Global Change Management Approaches in MNCs and Distinct National Trajectories: Britain and Germany Compared

The discourse on globalization has been a field of research in international business for quite some time. Within the large body of literature there seems to be a rather strong, if not dominating, school of thought, which argues that globalization will ultimately result in the worldwide convergence of organizational patterns. There is talk of the ‘stateless’ enterprise (Parker, 1998) and the ‘transnational’ organization (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1989), to name just two examples. The general argument is that the proliferation of worldwide, homogeneous economic and technological rationales is leading to a more or less worldwide standardization of organizational structures and processes. This view coincides with, and has been strongly encouraged by, a considerable bias on evolutionary concepts, which have clearly dominated theory building in the field of the multinational business organization over the last two decades. The most prominent example of this is the ‘transnational solution’ proposed by Bartlett and Ghoshal (1989: 66–71).