Abstract
This case presents the story of the sale of Norton Company, a 100-year-old, non-union manufacturing company in Worcester, MA, to the French conglomerate, Saint-Gobain in 1990. It begins by talking about the history of the company and how its paternalistic human resource policies infused in the workforce a powerful sense of loyalty and community-focus. It then considers how, in the early days of globalization and corporate takeovers, Norton's senior management was able to play on worker loyalty to the company and fear of job loss to rise up publicly and block a hostile takeover of Norton by a British conglomerate, BTR, only to be sold to a French conglomerate in a deal that was more lucrative for senior management. The case is useful for considering the role of paternalism, mystification, and the manipulation of resistance to serve management interests during the transition to a global economy in the early 1990s.
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