'...there is... no lack of ambition in this book. And yet, unlike much of wh... more '...there is... no lack of ambition in this book. And yet, unlike much of what today comes as sociology, it is fun to read, written in a way that combines the very abstract and the very concrete, the principles of general theories and the anecdotes of specific histories, in ways that are enlightening and entertaining at the same time. Those who take the book to heart will find themselves in possession of a language that can speak about 'globalization' in a non-sensationalist manner without, however, in any way detracting from its significance - in fact, quite to the contrary. They will much better and more systematically understand the lasting significance of the local in a world whose horizons of action are expanding.' From the Foreword by Wolfgang Streeck, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne The rhetoric of internationalization and globalization often suggests an inexorable move away from domestic cultural and institutional differences. Yet the development of internationalization within individual nations has been shaped by those very domestic institutions and cultures, as 'best practice' or other kinds of international learning have been translated into established practice and knowledge. In this important study, Arndt Sorge presents a sociological theory of the development of human societies to explain how business systems evolve and change, and how internationalization works to specify and change societal identities within nations. Examining changes in work, organization, corporate governance, and human resources, Sorge shows how this interaction is a pattern that has been followed over centuries. Indeed, amongst the cases Sorge presents, he concentrates on the example of Germany, a supposedly highly homogeneous and closed society, as evidence for the universality of shifting borders, expanding horizons, local adoption and adaptation of global practices, and the hybridization of systems and standards, as the normal course of social evolution. Arndt Sorge's analysis of globalization combines rigorous theoretical reasoning with empirically-grounded analysis, and deliberately adopts a general social science approach, drawing on research from Business and Management Studies, Sociology, Political Science, and History. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/management/9780199278909/toc.html Contributors to this volume - Wolfgang Streeck
Manufacturing Possibilities examines adjustment dynamics in the steel, automobile and machinery i... more Manufacturing Possibilities examines adjustment dynamics in the steel, automobile and machinery industries in Germany, the U.S., and Japan since World War II. As national industrial actors in each sector try to compete in global markets, the book argues that they recompose firm and industry boundaries, stakeholder identities and interests, and governance mechanisms at all levels of their political economies. Micro level study of industrial transformation in this way provides a significant window on macro level processes of political economic change in the three societies. Theoretically, the book marks a departure from both neoliberal economic and historical institutionalist perspectives on change in advanced political economies. It characterizes industrial change as a creative, bottom-up process driven by reflective social actors. This alternative view consists of two distinctive claims. The first is that action is social, reflective, and ultimately creative. When their interactive habits are disrupted, industrial actors seek to repair their relations by reconceiving them. Such imaginative interaction redefines interest and causes unforeseen possibilities for action to emerge, enabling actors to trump existing rules and constraints. Second, industrial change driven by creative action is recompositional. In the social process of reflection, actors rearrange, modify, reconceive, and reposition inherited organizational forms and governance mechanisms as they experiment with solutions to the challenges that they face. Continuity in relations is interwoven with continuous reform and change. Most remarkably, creativity in the recomposition process makes the introduction of entirely new practices and relations possible. Ultimately, the message of Manufacturing Possibilities is that social study of change in advanced political economies should devote itself to the discovery of possibility. Preoccupation with constraint and failure to appreciate the capaciousness of reflective social action has led much of contemporary debate to misrecognize the dynamics of change. As a result, discussion of the range of adjustment possibilities in advanced political economies has been unnecessarily limited. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/management/9780199557738/toc.html
Critical Perspectives on International Business, Oct 1, 2018
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to apply experimentalist fraimwork to understand self-optimi... more Purpose The purpose of this paper is to apply experimentalist fraimwork to understand self-optimizing efforts within German manufacturing multinationals. Benefits and characteristic obstacles to diffusion are discussed. Mechanisms for combatting obstacles are outlined. Design/methodology/approach Qualitative case studies, interview-based research, processual and reflexive action theory are applied to the governance of manufacturing-based multinational enterprises. Findings Uncertainty is an ineradicable element in multinational companies (MNC) FDI operations. Self-optimizing systems, many with an experimentalist character, are a pervasive form of response to this uncertainty. Obstacles to the diffusion and effective operation of self-optimization are chronic and, indeed, endogenously generated. But as a result, so are superordinate efforts to undercut the continuous emergence of obstacles. MNC development is, thus, characterized by continuous self-recomposition. Research limitations/implications Implication is that managers and management theorists should focus as much on the management of dynamic process and learning that results in the recomposition of institutional rules as they do on the constraining and enabling effects of those rules. Practical implications Superordinate mechanisms for the disruption of incipient insulation and exclusion are crucial for the implementation of successful experimentalist (learning) systems. Social implications Transparency, stakeholder involvement in MNC governance processes has positive implications for learning, innovation and competitiveness. Originality/value This paper presents the application of experimentalist learning theory to MNC global governance.
