Knowledge that Transforms

The purpose of this study is to determine the basic configuration and coordination patterns for medium-sized firms competing in global industries. Analyzing 126 businesses competing in nine different global industries, five distinct archetypes are identified. The results suggest that selective globalization—in which the firm defines its global strategy around a narrow subset of the value chain—may lead to the most effective outcomes.

Much attention has been paid to the importance of innovation in ensuring the survival and growth of companies. For U.S. companies a key issue is to what extent findings for the U.S. market can be extrapolated to non-U.S. markets to provide a basis for designing innovation strategy. Similar innovation orientation types were identified in both markets using a sample of consumer businesses from the PIMS database. A number of similarities and differences in associated environments and performance levels were also identified. A major finding was that a high degree of product innovativeness leads to generally poor financial and market share performance in both markets but high rates of market share growth. Another major finding was that having pioneered in a market leads to effective performance. Results for the associated environments were more mixed in the sense that there was not a perfect correlation in the environments associated with the types in both markets.

This article reports the results of a study that hypothesized the influence of culture on six aspects of budget control practices in the United States and Japan. Data were collected through questionnaires from 70 manufacturing companies in the United States and 149 such companies in Japan. Results of data analyses indicate that the Individualism-Collectivism dimension would seem to explain why the U.S. companies, compared to the Japanese companies, tend to use communication and coordination more extensively, build budget slack to a greater extent, and use long-term performance evaluations to a lesser extent. The implications of the results for further research and practice are discussed.

Cross-national face-to-face selling has thus far received very little scholarly treatment in marketing literature. With few notable exceptions, most existing research in this area has been fragmentary and opportunistic. These problems are largely because of the lack of a broad, generalizable framework within which to conceptualize and execute research studies. In offering such a conceptual framework, this article looks at buyer-seller interactions from a communication perspective.

The results of a three-year study of the objectives, strategies and organisation of American subsidiaries are presented. Their operations are compared against a matched sample of competitive British and Japanese subsidiaries. American subsidiaries were found to be less ambitious, more orientated towards delivering short-term profit performance and less adapted to local market conditions than their Japanese competitors. Over the five-year period, only one in three U.S. subsidiaries exhibited successful profit and market performance, against more than three out of four Japanese subsidiaries.

A higher proportion of U.S.-owned firms operating in Britain adopts investment post-completion audit (PCA) procedures than that of domestic British enterprises, confirming differential adoption rates for many decision and control procedures found by other studies. Insights to this differential are sought in executives' attitudes to the aims, benefits and drawbacks of post-completion auditing. The absence of clear differences in attitudes among all U.K.-based managers suggest that the differential in PCA adoption stems primarily from ownership factors, e.g., exportation of parental control techniques rather than from the influence of local environmental factors.