Managing Global Competition: Japanese Companies in Transition

Abstract

Much has been wntten about the discontnuities takmg place in the

post industnal society (Galbrath (1967), Marcuse (1968). Bell (1973),

Toffler (1980), Huber (1984), Reich (199l), Lewm and Stephens (1993),

and Ilinitch, Lewin, and D'Aveni, (1998)) which are forcing multinational

companies and heretofore pnmarily domestic companies in

every country and in almost every business sector to re-examine their

management philosophies, strategies and organization designs In

contrast to searching for a single theory of internationalization or for

"the" theory of organizing for global compehhon, this paper focuses on

the sources of vanation as a way of understanding the firm specific

paths of companies' internahonalizahon and their organlzabon forms

The paper extends the concept of equifinality (Katz and Kahn (1978),

Doty, Glick, and Huber (1993). and Gresov and Drazin (1997)) for

compehng in global environment and as a basis for understandmg why and how companies evolve unlque configurations of strategies and

organizahon forms. The paper applies this framework to a discussion of

Japanese companies.