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The European Corporation
Strategy, Structure, and Social Science
Richard Whittington and Michael Mayer
286 pages
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numerous tables and figures
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234x156mm
978-0-19-925104-9
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Paperback
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09 May 2002
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This item is printed to order. Items which are printed to order are normally despatched and charged within 5-10 days.
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- Original research combining long-run trends with mini case studies on the evolution of large European firms
- Includes analysis of the work of Alfred Chandler and his followers
- Presents detailed research from the UK, Germany, and France
- Snap-shot profiles of major companies such as Daimler Benz, Volkswagen, BAT, Rhone Poulenc, Unilever, Elf Aquitane, etc.
- Managerially-relevant advice on effective patterns of diversification and new forms of organization
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 rich and complex picture of corporate change. In particular, the authors highlight 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 twentieth 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 organizations 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 authors show how the surprising success of conglomerate diversification and the increasing adoption of more 'networked' multidivisional structure simply extend the core principles of the Chandlerian perspective. They argue that the extent to which Chandlerian principles have held good across the advanced economies of Western Europe through the whole post-war period makes them a model for the kind of adaptive and bounded social scientific prescription appropriate to a changing and varied world.
The book contributes to contemporary academic debates on relativism and universalism by proposing a middle-way based on a boundedly-generalizing social science. For policy-makers, it suggests the
possibility of steady economic convergence independent of radical and external pressure and sensitive to other aspects of national social structures. For business decision-makers, it offers a more positive model of diversification, especially conglomerate diversification, as well as a new networked organization appropriate to the demands of today's knowledge economy.Readership: Management academics and advanced students concerned with international business, strategy, organization studies and theory, and business and economic history; Managers and consultants concerned with corporate strategy and organization.
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Richard Whittington, University Reader in Strategy, Saïd Business School; Fellow, New College, Oxford, and Michael Mayer, Department of Management Studies, University of Glasgow
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"Almost 40 yeares after the publication of the seminal Strategy and Structure; Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise, by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., its rightful European heir has finally arrived." - Industrial Relations Journal, 32,5, 2001 "This book asks big questions, is written in a vivid and engaging style, provides an unusual historical perspective and is certain to provoke debate about challenges of social science and the future of the large corporations that dominate research in our field." - Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ)
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1: Change, Context, and the Corporation
2: Chandler and Context
3: Scale, Scope, and Structure
4: Corporate Careers and Control
5: Changing Strategies
6: Changing Structures
7: Strategy, Structure, and Politics
8: Concluding for the Corporation
Appendix I: Strategic and Structural Classification of French, German, and United Kingdom Firms
Appendix II: Methodology
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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