Administrative Heritage Research Articles

Transfer of managerial practices by French food retailers to operations in Poland

Executive Overview We studied French food retailing chains operations in Poland over a period of ten years to assess their ability to transfer their managerial practices and work routines to Polish store management and floor personnel. We discovered that the retailers experienced great difficulty in reproducing their model in Poland because knowledge transfer was impeded by the differences between the management model of the French retailers and the behavior model of their Polish recruits. Both models were embedded in quite dissimilar home country administrative heritages. The resulting blockage threatened the growth potential of French hypermarkets, which relied on the rapid training of large numbers of store management and staff. We show that the French retail managers went through three phases in attempting to transfer their practices. In the first phase, they endeavored to impose the home office practices without adapting to the different attitudes of the first Polish employees. In the second phase, they overcame the period of confrontation of the two models by adapting their practices and creating a shared common space for learning with their employees. By diverging from the home office methods, they succeeded in training their Polish employees to run the first hypermarkets. In the third phase, currently under way, the retailing home offices are re-imposing standardization of methods, to ensure globalization of their business model. We conclude that, despite the temporary divergence led by local managers in adapting to local conditions, multinationals will eventually re-centralize and impose home-office approved practices because the knowledge encompassed is considered fundamental to the firm's business model.

Influences on HRM practices in MNCs: a qualitative study in the Australian context

This paper uses data from interviews with HRM managers of the Australian operations of overseas multinational companies to critically question the analytical utility of a number of standard factors that have traditionally been claimed, in the international HRM literature, to influence decisions concerning the appropriate balance between centralization and localization in HRM. The variables reviewed are primarily structural: industry sector, strategic role of the subsidiary, administrative heritage and formal organizational structure. The data suggest that the firms modify their formal structures frequently in response to environmental turbulence and have evolved towards structural forms that are radically asymmetrical. Two variables that have received limited academic attention to date but which critically mediate the pattern of intended changes are identified. First, the perception by key actors in subsidiaries of HR competence elsewhere in the MNC network, particularly head office. Second, the propensity of the staff in the subsidiary to lobby politically against changes they did not perceive to be rational.

The politics of HRM: waiting for Godot in the Moroccan civil service

This study illustrates the fundamental importance of a political understanding in order to improve HRM in both public and private organizations. It complements studies that have found a statistical relationship between public staff management and economic growth by presenting a case study of Morocco, using the strategic human resource management (SHRM) model as a framework. The view to which we are alluding is perhaps too well known to require rehearsing here. Readers not familiar with its origins or the policies to which it led can consult Williamson (1993). There are several reasons why HRM in the Moroccan civil service has stagnated, notably unfamiliarity with HRM models and the French administrative heritage. But the fundamental reason is Morocco's political system, where real power resides in the Palace, and where political actors are reluctant to take bold initiatives. Thus a focus on the management level is currently misplaced, and fundamental political action harnessing the authority of the Palace without disempowering other political actors is needed. The study implies that a political analysis is sometimes a prerequisite for improving HRM in both public and private organizations.

Strategic Innovation and the Administrative Heritage of East Asian Family Business Groups

Using the case of Chinese Family Business Groups (FBGs) in East Asia, this paper examines the relationship between the strategic behaviour exhibited by an organisational form and it's administrative heritage. To do so, we trace the origins of the strategic behaviour that scholars commonly attribute to FBGs to the environmental conditions prevailing during their emergence in the turbulent post-Colonial era of East Asia. We explain how fundamental changes brought about by shifts in the post-Cold war environment of East Asia have confronted FBGs with new opportunities and organising imperatives which their administrative heritages have left them ill-equipped to deal with. In concluding, we explain how the lack of fit between a dominant organisational form and contemporaneous environmental conditions may have significant implications for the organisations themselves and the economies whose landscapes they dominate.

Managing Internal R&D Networks in Global Firms: What Sort of Knowledge is Involved?

