Graham Hollinshead

Blockbusters or Bridge-Builders? The Role of Western Trainers in Developing New Entrepreneurialism in Eastern Europe

Since the start of the transformation in Eastern Europe in late 1989, there has been a marked increase in training programmes and activities designed to modernize human capital in the region. Many of the initiatives are financed by the EU or other western sources and led by western training providers. This article deals with classroom training activities as a particular mechanism for developmental activity for post-socialist managers. Its empirical basis is a four-year training project that took place in Bulgaria from 1992 to 1996. The educators and trainers were from various EU countries while the trainees were Bulgarian middle and top-level managers from private and state-owned organizations. The article commences by considering why the western commitment to experiential learning appears to be compromised when trainers travel East, and relates this to broader issues of knowledge creation, ownership and transfer. As a prelude to describing the training programme itself we provide a brief insight into Bulgarian culture and then reveal trainee perceptions as to the value of the training initiative. We conclude by suggesting that if such training is to be meaningful to audiences in the post-command economies the principles of experiential learning need to be both reasserted and modified.

Transition and organizational dissonance in Serbia

This study reveals and analyses contradictory narrative voices within a local enterprise in the troubled Balkan region, recently acquired by a multinational enterprise. We employ case study research methods informed by semi-structured interviews with management and worker representatives to expose underlying and conflicting rationalities relating to the upgrading of technological and work systems, as a management-led response to growing market pressures. Recognition of the post-socialist enterprise as a site of political contestation and social fragmentation serves to frustrate broader aspirations of policy-makers towards early transitional closure, and limits the potential applicability of linear western conceptions of organizational change to transitional realities. The Serbian case presents an extreme variant of other, post-socialist contexts, institutionally volatile and politically charged. In an increasingly unbounded, indeterministic world, however, it emerges as potentially archetypal, thus enhancing our understanding of organizations and their management in the new global era.

Western management training in Eastern Europe: trends and developments over a decade

This paper tracks changes in design and implementation of Western management training interventions in Eastern Europe (EE) over a period of more than a decade. The study is based empirically on three management development programmes conducted by Westerners in the transitional environments of Bulgaria and Russia from 1992 to 2003. Departing from existing literature on knowledge transfer from Western to EE, activity theory is used to identify a process of reconfiguring the zone of proximal development of East European (also abbreviated EE in the article) participants and conclude that there is a growing desire and assertiveness on the part of local participants to formulate their own strategic and managerial repertoires. At the same time, it is also observed that as a product of Western ideology of the transitional process, there has been empowerment of socio-demographic groupings who demonstrate consonant ideological inclinations towards Western managerial discourse, most notably young, educated and English proficient individuals.

The Embeddedness of Software Development in the Ukraine: An Offshoring Country Perspective

Since 2004 there has been an acceleration in offshoring tasks that engender high-level skills. The aim of this article is to examine the offshoring of software development to the Ukraine from the perspective of sender countries. We report the data gathered from interviews with CEOs or senior managers in Europe and the US that offshore software development to the Ukraine. We use a three-fold conceptual framework to analyse the data, which focuses on; structural embeddedness to identify constraining influences; cognitive-cultural embeddedness to examine how firms leverage tacit knowledge and network embeddedness to understand the role of offshoring in wider corporate strategies. We conclude that while offshoring to the Ukraine has brought higher level employment for individuals, territorially and temporally it is weakly embedded.

Contesting social space in the Balkan region:the social dimensions of a “red” joint venture

This chapter sheds light on the MNC as a contested transnational social space in the Balkan region of south-east Europe by “deconstructing” a recent “red” joint venture from the perspectives of key stakeholders, “red” referring to the location of the MNC in question in countries belonging to the former communist bloc. The organizational focus of our analysis is the Serbian brewery Weisser, the oldest brewery in the Balkans, situated near Belgrade, and recently acquired by the Turkish-owned MNC Eden; the merger having taken place in an unstable and volatile environment, compared to a “tinderbox” ready to ignite (Lee 2006a). Through examining the merger from the grounded positions of key social actors – indigenous employees, union officials, local Serbian and “westernized” managers, exposed to new market-oriented logics emanating from the west, fuelled by globalization – we discern both conflicting and consonant interests and rationalities relating to the establishment and early operations of the cross-border joint venture. Our study is informed by the work of Zgymunt Bauman (2000; 2007; Bauman and Vecchi 2004) on identity and Pierre Bourdieu (1984; 1990a; 1990b) on the notion of “habitus.” Habitus is conceived by Bourdieu as the ingrained, socially constituted dispositions of social classes that lead actors to make choices and decisions that reproduce existing social structures and status distinctions, orienting their actions and inclinations without precisely determining them.

