Peer Hull Kristensen

The contested space of multinationals: Varieties of institutionalism, varieties of capitalism

The article argues that institutionalist theory applied to multinationals focuses on the issue of ‘institutional duality’, that is, that within multinationals, actors are pressured to conform to the expectations of their home context whilst also being subjected to the transfer of practices from the home context of the MNC itself. This institutional duality leads to conflicts that can be labelled as forms of ‘micro-politics’. The head office managers transfer practices, people and resources to subsidiaries in order to maintain control and achieve their objectives. Local subsidiaries have differential capacities to resist these transfers or to develop them in their own interests depending on their institutional context. The article distinguishes institutional contexts that produce ‘Boy Scout’ subsidiaries, doing what they are told and consequently allowing locally distinctive capabilities to be undermined and those that produce ‘subversive strategists’ which look to deepen their connection with the local context not the MNC itself. These processes are exacerbated by the demands of capital markets which impose performance requirements on MNCs and lead to continuous organizational restructuring. Head offices become stronger in their attempts to impose standards in all their subsidiaries. The consequences of these processes are that except for a few pockets of ‘subversive strategists’, multinationals produce subsidiary ‘clones’ with little ability to leverage the specific assets which the institutional context provides. As it is the subversive strategists that are best placed to be innovative, the problem for the MNC is how to manage this tension.

The multinational firm : organizing across institutional and national divides

1. The Multinational Firm: Organizing across institutional and national divides 2. HOW AND WHY ARE INTERNATIONAL FIRMS DIFFERENT? THE CONSEQUENCES OF CROSS-BORDER MANAGERIAL COORDINATION FOR FIRM CHARACTERISTICS AND BEHAVIOUR 3. The Emergence of German Transnational Companies: A theoretical analysis and empirical study of the globalization process 4. Constructing Global Corporations: Contrasting national legacies in the Nordic Forest 5. BETWEEN NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL GOVERNANCE: SECTOR COORDINATION AND GEOPOLITICS IN ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING 6. The Impact of the Internationalizing of Capital Markets on Local Companies: How international institutional investors are restructuring Finnish companies 7. The Making of a Global Firm: Local pathways to multinational enterprise 8. Globalization and Change: Organizational continuity and change within a Japanese multinational in the UK 9. THE DEVELOPMENT OF TRANSNATIONAL STANDARDS AND REGULATIONS AND THEIR IMPACTS ON FIRMS 10. Globalization and its Limits: The making of international regulation 11. National Trajectories, International Competition, and Transnational Governance in Europe

From Institutional Change to Experimentalist Institutions

Institutionalist theory has shown how work and employment relations are shaped by national contexts. Recent developments in these theories have been increasingly concerned with the issue of institutional change. This reflects a shift in the nature of the competitive environment of firms from the stable and planned and predominantly national models of economic organization supported by the Keynesian state, which dominated in the 30 years after 1945, to the uncertain and high‐risk environment of the current period in which globalization has opened up the possibility of new forms of firms and institutions. In this paper, we emphasize that in the current context of globalization, firms and actors within firms are continuously developing the way in which they organize work and employment to produce goods and services that are competitive in global markets. The paper argues that new market conditions lead firms to constant experimentation in work organization as they seek to position themselves within systems of production and innovation that are global in nature. This creates a pressure for institutional change to facilitate the process of firm‐level experimentation; it also tends to create a pressure for new experimental forms of institutions that are themselves searching for ways to improve their relevance. This change calls for extending the study of industrial relations and employment systems in the current era to investigate how new dynamic complementarities among employees, managers, institutions, and markets are created (or not) and what the effects of these processes are on: employment growth, income inequalities, inequalities between groups, rights at work, and the distribution of skills and autonomy in the workplace. The paper therefore proposes a framework and conceptual language for identifying forms of institutional change in the current period. These developments are illustrated through an analysis of the way in which actors in the Danish context have responded to the challenges of the last few decades. It is the capacity of actors within firms to use and develop institutions in ways that enable them to restructure work and employment and gain a more effective position in the market that is crucial to institutional change. However, these micro‐level processes may be unseen and unappreciated by actors at the macro level such as political parties, employers’ associations, and unions, who are generally perceived as being most influential in processes of redesigning institutions and complementarities at societal levels. This creates a tension between micro and macro changes that we examine in the Danish case, arguing that it is possible to reconcile this dilemma under certain circumstances. The final section suggests that while Denmark is distinctive in terms of how these processes of experimentalism relate to firms and institutions, similar issues can be seen at work in other national contexts where the results are very different. This suggests the need for a comparative study of institutions, work, and employment that places change and the dynamics of firms and markets at the center of the analysis and searches for how systemic change can itself be institutionalized. The current paper offers a framework for such analytical work.

