Nokia Video

In the class we watched a documentary about the company Nokia trying to shift its production towards China. During the film we watch the adventures of Ms. Hanna who is the main employee on the mission of analyzing the various supplier alternatives and then reporting and presenting the outcomes to the board members. We watch only one of the supplier alternatives which was in fact not selected by Nokia to form business relations. There are many interesting points and inferences I had drawn from the movie, and in this entry I will try to depict them in addition to addressing the two questions given in the class.

The main question is that is it possible to import the moral and ethical standards from Finland (Europe) to production system (business life) in China?

Most of the video contains scenes like how poorly Chinese workers are living. They may be regarded as somewhat modern slaves with all their boring and monotonous duties, unpaid overtimes, no labor rights, no labor contracts, poor housing conditions with unhealthy bathrooms, toilets and kitchens,  no rights for emotional feelings, and much more which we all have seen reminded me the famous (nationally) Turkish TV series "Arena" we used to have when I was a child. The brave journalist was discovering and revealing all the illegal and filthy activities of many companies or workstations from a wide variety of industries from drug dealers to bakers, from white women traders to museum administrations. But the difference was they used to be filmed by hidden cameras, naturally. In Nokia movie I sensed the same feeling that the Finnish lady and her Chinese advisor are trying to investigate and depict every problems they can observe and point the findings out to the camera. This situation is also in correlation with my personal experiences from living abroad in Europe, namely it is quite common for a person coming from a developed country to directly and immediately catch the problems or inefficiencies (sometimes stated as low hanging fruits) they see when they arrive in a less developed country. I believe the important thing is how to make use of that findings. In short term it is quite economically rational for firms from developed countries to make the investigations like Nokia has done and then analyze the findings and choose the best supplier best fits or promises to be able to best fit the company standards. But since we are living in the post-colonial age, as an individual I would like to see the deeper issues as well. In the 21th century the humanity have started to talk about other interests than finance; environment and sustainability are two of them. I don't know if one day organizations from developed world will arrive in non-developed world for improving their standards not just for maintaining their own organizational images but in addition for environmental and social responsibilities. Development should be global if a sustainable global growth is intended. Otherwise I think Nokia's selection of suitable Chinese supplier is just a small thing in whole the system. I think so because at market and sector level it is unclear that significant percentage of customers will decide not choose Nokia because it has connections is China, since there are almost none which does not have some their facilities in China. This is somewhat a norm for our modern industrial world. I see this video, as well many similar things from the corporate world, as a sustainability game in order to convince the society that company cares about sustainability. It is hard to define the boundaries and see the real picture.