Managing international organisations: Lessons from the field

Abstract

Abstract This study sets out to understand how ten companies, each of them operating internationally, organise and control their core activities in different countries, business units and market segments. In the process it seeks to address orthodox views on international strategy and structure derived from the work of Stopford and Wells and Egelhoff, as well as the more recent transnational model developed by Bartlett and Ghoshal. As far as the latter is concerned, the trend towards dispersal of authority outside a company's domestic market seems to be proceeding only very slowly. On the decentralisation issue, the companies exhibit no clear trend and even when disaggregated into functions there is no common model to which they seem to approximate. Ian Turner and Ian Henry conclude that, whilst a number of the companies in the sample aspire to transnational status, it is not clear that all will succeed or that this ambition is necessarily a good thing for all companies in all situations. Moreover, even companies that aspire to be transnationals will have to modify their approach and adopt different organisational solutions where appropriate.