Giuseppe Delmestri

Mastering Techniques or Brokering Knowledge? Middle Managers in Germany, Great Britain and Italy

What do middle managers do? Based on a conceptualization of knowledge as the capacity to act in response to uncertain, complex and ambiguous environmental stimuli, we analyse the role of middle managers in Germany, Great Britain and Italy as holders of different types of knowledge in relation to national institutions such as the education system, the system of industrial relations and the career system. We identify the common role of middle managers in the three countries as the responsibility to both maintain a positive social environment and to handle exceptions and solve unexpected problems. German and Italian managers are directly involved in the solution of technical problems, while their British counterparts act as brokers of technical specialized competences. Italian firms differ from German ones in that the role of middle managers is less formalized.

Streams of inconsistent institutional influences: Middle managers as carriers of multiple identities

Conceiving institutional effects as occurring within the boundaries of predefined institutional environments, spaces or fields leaves little leeway for understanding transnational phenomena of interaction, competition and overlapping jurisdiction of ideas, norms and regulations of multiple origin. I propose here the metaphor of intersecting institutional streams, which influence social actors due to their different origin, strength and fluidity. Thanks to a new understanding of the interaction between roles, institutionalized identities and the self, I refer to individuals not as cultural and institutional dopes, but as able, in varying degrees, to participate in multiple cultural traditions and to maintain distinctive and inconsistent action frames. I collected quantitative information on 418 Italian middle managers, working for local and international firms in Italy, and qualitative information on 113 of them. The majority in international firms enacted Anglo-Saxon identities, and more so in US and British firms; hybridizations occurred with positively perceived aspects of Italian institutions. The majority in Italian firms enacted a traditional Italian identity. Enactment was dependent on characteristics of the role (hierarchical level, international interconnectedness) and on the degree of identification with the international firm’s culture. The latter was spurred by the global integrated use of HRM practices.

How Cinderella Became a Queen Theorizing Radical Status Change

Using a case study of the Italian spirit grappa, we examine status recategorization—the vertical extension and reclassification of an entire market category. Grappa was historically a low-status product, but in the 1970s one regional distiller took steps that led to a radical break from its traditional image, so that in just over a decade high-quality grappa became an exemplar of cultured Italian lifestyle and held a market position in the same class as cognac and whisky. We use this context to articulate “theorization by allusion,” which occurs through three mechanisms: category detachment—distancing a social object from its existing category; category emulation—presenting that object so that it hints at the practices of a high-status category; and category sublimation—shifting from local, field-specific references to broader, societal-level frames. This novel theorization is particularly appropriate for explaining change from low to high status because it avoids resistance to and contestation of such change (by customers, media, and other sources) as a result of status imperatives, which may be especially strong in mature fields. Unlike prior studies that have examined the status of organizations within a category, ours foregrounds shifts in the status and social meaning of a market category itself.

Institutional streams, logics, and fields

Ideology is discussed as the missing link between material practices and symbolic constructions in defining institutional logics. Institutional streams are proposed as disembedded institutional logics traveling as ideologies that are taken for granted. They affect specific (inter)action contexts on a global level providing institutional entrepreneurs and workers with symbolic elements to translate into local institutional arrangements. Such translations can give rise to institutional change. Local translation of nonlocal elements advances the interests of the elites of the “sending” institutional context, as well as it may advance those of the receiving one. Dominant transnational streams may or may not coalesce to form a global world order.

Do All Roads Lead to Rome... or Berlin? The Evolution of Intra- and Inter-organizational Routines in the Machinebuilding Industry

Contingent and institutional perspectives have been contrasted in order to explain the evolution of organization structures and inter-firm relations in the Italian and German machine-building industries, both of which were racked by a massive change in their competitive and technological environments. The result was an increasing similarity in their internal and external organization. The change was guided by an interplay of autonomous problem solving, mimetic isomorphism of fashionable practices and societal features. The different education and industrial relations systems appeared to be functionally equivalent. The task characteristics (type of strategy, the variability of customer demands, and technological complexity) were related to configurational and functional differentiation, the rigidity of functional specialization and the intensity of interfunctional coordination; the exceptionality of customer demands was related to features of the internal processes. Task characteristics were also related to the level of outsourcing and the mode of inter-firm coordination; the measurability of a suppliers performance was related to inter-firm coordination mechanisms. The characteristics of both internal and external organization affected each other.