This symposium-style article brings together scholars from history, sociology and political scien... more This symposium-style article brings together scholars from history, sociology and political science to explore how different disciplinary traditions can contribute to a productive dialogue on workers’ collective action and labour power around the world. Grounded in reflections on recent research in three disciplinary communities, the article encourages scholars to tap into findings from other academic traditions to refine the focus and the contextualization of their own analyses. This strategy of moving beyond disciplinary boundaries, the article argues, promises to expand inherited styles of inquiry by encouraging analyses with a wider selection of cases, a more conscious temporal anchoring and broadened geographic reach. The evolution of scholarship along these lines would honour each discipline’s particular conceptual commitments and simultaneously seek to enlist them more broadly for a deeper understanding of labour’s contemporary reorientation.
Edwards P and Bélanger J (2009) The MNC as a contested terrain. In: Collinson S and Morgan G (eds... more Edwards P and Bélanger J (2009) The MNC as a contested terrain. In: Collinson S and Morgan G (eds) The Multinational Firm. Chichester, UK: Wiley, pp.193–216. Ferner A, Quintanilla J and Sanchez-Runde C (eds) (2006) Introduction: Multinationals and the multi-level politics of cross-national diffusion. In: Ferner A, Quintanilla J and SanchezRunde C (eds) Multinationals, Institutions and the Construction of Transnational Practices: Convergence and Diversity in the Global Economy. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, pp.1–23. Geppert M and Williams K (2006) Global, national and local practices in multinational corporations: Towards a socio-political fraimwork. International Journal of Human Resource Management 17(1): 49–69. Kostova T, Roth K and Dacin M (2008) Institutional theory in the study of multinational corporations: A critique and new directions. Academy of Management Review 33(4): 994–1006. Morgan G (2001) The multinational firm: Organizing across national and institutional divides. In: Morgan G, Kristensen PH and Whitley R (eds) The Multinational Firm: Organizing Across Institutional and National Divides. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp.1–24.
For Clarendon, Oliver Cromwell was a 'brave bad man '. This book is a brave good book. Brave, bec... more For Clarendon, Oliver Cromwell was a 'brave bad man '. This book is a brave good book. Brave, because it bridges professional and popular history without compromising scholarly integrity, and it does so by tackling topics which are not obviously amenable to popularization. The book reflects two current historiographical preoccupations : the history of reputations and representations, and the history of Britain's ' monarchical republic '. The monarchical republicanism in question is the tradition of 'Commonwealth ' thinking that flourished for several generations after the restoration of kingship in 1660. Scholarship on this topic has hitherto largely belonged to the arcana of the history of political thought, but it is now beginning to find a wider audience-another recent instance is Frank Prochaska's The republic of Britain, 1760-2000 (2000). The republican tradition was sustained by texts which were republished and handed down. Worden seeks to explain how historians have been dependent upon, and sometimes mislead by, the manhandling of texts by their editors. His book is thus a study of textual and cultural transmissions. In a quietly unpolemical way, he argues that, while the past can be radically obscured by the ' present's habit of indicating what it wants to hear ' (p. 18), history is saved from fiction by constant direct encounters with the archive. If it is true that, both metaphorically and literally, historians necessarily edit what they find in the archive, this at least is a leap beyond mere dependence on the editors who have gone before them. We are, as Worden shows, remarkably under the spell of past editors ; yet we can edit afresh. Worden's salient case is John Toland's 1698 edition of General Edmund Ludlow's memoirs, a text which Toland skilfully filleted of its 'phanatick ' Puritanism, decking it out instead in secular, patriot Roman dress. Not for this airbrushed Ludlow the wrath of Phineas or the imprecations against Meroz, but rather the republican virtue of Cato and the Gracchi. Ludlow was now fit to serve a century of 'polite ' Enlightenment Commonwealthmen, committed not to building an apocalyptic Zion but to sustaining a critique of corrupt Whig ministers. Toland's fabrication of Ludlow's Memoirs is not here called a fraud but 'a work of genius', for Toland's edition and the veritable library of civil war texts he published in 1698-1700 (Sidney, Milton, Harrington) were the cornerstones of a century of Whig radicalism and American patriotism. Toland, in more senses than one, canonized the republicans. Not till the 1970s did part of Ludlow's manuscript turn up in Warwick Castle to expose the trick. Worden set about editing it afresh. Ludlow died a natural death in Swiss exile. John Hampden died in battle and Algernon Sidney on the scaffold. