Florian A. A. Becker-Ritterspach

Control Mechanisms and Patterns of Reorganization in MNCs

Current management and organizational research seems to agree in one respect: that management faces new challenges resulting mainly from globalization, whether it is real or perceived. Clearly, national corporations as much as MNCs feel the need to respond to new market conditions by reorganizing their businesses on a permanent basis. These changes concern structural configurations as much as flows of all kinds of resources including products, people and capital. However, in our empirical research we looked more closely at such reorganizations and found that even MNCs operating in the same industry were by no means responding to the challenges of globalization in a uniform or convergent way. Despite some similar trends, the types of reorganization, as well as the way the reorganization process developed, diverged from one company to the other. Searching for answers, we found that different dominant control mechanisms were key factors in explaining the divergent patterns of reorganization. Although our research topic is only indirectly linked to the general convergence—divergence debate in the context of globalization (see Ohmae, 1990; Maurice and Sorge, 2000; Morgan et al., 2001), we may nevertheless contribute to it. As will be outlined in our chapter, our findings on the connection between control mechanisms and patterns of reorganization indicate that there is as much convergence as divergence.

Exploring the interaction of firm-level change and national institutional environments in shaping employment and union relations: a comparative case study of four European airlines

Abstract Drawing on the example of the airline industry, this paper explores in a longitudinal comparative case study the question of how firm-level changes and national institutional environments interact in shaping employee and union relations. Adding to previous research in comparative institutional analysis and comparative employment relations, we illustrate that the way in which industry pressures and national-level effects play out to influence employee and union relations depends on firm-level changes, mainly in the form of firm growth, acquisitions and the foundation of new subsidiaries. We show in particular that depending on firm-level changes, the very same firm might engage differently with a given institutional context at different points in time. Hence, our work illustrates the importance of firm growth, acquisitions and the foundation of new subsidiaries in explaining the shifting interaction between the firm and its institutional environment, and its implications for changing employee and union relations within firms.