How should a global firm manage its network of R&D centres in an effective manner? Some have developed an Integrated Network model in which the R&D centres around the world are tightly integrated into a coherent whole. Others have adopted a Loosely-Coupled Network model in which individual “centres of excellence” are given considerable autonomy. In this paper we argue that the way individual R&D units are structured, and the way the entire network is managed, should be based not on administrative heritage, environmental turbulence or management style, but on the basis of the underlying characteristics of the firm’s knowledge assets. In particular we focus on the observability and mobility of the firm’s knowledge assets, the impact these factors have on the way individual R&D centres are structured, and how they relate to one another in the international network. The argument is supported using examples and data from Swedish firms including ABB, Alfa Laval and Ericsson.

Administrative Reform in Post-Mao China: Efficiency or Ethics (review)

Reviewed by: Administrative Reform in Post-Mao China: Efficiency or Ethics Thomas Scharping (bio) Stephen K. Ma. Administrative Reform in Post-Mao China: Efficiency or Ethics. Lanham, New York, and London: University Press of America, 1996. vii, 218 pp. Hardcover $36.00, ISBN 0-7618-0499-4. While more profound changes in the governmental system of China have been shelved for the time being, the imperatives of economic reform have kept an overhauling of the country's administrative apparatus high on the political agenda. Of course, the borderline between political and administrative reform is a thin one, as all debates on increasing bureaucratic effectiveness soon touch on the sensitive question of the Party's role. The present study by Stephen Ma, therefore, should command the attention of both specialists in organizational studies and those who are interested in the broader topic of political change in China. After having read the study under review here, however, these two groups of readers will be equally disappointed. Neither does the text offer significantly new empirical evidence on its subject nor does it present a well-reasoned argument with fresh perspectives. Because of its lack of clear structure, it cannot even be recommended for introductory reading. The sources used are limited to major Party newspapers and some journals from China, Hong Kong magazines, and a specialized periodical on the topic. The methodology employed is content analysis veering between anecdotal storytelling and the computation of data for article categories, subject matter, and authorship. The conclusions are inconclusive, and the line of reasoning is blurred. The book opens with an introductory chapter on modernization and administrative reform. It presents the guiding questions behind the study: Are the existing administrative structures and processes in China adequate for the implementation of rapid modernization? Can they adapt to the rapid changes in environmental policy making? Have administrative reforms undermined the Party's ability to control, or even reduced the scope of, state power? It is the author's contention that the difficulties encountered in Chinese policy implementation are more related to the unethical behavior of government bureaucrats than to an unbalanced institutional or political development. A couple of pages later, though, he contradicts this assertion by remarking that post-Mao China has produced a bureaucracy with some autonomy and too little supervision. The text abounds with such incongruous statements. Usually, the contradictions are glossed over by profuse references to Max Weber, Samuel Huntington, Anthony Downs, and the like; but we sorely miss some clarifying thought by the author himself. Two further chapters provide historical background to the main subject of the study. They discuss the administrative heritage of China and the role of intellectuals vis-à-vis the government. The main thrust is a claim for the existence of [End Page 141] honest government prior to the reform period, followed by a discussion of the strained relations between intellectuals and power holders. Again, the arguments often contradict each other. And the situation is not improved by the author's practice of making broad statements that lump together imperial China, revolutionary history, and decades of PRC experience. It seems that bureaucratic problems prompting the Hundred Flowers campaign, the sharp inner-Party tensions over different administrative approaches, and the violent conflicts triggered by them during the Cultural Revolution do not exist for the author. Although the pre-reform campaigns are later mentioned in passing and the existence of earlier administrative problems is acknowledged, the book does not succeed in placing into political context the diverse Chinese voices cited. While the opening chapters do not contain significant new points, the parts that follow make some contribution by analyzing the coverage of administrative problems in Chinese periodicals of the reform period. The main attention is focused on the journal Chinese Public Administration, the house organ of the Chinese Association of Public Administration. The author's findings include the following observations: theoretical articles and news on practical developments rather than concrete reform proposals have dominated the writing in the journal; practitioners from the ranks of the bureaucracy rather than intellectuals from outside have been the most active contributors; and questions of personnel management rather than structural issues have been the prevalent topics. Such observations are...