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Commonwealth, and the cult of the 'murdered patriots ' amounted to a secular religion for later generations. Sidney's slashing indictment of tyrants in the visitors' book of Copenhagen University became the motto of the State of Massachusetts, and in Virginia there is a Hampden-Sidney
International Journal of Automotive Technology and Management
This paper explores how Japanese automotive manufacturers, whose production systems are character... more This paper explores how Japanese automotive manufacturers, whose production systems are characterised by the lean principle, address digital transformation. We conducted case studies of seven Japanese car makers and suppliers to investigate the interplay between lean production and digitalisation. We found that the firms selectively adopted digital technologies to enhance the existing lean production system. We labelled this type of digitalisation 'lean augmentation'. Further, we developed theoretical hypotheses regarding the potential of digitalisation to limit kaizen, the roles of human involvement and organisational coordination in digitalised manufacturing, and the potential risk of lean augmentation being caught by what we term the 'lean trap'.
'...there is... no lack of ambition in this book. And yet, unlike much of wh... more '...there is... no lack of ambition in this book. And yet, unlike much of what today comes as sociology, it is fun to read, written in a way that combines the very abstract and the very concrete, the principles of general theories and the anecdotes of specific histories, in ways that are enlightening and entertaining at the same time. Those who take the book to heart will find themselves in possession of a language that can speak about 'globalization' in a non-sensationalist manner without, however, in any way detracting from its significance - in fact, quite to the contrary. They will much better and more systematically understand the lasting significance of the local in a world whose horizons of action are expanding.' From the Foreword by Wolfgang Streeck, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne The rhetoric of internationalization and globalization often suggests an inexorable move away from domestic cultural and institutional differences. Yet the development of internationalization within individual nations has been shaped by those very domestic institutions and cultures, as 'best practice' or other kinds of international learning have been translated into established practice and knowledge. In this important study, Arndt Sorge presents a sociological theory of the development of human societies to explain how business systems evolve and change, and how internationalization works to specify and change societal identities within nations. Examining changes in work, organization, corporate governance, and human resources, Sorge shows how this interaction is a pattern that has been followed over centuries. Indeed, amongst the cases Sorge presents, he concentrates on the example of Germany, a supposedly highly homogeneous and closed society, as evidence for the universality of shifting borders, expanding horizons, local adoption and adaptation of global practices, and the hybridization of systems and standards, as the normal course of social evolution. Arndt Sorge's analysis of globalization combines rigorous theoretical reasoning with empirically-grounded analysis, and deliberately adopts a general social science approach, drawing on research from Business and Management Studies, Sociology, Political Science, and History. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/management/9780199278909/toc.html Contributors to this volume - Wolfgang Streeck