Strategies in a volatile world

Globalization and localization are usually considered to be two very opposite theoretical frames for studying todays political economy. Rather than accepting this theoretical dualism, this article argues that the combination of the two worlds is dependent on strategies. By analysing the action of a business unit of a multinational corporation, it is shown how it is possible for local actors to combine their strategies into a coherent whole by which a locality takes advantage of its channels to the corporate markets of the multinational corporation. This case-study then questions our usual theortical observations concerning internationalization and sketches out an alternative way of thinking, combining globalization and localization.

New Roles for the Trade Unions

This article builds on lessons from Denmark and the Nordic area to offer a novel and comprehensive logic of action within the emerging political economy that may be used to assess the possible new roles that unions can take on. The authors argue that unions are capable of “civilizing” globalization and current forms of governance by becoming responsible for pushing for a governance regime in a new and more egalitarian direction.

Toward a New Sociology of Business Firms

This article is based on the conviction that social science needs theories that can account for the systematic reproduction of organizational differences among national business systems and simultaneously explain why capitalism is not a unitary phenomenon but rather gives rise to highly varying economic evolutionary paths.

Transformative dynamics of innovation and industry: new roles for employees?

Organizing for innovation is becoming increasingly important for boosting national competitiveness and job creation, but is also becoming much more complex to do properly. The dynamics of innovation are undergoing profound changes, becoming globally distributed and involving more employee groups in corporations. This evolution is a radical change from the previous pattern of innovation, which we call the Chandlerian Innovation System. This article starts by briefly characterizing the post-war Chandlerian Innovation System, and then discusses the reasons why it is breaking up by exposing some of its pitfalls and contradictions. The article then proceeds to discuss how novel arrangements are emerging to create a global Networked Innovation System. Finally, the article suggests how employees, trade unions and political reformers may act to involve all groups of employees in new forms of work organization so they can take on a role as ‘drivers’ of innovation. L’organisation de l’innovation est de plus en plus importante pour stimuler la compétitivité nationale et la création d’emplois, mais elle devient aussi beaucoup plus complexe à réaliser de manière judicieuse. La dynamique de l’innovation est en pleine mutation, s’étend partout dans le monde et implique de plus en plus de groupes de travailleurs dans les entreprises. Cette évolution constitue un changement radical par rapport au modèle précédent d’innovation appelé modèle d’innovation chandlerien. L’article présente tout d’abord un bref aperçu du système d’innovation chandlerien de l’après-guerre et analyse ensuite les raisons pour lesquelles il a été démantelé en exposant certaines de ses embûches et de ses contradictions. L’article poursuit en examinant l’émergence de nouvelles dispositions dont le but est de créer un système d’innovation mondial en réseau. En dernier lieu, l’article suggère comment les travailleurs, les syndicats et les réformateurs de la scène politique peuvent agir pour impliquer tous les groupes de travailleurs dans les nouvelles formes d’organisation du travail afin qu’ils puissent assumer un rôle de «moteurs» de l’innovation. Eine innovationsfördernde Organisation ist im Hinblick auf die Verbesserung der Wettbewerbsfähigkeit der einzelnen Länder und die Schaffung von Arbeitsplätzen immer wichtiger, aber gestaltet sich in der Praxis auch zunehmend komplex. Die Innovationsdynamik ist in einem tiefgreifenden Wandel begriffen und führt zu einer globalen Verteilung und zu einer breiteren Einbeziehung der Beschäftigten in den Unternehmen. Diese Entwicklung stellt eine radikale Veränderung der bisherigen Innovationsmuster dar, die dem Innovationsmodell von Chandler entsprechen. Dieser Beitrag beschreibt zunächst das chandlersche Innovationsmodell in der Nachkriegszeit und erörtert anschließend die Fallstricke und Widersprüche dieses Modells, die seinen Niedergang erklären. Anschließend wird dargelegt, wie neuartige Strukturen entstehen, die zur Schaffung eines globalen vernetzten Innovationssystems beitragen. Zum Schluss wird vorgeschlagen, was Arbeitnehmer, Gewerkschaften und politische Reformer unternehmen könnten, um alle Arbeitnehmergruppen in neue Formen der Arbeitsorganisation einzubeziehen, damit sie als Antriebskräfte an Innovationen mitwirken können.Organizing for innovation is becoming increasingly important for boosting national competitiveness and job creation, but is also becoming much more complex to do properly. The dynamics of innovation are undergoing profound changes, becoming globally distributed and involving more employee groups in corporations. This evolution is a radical change from the previous pattern of innovation, which we call the Chandlerian Innovation System. This article starts by briefly characterizing the post-war Chandlerian Innovation System, and then discusses the reasons why it is breaking up by exposing some of its pitfalls and contradictions. The article then proceeds to discuss how novel arrangements are emerging to create a global Networked Innovation System. Finally, the article suggests how employees, trade unions and political reformers may act to involve all groups of employees in new forms of work organization so they can take on a role as ‘drivers’ of innovation.