Les recompositions du Norte Grande chilien pendant la transition démocratique : enjeux d'une gestion territoriale en contexte néolibéral

The reorganisation of the Chilean Norte Grande during the democratic transition : the stakes involved in territorial management in a neoliberal context. In the elongated and politically centralised country of Chile, the debate on the virtues of planning has been going on for some fifty years. Paradoxically, it was under the dictatorship (1973-1990) that profound changes in the administrative organisation were made, including the creation of a new reference scale for planning, the Region. Planning at this scale should allow a closer control of the territory as well as diffusion, at the local scale, of the neoliberal economic principles promoted by the military government. In the Norte Grande, internationalisation of the economy took the form of an increase in foreign investment in the mining sector. In the 1990s, it lead to the opening up of new private mines which were much bigger than earlier mines. Since 1990, the democratic transition governments have tried to manage this economic and administrative heritage with a view to promoting both the regional spinoffs of growth and a type of development involving greater local participation. However, the context in which the Regions were created makes their adaptation to a democracy quite difficult : the identification of the actors likely to take part in the democratic process and of the scale at which their claims are expressed are illustrative of the stakes involved in territorial politics in a neoliberal environment.

Restructuring European supply chains by implementing postponement strategies

More demanding customer needs in terms of quality, variety, delivery (both fast and reliable), and competitive pricing challenge an increasing number of companies to restructure their supply chains. An appealing option is to delay, or postpone, the point of product differentiation, that is deferring the process in which products are transformed according to unique customer specifications. Advances in technology and the gradual removal of barriers to trade in Europe increasingly enable companies to apply postponement principles in their supply chain strategies. In this article, we provide an in-depth analysis of the experiences of four companies in managing the change process associated with implementing such strategies. Operating and organizational characteristics are identified to assess the attractiveness of postponement in their specific business settings. It was found that in particular, an organization’s administrative heritage and the lack of an overall supply chain vision can be major bottlenecks in managing the change process. For a successful implementation of postponement, a company’s management should establish the appropriate mix of standardization and customization in the supply chain. Differences in the internal organization and the external demands for product specificity require different postponement strategies.

Recasting the visible hand? Strategy, structure and process in UK manufacturing, c.1970–97

Contemporary changes in corporate strategies and structures have been determined by market forces and the administrative heritage of specific firms. In particular, the partial ‘Americanisation’ of British corporate structure in the 1970s was crucial in shaping the shift to financial control regimes in British big business. The principal effect has been to expose both front line managers and the shopfloor to more continuous and intensive corporate surveillance.

Managing Mergers Across Borders: A Two-Nation Exploration of a Nationally Bound Administrative Heritage

Top managers of British and French firms, which were recently acquired by either British or French firms, were surveyed as to their perceptions of the administrative approach—reflected in integrating mechanisms—used by the acquiring firms to establish headquarters-subsidiary control. Four types of integrative mechanisms were examined: structural, systems, social, and managerial. A multiple analysis of covariance model, coupled with a two-nation (British and French), two-merger type (domestic, cross-national) sampling design, found evidence that the administrative approaches used by managers during merger integration from two nations partially reflect their different heritages, and that these differences are consistent with national differences and the theoretical perspectives of institutional development and cross-cultural studies. Our findings, while exploratory, provide insight into the administrative difficulties of managing across borders and help us understand why many cross-national firms continue to use ethnocentric approaches in spite of the incentives for adopting a transnational approach. Moreover, our findings add one more voice to a growing chorus calling for a theory of the firm, as embedded, institutionally, culturally, and historically.

Modelling the Origins of Nationally-Bound Administrative Heritages: A Historical Institutional Analysis of French and British Firms