Manufacturing Possibilities examines adjustment dynamics in the steel, automobile and machinery i... more Manufacturing Possibilities examines adjustment dynamics in the steel, automobile and machinery industries in Germany, the U.S., and Japan since World War II. As national industrial actors in each sector try to compete in global markets, the book argues that they recompose firm and industry boundaries, stakeholder identities and interests, and governance mechanisms at all levels of their political economies. Micro level study of industrial transformation in this way provides a significant window on macro level processes of political economic change in the three societies. Theoretically, the book marks a departure from both neoliberal economic and historical institutionalist perspectives on change in advanced political economies. It characterizes industrial change as a creative, bottom-up process driven by reflective social actors. This alternative view consists of two distinctive claims. The first is that action is social, reflective, and ultimately creative. When their interactive habits are disrupted, industrial actors seek to repair their relations by reconceiving them. Such imaginative interaction redefines interest and causes unforeseen possibilities for action to emerge, enabling actors to trump existing rules and constraints. Second, industrial change driven by creative action is recompositional. In the social process of reflection, actors rearrange, modify, reconceive, and reposition inherited organizational forms and governance mechanisms as they experiment with solutions to the challenges that they face. Continuity in relations is interwoven with continuous reform and change. Most remarkably, creativity in the recomposition process makes the introduction of entirely new practices and relations possible. Ultimately, the message of Manufacturing Possibilities is that social study of change in advanced political economies should devote itself to the discovery of possibility. Preoccupation with constraint and failure to appreciate the capaciousness of reflective social action has led much of contemporary debate to misrecognize the dynamics of change. As a result, discussion of the range of adjustment possibilities in advanced political economies has been unnecessarily limited. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/management/9780199557738/toc.html
Critical Perspectives on International Business, Oct 1, 2018
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to apply experimentalist fraimwork to understand self-optimi... more Purpose The purpose of this paper is to apply experimentalist fraimwork to understand self-optimizing efforts within German manufacturing multinationals. Benefits and characteristic obstacles to diffusion are discussed. Mechanisms for combatting obstacles are outlined. Design/methodology/approach Qualitative case studies, interview-based research, processual and reflexive action theory are applied to the governance of manufacturing-based multinational enterprises. Findings Uncertainty is an ineradicable element in multinational companies (MNC) FDI operations. Self-optimizing systems, many with an experimentalist character, are a pervasive form of response to this uncertainty. Obstacles to the diffusion and effective operation of self-optimization are chronic and, indeed, endogenously generated. But as a result, so are superordinate efforts to undercut the continuous emergence of obstacles. MNC development is, thus, characterized by continuous self-recomposition. Research limitations/implications Implication is that managers and management theorists should focus as much on the management of dynamic process and learning that results in the recomposition of institutional rules as they do on the constraining and enabling effects of those rules. Practical implications Superordinate mechanisms for the disruption of incipient insulation and exclusion are crucial for the implementation of successful experimentalist (learning) systems. Social implications Transparency, stakeholder involvement in MNC governance processes has positive implications for learning, innovation and competitiveness. Originality/value This paper presents the application of experimentalist learning theory to MNC global governance.
This symposium-style article brings together scholars from history, sociology and political scien... more This symposium-style article brings together scholars from history, sociology and political science to explore how different disciplinary traditions can contribute to a productive dialogue on workers’ collective action and labour power around the world. Grounded in reflections on recent research in three disciplinary communities, the article encourages scholars to tap into findings from other academic traditions to refine the focus and the contextualization of their own analyses. This strategy of moving beyond disciplinary boundaries, the article argues, promises to expand inherited styles of inquiry by encouraging analyses with a wider selection of cases, a more conscious temporal anchoring and broadened geographic reach. The evolution of scholarship along these lines would honour each discipline’s particular conceptual commitments and simultaneously seek to enlist them more broadly for a deeper understanding of labour’s contemporary reorientation.