Logics and Limits in Ethical Outsourcing and Offshoring in the Global Financial Services Industry

The offshore outsourcing of financial and other services has generated considerable political heat in Western countries over the past decade. In this paper we subject the realities of offshoring to observation at company level by unpacking the strategies underlying the offshoring decision and related ethical considerations, in respect of a US-based flagship finncial services firm renowned as exemplary in international business process engineering and corporate social responsibility. Through interviews with senior executives in the case organization, and with leading management consultants in the field, we build a picture of the potentially contradictory strategic logics which have characterized the approach to offshore outsourcing in the company over more than a decade.

Multinationals, Social Agency and Institutional Change; Variation by Sector

Multinational corporations (MNCs) operate at a crossroads of countervailing influences. While headquarters are typically embedded in the institutional settings of their home country, subsidiaries tend to internalize regulative and cognitive frames in their own national and regional contexts. MNCs now frequently assume highly diffuse global structures, operating across regionally dispersed horizontal and vertical networks, thereby exposing them to a global mosaic of societal, institutional and socio-economic influences. Moreover, MNCs are subjected to regulative effects emanating from transnational regulation. Recent departures in institutional theory have sought to recognize how local ‘embedding’ in the various geographical sites of operation of MNCs has rendered their structures and cultures pluralistic in nature (Kostova & Roth, 2002; Morgan & Kristensen, 2006). It is increasingly acknowledged by organizational theorists that viewing MNCs through a universalistic or unitary lens fails to adequately capture their inherent social and political complexity and neglects the reality of an internal anatomy that frequently comprises an array of ‘cellular’ and politically contested ‘social spaces’ (Edwards & Belanger, 2009; Geppert & Dorrenbacher, 2014; Hollinshead & Maclean, 2007) involving interplays of major actors in dispersed ‘home’ and ‘host’ contexts. It may be argued that comparative institutionalist theories, which have placed a considerable emphasis on the influence of national institutional arrangements and exogenous structural factors in the moulding of international organization, have run the risk of asserting an over-deterministic linkage between the effects of various institutional features (such as industrial relations, education and training, and corporate governance systems) of various ‘distinct types of capitalism’ (Hall & Soskice, 2001; Whitley, 1999) and the internal ordering of the MNC. In positioning this Special Issue, we aim to ‘lower’ the focal point of critical inquiry to bring to the fore the significance of sector, and sector-specific actors, in the determination of the strategies, structures and behaviours of MNCs. Such a trajectory is designed to provide a more nuanced, disaggregated and ‘inside-out’ view of the realities of MNC organization

Politicization and political contests in and around contemporary multinational corporations: An introduction:

This article looks at core arguments in international business, organization studies and surrounding academic fields that focus on the study of politicization and political contests in and around multinational corporations (MNCs). Two evident streams of debate are identified. Equally evident is that these streams hardly connect. One stream is mainly interested in studying politicization from the outside, whereas the other is mainly interested in politicization from within. As a way of connecting both streams, we introduce the circuits of power framework. Next, we introduce the contributions of our Special Issue, followed by concluding comments which distinguish five emergent themes. First, we show how the application of the circuits of power framework sheds new light on the study of political contests of MNCs. Second, we highlight that the role of nation states has not lost its significance as, for example, political corporate social responsibility (CSR) approaches would have us believe. Third, dominant ideologies play an important role in establishing and controlling circuits of power in and around MNCs. Fourth, it is vital to take labour issues into account in this field of study. Fifth, there is increasing evidence that asymmetric and hierarchical forms of organizing do not disappear in new MNC network forms.

‘Clouds’ in the Desert? Central and Eastern Europe and Ukraine in the New Division of Labour for Business Services and Software Development

In the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) after 1990, foreign direct investment (FDI) was viewed as a key driver of the transition to a market-based economy and integration with the global and European economies. However, an extensive literature has critically addressed the assumption that foreign firms would bring much needed capital and have the propensity to transfer advanced technology and management techniques (Hardy 1998, 2006; Pavlinek and Smith 1998; Drahokoupil 2008; Fifekova, 2008a). Attention has now shifted to the increasing importance of offshoring in the service sector as a key driver of the globalisation process. Much has been written on the implications of relocating business services from the sender country perspective, in particular, focusing on job loss, welfare implications and efficiency gains. However, with the exception of India and Ireland, little consideration has been given to offshore destinations and even less to the impacts of this emerging trend in foreign investment in the new receiver countries of CEE from 2000 onwards.