Various determinants have been proposed to explain the persistence of nationally-bound administrative heritages. In this paper, we propose an overall model that integrates these contingent determinants. Our model is based on historical analysis, a method of theory building that first conceptualizes a model and then utilizes it as an exploratory lens for viewing historical evidence. The originality of our model comes from the theory-based bias that we introduce into the model as a way to avoid the trap of multi-causalism. Specifically, we select a nation's educational system as our model's leading determinant, for educational institutions and particularly schools more than other institutions both shape a nation's beliefs about “how things ought to be done,” and transmit those beliefs and practices to successive generations. We draw the theoretical grounding for this bias using a theory of socialization which posits that the schemas that individuals internalize during their early formative stages of development greatly influence the way that they will later construct reality. We found our model to be useful in clarifying the underlying historical reasons why British and French firms rely on different integrative mechanisms when establishing headquarters-subsidiary linkages. Indeed, by analyzing the history of these two nations and the routines and rationalities imposed by their respective set of institutions in the context of our model, we find an overall mosaic, or gestalt, that is fully consistent with their present-day administrative practices. For example, we find that French managers today tend to heavily rely on centralized controls and headquarters intervention because of the influences of a number of key historical elements. These include the way their ancestors dealt with threats of invasion and ethnic diversity; the leadership styles of past French monarchies and elected officials; the manner in which the French colonies were controlled and the French school system organized; and the way the French government responded to economic problems that came from being a late participant in the two industrial revolutions. These also include the philosophies of the revered seventeenth-century French thinkers; the family structures that have existed in France since the middle ages; and the enduring influence of the Catholic ethos. Similarly, we use our model to present a different, yet equally compelling, mosaic image to explain why British managers have tended to rely on an administrative heritage, based on decentralization, “laissezfaire” and autonomy. Finally, and perhaps most important, we show that the explanation we arrived at using this inductive method of theory building is fully consistent with the empirical conclusions we derived using contemporary methods of organization science. In so doing, we demonstrate that these two approaches, when combined, can inform and enrich theory building and thereby lead to a more thorough understanding of organizational phenomena such as administrative heritage.

Overcoming the Liability of Foreignness

This study addressed the question of whether firms in a competitive, globally integrated environment face a “liability of foreignness” and to what extent either importing home-country organizational capabilities or copying the practices of successful local firms can help them overcome this liability. Predictions were tested with a paired sample of 24 foreign exchange trading rooms of major Western and Japanese banks in New York and Tokyo. Results support the existence of a liability of foreignness and the role of a firm's administrative heritage in providing competitive advantage to its multinational subunits. They also highlight the difficulty firms face in copying organizational practices from other firms.

Control Mechanisms in Cross-border Acquisitions: An International Comparison

This paper analyzes the influence of national culture on the integration mechan isms exercised in international acquisitions. The study of 75 international acquisi tions in Europe (France and the United Kingdom) shows that firms are influenced by their national administrative heritage when they acquire companies abroad. For instance, the French exercise higher formal control of the strategy and the operations, and lower informal control through teamwork than the Americans when they buy firms in the United Kingdom. The Americans exercise higher formal control through procedures than the British when they buy firms in France. As some of these aspects of control were found to be linked with the attitudinal and/or economic performance of the acquired company, we argue that being conscious of the influence of a national administrative heritage should help anticipate cultural problems in the integration process following international acquisitions.

Christopher Bartlett on transnationals: An interview

Since its publication in 1989 and following many reprintings in eight language editions, Christopher Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal's book, Managing Across Borders: the Transnational Solution, has made a big impact on managers' thinking on global strategy. The model and concept of the transnational organisation is now in common parlance in the corporate world. The research was widespread — 236 managers interviewed in a diverse group of companies in three distinctly different industries in Europe, the US and Japan. The results were startling and give me to clear prescriptions on how to develop companies' organisational capabilities to implement new competitive global strategies. These are quite different from the multinational, global, and traditional international companies' capabilities. They belong to a new and formidably successful genre of corporate organisation — the transnational. Although the transnational model implies a new strategic posture and a new organisational configuration, at its core is a new management mentality. This mentality is vital to achieving the multi-dimensionality and flexibility required to develop the three characteristics of successful transnational organisations — sensitivity and responsiveness to national market differences around the world, global scale efficiency, and a worldwide innovation and learning capability. In an interview at Harvard Business School with EMJ's Editor, Paul Stonham, Christopher Bartlett explains the growth of the transnational and its powerful potential for competitive supremacy in global strategy. There are many lessons for European companies — for instance, they should build on their strong administrative heritages and cultural diversity rather than denying, or undermining it in overseas operations; and they should invest aggressively in the training of their managers to be creative, entrepreneurial and visionary, rather than good command and control executives.

