up for sale to the highest bidder...]

The Berne Declaration, a not-for-profit organization in Switzerland that promotes corporate responsibility, has formally criticized IKEA for its tax avoidance strategies. In 2007, the Berne Declaration nominated IKEA for one of its Public Eye “awards,” which highlight corporate irresponsibility and are announced during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.[12]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA

It is true. No residents from Mbarara were employed in the plant (I've toured the plant and spoken with the management there about this). Those are the skilled and semi-skilled jobs. Locals mainly got employment driving the distribution trucks and manning the Coke kiosks that popped up eveywhere (unskilled labor).

And this is absolutely in keeping with colonialist practices, especially as they have been practiced here in Uganda (and elsewhere in Africa). In Uganda, the British imported "Asians" (ie colonial subjects from the Indian sub-continent) to be the skilled/semi-skilled laborers and the entreprenurial middle-class. The informal rule employed by the British relied on empowering a small African elite, importing other British colonial subjects (viewed as more developed by the racialist hierarchy employed) to help run the economic side of the system. Of course, this practice of assimilating a small group of indigenious poltical/economic elites didn't work in the long run for colonialism. But it works great under neoliberal globalization because the majority of people buy into the ideological premise/promise of the system, as evident in my Mbarara-Coke story and the relevance of Gramsci's hegemony.