Democracy
To succeed in a business, you have to know how to deal with the environment that has a direct influence on the company. For example they have to know how to deal with the competitors, customers, environment, laws and so on. Therefore, what happened in Saudi Arabia was a shock to Danish companies that have sales in Saudi Arabia or in the Muslim world in general. According to Hamel customer interface is the third components of the business concept which is buyer power in some other concepts. As soon as the Muslim knew about the cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), they panned the Danish and Norwegian products from their markets. As a result, sales have been decreased in this market according to the buyer power. This shows the importance of the customers’ satisfaction in the revenue generating by the firms worldwide. On the other hand, some firms in Saudi Arabia have been affected by the cartoons because their names are attached with a Danish name like SADAFCO. Therefore it is their responsibility to clarify that there are Saudi 100%. This is also happened in Kuwait to KDD (Kuwait Danish Dairy) where it is 100% Kuwaiti company. I think these companies should inform the customers who have the magic power in this case in order to sustain in the business. So they have to focus more on the customer interface to guide them to the right direction. On the other hand, for the Danish base companies, they have to satisfy their Muslim customers by refusing and denying the cartoons because these cartoons may affect the economy in these countries as a whole. In my opinion, the Danish and Norwegian governments should have an instant act toward this issue because it is not a democracy issue when touching the religion concept.
posted by Hassan at 4:45 PM
1 Comments:
Hi Hassan,
You write:
"In my opinion, the Danish and Norwegian governments should have an instant act toward this issue because it is not a democracy issue when touching the religion concept."
You obviously don't understand how the Danish democracy works. I have sketched some of the background in a comment on http://mgt406.blogspot.com/2006/02/trying-to-work-unworkable-boycott-of.html
But I'd like to elaborate a little about our system. Denmark is a constitutional monarchy, with parliamentarism. This means that although we have a king or queen he or she has absolutely no say in political matters, the queen can not act politically except in very narrow straits. Otherwise she would become an ex-queen with a few swift parliamentary penstrokes.
The queen rules, but parliamentarism means that the government is really comprised by those who can be agreed upon by a majority of the parliament. The prime minister executes the laws, but the parliament writes the laws. (In practice it is more of a cooperation.) And last, but not least, the *courts* decide how the laws are interpreted and applied. In my reply to Sultan, I mentioned paragraph 77 of our constitution. This paragraph means that expressions can be outlawed, but you cannot be preemptively obstructed in making them. After the fact, however, you can be brought to court and held responsible for your thoughts. If you say that you want to kill someone, well, that's probably unlawful. But it is the courts who decide, based on the laws.
Actually we have laws against some forms of blasphemy and stuff. However the judicial systems, as well as experts on Danish law, have already determined that the cartoons were within the limits of Danish law. This means there is nothing anyone can do, except the long hard way of democratic process, to change the laws. Frankly, my qualified guess is that it will probably never happen.
The Danish government, be it represented by the queen or by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, is simply not a player in this game. He has no say. He cannot force the newspaper to apologize, and the government hasn't done anything wrong. The newspaper, being within the law and upholding their freedom of speech, also cannot apologize more than it has already, as any further apology would invalidate the entire concept of freedom of expression and lead to future attempts of interference.
Just as it is a well-known fact that you shouldn't negotiate with terrorists and kidnappers, the same logic applies here. We are terribly sorry, but you will have to be satisfied with that. You are of course free to dislike us, even hate us. By all means boycott us, though it doesn't matter much to us. We have a strong economy, and even trying to use oil pressure wouldn't help: as Denmark is a net exporter of oil, we would actually gain from that.
I would much prefer if you tried to understand us, though. I think I can at least partially understand how you feel about it, after all it is probably similar to the way I feel about freedom of expression.
Sincerely,
Lasse Hillerøe Petersen
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