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Barcode: 01155419	Locations: 2.12.1.1 WHI	Status: borrowed

This book examines the evolving strategies and structure of large European firms in comparative and historical context. Although European corporations still differ in terms of ownership and management, they are adopting increasingly similar organizational structures and diversification strategies. The authors explain recent corporate developments by extending Alfred Chandler's original model of strategy and structure to include conglomerate diversification and the more integrated 'networked multidivisional' structure.

 

This book traces the evolution of the large industrial corporation in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom from the 1950s to the 1990s. It combines long-run trends with illustrative case studies of leading companies and their managers to present a complex picture of corporate change. In particular, it highlights the paradox of increasingly similar patterns of corporate strategy and structure across advanced industrial nations with continuing marked differences in corporate ownership, control, and managerial élites. Despite strong institutional contrasts between the leading European economies, and regardless of the decline of the American model of management, big business in Europe has continued to follow a strategic and structural model pioneered in the United States during the first half of the 20th century and encapsulated long ago in Alfred Chandler's (1962) Strategy and Structure. This finding of similar patterns of corporate strategy and structure across Europe challenges recent relativist perspectives on organisations found in postmodern, culturalist, and institutionalist social science. Nevertheless, it does not endorse standard universalist accounts of convergence either. The book distinguishes between Chandlerism, with its original ideology of universalism, and the broader Chandlerian perspective, an enduring but evolving core of good sense about the corporation in certain kinds of advanced economies. Thus, the book shows how the surprising success of conglomerate diversification and the increasing adoption of a more ‘networked’ multidivisional structure simply extends the core principles of the Chandlerian perspective.

 

Machine generated contents note: I Change, Context, and the Corporation -- 1.1 Changing strategies and structures -- 1.2 The corporation in context -- 1.3 Researching strategy and structure in Europe -- 1.4 Programme and proposal -- 2 Chandler and Context -- 2.1 Contextualizing Chandlerism -- 2.2 Postmodernism and context -- 2.3 Between Chandlerism and contextualism -- 2.4 Summary -- 3 Scale, Scope, and Structure -- 3.1 Scale -- 3.2 Scope -- 3.3 Explaining scope -- 3.4 Divisionalization and beyond -- 3.5 Summary -- 4 Corporate Careers and Control -- 4.1 Financial systems and corporate ownership -- 4.2 Managerial control -- 4.3 Management development -- 4.4 Summary -- 5 Changing Strategies -- 5.1 Measuring strategy -- 5.2 Strategy trends and transitions -- 5.3 Cross-national comparisons -- 5.4 Strategy and performance -- 5.5 Summary -- 6 Changing Structures -- 6.1 Measuring structure -- 6.2 National context and organizational structure -- 6.3 The network multidivisional -- 6.4 Structure and performance : -- 6.5 Summary -- 7 Strategy, Structure, and Politics -- 7.1 The politics of strategy and structure -- 7.2 Ownership and strategy -- 7.3 Ownership and structure -- 7.4 Summary -- 8 Concluding for the Corporation -- 8.1 The Chandlerian model renewed -- 8.2 Strategy, structure, and nations -- 8.3 The science of the corporation -- Appendix I: Strategic and Structural Classification of French, -- German, and United Kingdom Firms -- Appendix II: Methodology -- References -- Index