Bounded Rationality and Organizational Learning

Abstract : If organization theory finds it useful to draw upon some of the ideas that have emerged in cognitive psychology, it will be advantageous to borrow also the terminology used in discussing these ideas. Without working toward a higher level of consistency in terminology than prevails in organization theory today, it will be difficult or impossible to cumulate and assemble into a coherent structure the knowledge we are gaining from individual case studies and experiments. We will be continually reinventing wheels. That is a luxury we cannot afford. The happy band of researchers on organization theory is sufficiently small to be kept fully occupied discovering and verifying the theory just once. (Author) (kr)

A resource-based analysis of global competition: The case of the bearings industry

This paper critically examines the contribution of aspects of the resource-based view of the firm to global competition in particular, and to strategic management in general. Three concepts—core competence, organizational capability, and administrative heritage—are defined and compared with the current mainstream economic tradition of strategy. The value of these concepts in analyzing and explaining competitive strategy is determined through a detailed field-based case study of three firms in the worldwide bearings industry. It is found that the resource-based view of the firm complements economic analysis, and that both are essential to a complete understanding of global strategy.

The Context of Television Broadcasting in Cameroon

The Republic of Cameroon, a West African nation of about 10 million ethnically, linguistically, and geographically diverse people who occupy about 465,000 square kilometers of land, had some very good reasons for delaying the development of a television system until 1985 even though some of her African neighbors had been operating such a system for about 25 years. The Cameroon population is made up of about 200 ethnic groups who speak about 24 different languages or dialects. The population is unevenly distributed with population densities that range from 74 inhabitants per square kilometer in the West Province to 3 inhabitants per square kilometer in the East Province. The country's seven major ethnic groups correspond approximately to the country's seven administrative regions. The only African country to have been colonized by three different imperial powers (Germany, Great Britain, and France), Cameroon is also the only African country with English and French as official languages of education, government, and commerce, thus reflecting the two dominant administrative and cultural colonial heritages. Geographically, Cameroon is divided into five geoclimatic regions: the southern marshes and mangrove forests, the savannah, the steppe, and the western mountainous areas that border Nigeria. Although Cameroon shares two dominant characteristics of contemporary African political systems, some have argued that

Editor's introduction: Administrative heritage, morality and challenges in the sub‐continent since the British Raj

Editor's introduction: Administrative heritage, morality and challenges in the sub‐continent since the British Raj

In the Shadow of Wilson and Brownlow: Executive Branch Reorganization in the States, 1965 to 1987

Between 1965 and 1987, the organization of the executive branch was overhauled in 22 states. One objective of this article is to expand the existing database and scholarship on this fourth wave' of state reorganization initiatives. Consequently, the origins, goals, processes, and results of these 22 comprehensive' reorganization initiatives are described and analyzed. second objective is to examine the intellectual foundation upon which these state reform efforts were built. As the rhetoric of these initiatives clearly shows,3 the principal administrative values, the structural and procedural objectives, and the positions taken on the proper (constitutional) roles of the legislature and chief executive can be traced to the works of Woodrow Wilson and the President's Committee on Administrative Management (the Brownlow Committee). 4 Since 1987 was the bicentennial of the U. S. Constitution (1787), the centennial year of Wilson's The Study of Administration (1887),[5] and the golden anniversary of the Brownlow Committee's Report on the President's Committee (1937),[61 this is a particularly appropriate time to reflect on the American political and administrative heritage through the looking glass provided by these state reform initiatives. This article is divided into four parts. First, the basic elements of the intellectual heritage provided by Wilson and Brownlow are outlined. Second, the application of that heritage in the states is examined. Specifically, data on the rhetoric (origin and goals) of the reform efforts, the process used to pursue the goals, and the results achieved in each state are presented. Third, the data on the 22 state reorganization initiatives are analyzed. Attention is focused on whether gubernatorial control over administration was expanded and whether improved effectiveness, efficiency, and economy (savings) were achieved through reorganization. Finally, the analysis of the 22 state reorganization initiatives is used to develop some reflections about the intellectual heritage which Wilson and Brownlow provided for American public administration.

The Administrative Heritage of India

The Administrative Heritage of India