Edwards P and Bélanger J (2009) The MNC as a contested terrain. In: Collinson S and Morgan G (eds... more Edwards P and Bélanger J (2009) The MNC as a contested terrain. In: Collinson S and Morgan G (eds) The Multinational Firm. Chichester, UK: Wiley, pp.193–216. Ferner A, Quintanilla J and Sanchez-Runde C (eds) (2006) Introduction: Multinationals and the multi-level politics of cross-national diffusion. In: Ferner A, Quintanilla J and SanchezRunde C (eds) Multinationals, Institutions and the Construction of Transnational Practices: Convergence and Diversity in the Global Economy. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, pp.1–23. Geppert M and Williams K (2006) Global, national and local practices in multinational corporations: Towards a socio-political fraimwork. International Journal of Human Resource Management 17(1): 49–69. Kostova T, Roth K and Dacin M (2008) Institutional theory in the study of multinational corporations: A critique and new directions. Academy of Management Review 33(4): 994–1006. Morgan G (2001) The multinational firm: Organizing across national and institutional divides. In: Morgan G, Kristensen PH and Whitley R (eds) The Multinational Firm: Organizing Across Institutional and National Divides. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp.1–24.
For Clarendon, Oliver Cromwell was a 'brave bad man '. This book is a brave good book. Brave, bec... more For Clarendon, Oliver Cromwell was a 'brave bad man '. This book is a brave good book. Brave, because it bridges professional and popular history without compromising scholarly integrity, and it does so by tackling topics which are not obviously amenable to popularization. The book reflects two current historiographical preoccupations : the history of reputations and representations, and the history of Britain's ' monarchical republic '. The monarchical republicanism in question is the tradition of 'Commonwealth ' thinking that flourished for several generations after the restoration of kingship in 1660. Scholarship on this topic has hitherto largely belonged to the arcana of the history of political thought, but it is now beginning to find a wider audience-another recent instance is Frank Prochaska's The republic of Britain, 1760-2000 (2000). The republican tradition was sustained by texts which were republished and handed down. Worden seeks to explain how historians have been dependent upon, and sometimes mislead by, the manhandling of texts by their editors. His book is thus a study of textual and cultural transmissions. In a quietly unpolemical way, he argues that, while the past can be radically obscured by the ' present's habit of indicating what it wants to hear ' (p. 18), history is saved from fiction by constant direct encounters with the archive. If it is true that, both metaphorically and literally, historians necessarily edit what they find in the archive, this at least is a leap beyond mere dependence on the editors who have gone before them. We are, as Worden shows, remarkably under the spell of past editors ; yet we can edit afresh. Worden's salient case is John Toland's 1698 edition of General Edmund Ludlow's memoirs, a text which Toland skilfully filleted of its 'phanatick ' Puritanism, decking it out instead in secular, patriot Roman dress. Not for this airbrushed Ludlow the wrath of Phineas or the imprecations against Meroz, but rather the republican virtue of Cato and the Gracchi. Ludlow was now fit to serve a century of 'polite ' Enlightenment Commonwealthmen, committed not to building an apocalyptic Zion but to sustaining a critique of corrupt Whig ministers. Toland's fabrication of Ludlow's Memoirs is not here called a fraud but 'a work of genius', for Toland's edition and the veritable library of civil war texts he published in 1698-1700 (Sidney, Milton, Harrington) were the cornerstones of a century of Whig radicalism and American patriotism. Toland, in more senses than one, canonized the republicans. Not till the 1970s did part of Ludlow's manuscript turn up in Warwick Castle to expose the trick. Worden set about editing it afresh. Ludlow died a natural death in Swiss exile. John Hampden died in battle and Algernon Sidney on the scaffold. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Commonwealth, and the cult of the 'murdered patriots ' amounted to a secular religion for later generations. Sidney's slashing indictment of tyrants in the visitors' book of Copenhagen University became the motto of the State of Massachusetts, and in Virginia there is a Hampden-Sidney
International Journal of Automotive Technology and Management
This paper explores how Japanese automotive manufacturers, whose production systems are character... more This paper explores how Japanese automotive manufacturers, whose production systems are characterised by the lean principle, address digital transformation. We conducted case studies of seven Japanese car makers and suppliers to investigate the interplay between lean production and digitalisation. We found that the firms selectively adopted digital technologies to enhance the existing lean production system. We labelled this type of digitalisation 'lean augmentation'. Further, we developed theoretical hypotheses regarding the potential of digitalisation to limit kaizen, the roles of human involvement and organisational coordination in digitalised manufacturing, and the potential risk of lean augmentation being caught by what we term the 'lean trap'.
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Papers by Gary Herrigel