Convergent Organizational Responses to Globalization in the Italian and German Machine-Building Industries

Business developments in Europe and the rest of the world have pushed researchers and practitioners to examine the effect of cultural diversity on economic performance. Moreover, small and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs) have finally been recognized in many countries as one of the most important driving forces of innovation and economic growth, and studies focusing on their peculiarity are spreading (Davidson, 1989; Storey, 1994). This important new focus on cultural and size specificity has, at the same time, had the effect of disregarding the other side of the coin, that is, the issue of similarity and comparability of differences between firms located in different national contexts and with different ownership. Which institutional provisions are in the best position to sustain the competitive advantage of SMEs? Do global competitive pressures force SMEs to adopt particular organizational arrangements, regardless of nationality, to achieve comparable competitiveness (Hollingsworth

Interference among conflicting institutions and technical-economic conditions: the adoption of the Assessment Center in French, German, Italian, UK, and US multinational firms

We analyze the adoption of the Assessment Center (AC), one of the most complex human resource management techniques, in 161 British, French, German, Italian and US multinational firms both at the headquarters and in their Italian subsidiaries. Combining both quantitative analysis and qualitative accounts, we investigate how different and partially contradictory institutional influences stemming from national business systems and professions, global corporate networks and professions, and different technical-economic conditions affect the adoption of the AC. Our study shows that AC-diffusion is similar at headquarters level in all national contexts, testifying to the paramount importance of transnational institutions of Anglo-American origin for MNCs of any nationality, despite great local variation in the degree of institutionalization of the AC, which ranges from fully-fledged support in culture and the professions as, for example, in Germany, the UK and the USA, to weak or negative backing as in France and Italy. However, the study also reveals how different characteristics of the corporate field of firms with headquarters in different countries, as well as organizational size and labor market conditions, still explain adoption of the AC in their subsidiaries in Italy.

The Unbearable Lightness of University Branding

Abstract This study investigates how universities brand themselves and in what ways visual self-representation varies cross-nationally. We trace differences in the icons (emblems and logos) used in the Internet self-representation of 821 universities and higher education institutions in 20 countries in 5 continents. Emerging from content analyses of the icons were three main visual types (guilded, national, and organizational), arranged in five subtypes (classic, science/technology, local, abstract, and just-text). Generally, the visual expression of abstract or text-based organizational type is the least visually loaded, such lightness matching modern principles of corporate branding; the other types are rich in references to the national or guilded professional field of universities. We find that while the abstract organizational type of visual expression has become dominant in Western countries, including France, Germany, and the United States, heterogeneity prevails in other nations such as Australia, Italy, or South Africa. We develop possible explanations of the observed distribution of types across countries and discuss the implication of our findings for world society institutionalism and the institutional logics approach.

Human Capital, Social Capital and Performance: An Empirical Test from an Entrepreneurial Project-Based Industry

Interpersonal ties facilitate access to resources and ideas. What should be their intensity? And how do the human and social capital of entrepreneurs affect the performance of their projects? We investigated this in the Italian cinema industry in the 1990s, focussing on the directors role. Human and social capital significantly affected performance. Economic and artistic reputation were linked to economic and artistic performance. Task characterised by lower/higher uncertainty were favoured/damped by strong interpersonal ties.

Look What's Back! Institutional Complexity, Reversibility and the Knotting of Logics

Through a comparative historical study of community pharmacy in the UK, Italy, Sweden and the USA, the authors examine what happens to institutional arrangements designed to resolve ongoing conflicts between institutional logics over extended periods of time. It is found that institutional arrangements can reflect the heterogeneity of multiple logics without resulting in hybridization or dominance. Because logics remain active, similar conflicts can reappear multiple times. It is found that the durability of the configurations of competing logics reflects the characteristics of the polities in which fields are embedded. The dominance of any societal institutional order leads to more stable field-level arrangements. The authors suggest that the metaphor of institutional knots and the related image of institutional knotting are useful to capture aspects of this dynamic and to foreground the discursive and material work that allows multiple logics to coexist in local arrangements with variable durability.