Taking Teams Seriously in the Co-creation of Firms and Economic Agency

In this paper it is suggested that it is time to take the agency of teams seriously. Whereas the debate has previously focused on how firms may function more effectively by using team-based work organization, our aim here is to discuss and understand how teams affect the evolutionary dynamic of companies. Fieldwork in four Danish manufacturing companies helped us discover that firms as ‘communities of teams’ are highly dynamic entities with complex layers of different team forms that operate, innovate and improve by constantly recombining, collaborating across organizational divisions and redistributing authority, thereby challenging some of the existing ‘idioms’ of team research and theories of the firm. Building on these findings, we rethink research on teams by re-describing the evolutionary dynamics of firms and call for new comparative research.

Moving Organizations towards Employee-Driven Innovation (EDI) in Work Practices and on a Global Scale: Possibilities and Challenges

Today, multinational corporations (MNCs) increasingly innovate by tying into global networks of customers, suppliers, public RD Hedlund, 1986; Sabel et al., 2009), experimenting with new ways of combining and leveraging distinctive knowledge and practices from around the world. Innovating in global networks, MNCs can no longer depend on cues from a centralized RD Doz et al., 2003). To improve their innovative performance, instead, they are required to combine knowledge and learn from multiple sources (embedded in diverse organizational and institutional contexts) as well as to decentralize responsibilities and innovative search practices to various levels and sites that can respond quickly to new situations. This becomes so much more important as the firm constantly has to define for itself a new role in relation to other firms, with constant changes in the composition of global value chains, role changes that make it necessary to reform the organization, focus on new processes and bring new products to the market (Herrigel, 2010). Consequently, not only RD Hecksher and Adler, 2006; Sabel, 2007; Stark and Girard, 2002; Wenger, 1998).

Multinationals of Industrial Co-development: Co-creating New Institutions of Economic Development

Over the last decades original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in highly developed countries have been off-shoring production to low-wage countries to achieve cost-advantages to the effect that dominating global value chains (DGVC) have emerged. As this leads to huge layoffs of employees in Western economies, many interest groups have joined forces and engaged in taking new forms of action, generating social and organisational innovations. At first the concentration of headquarters of large multinationals (LMNCs) in the First World seemed to promise that they could evolve towards knowledge societies. This expectation followed from the belief that only large corporations of developed countries were able to finance R&D labs large enough to turn out new products, if supported sufficiently by basic research institutions (Kristensen 2010). However, the increasing attempts to upgrade industry in emerging economies have gradually undermined this vision of future co-development. Many low cost countries imitate the highly developed by investing in R&D and higher education so that they might be allocated advanced tasks and innovative projects within existing DGVCs. This evolution is diffusing fast to BRIC-countries. Furthermore, Western small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that used to supply repetitive components for the large OEMs have become much more innovative. Innovation in some developed countries has shifted from domination by LMNCs to