Mercury and Minerva: A Modern Multinational Academic Business Studies on a Global Scale

Multinational corporations are significant actors in modern economies. Many of them operate on a worldwide basis and are managed through decentralized structures, which are more or less tight (see, for example, Doz, 1986; Forsgren, 1989). Some of them, like McDonald’s, operate a franchising system: that is, they contract people who then act as their agents, selling their product under strict rules of conformity. This means that the appearance and behaviour of the franchisees all over the world will tend to be the same. The Big Mac served in Moscow can be expected to taste the same as the one served in New York. Such homogenization is a result of coercive pressures which are based on the owner’s prerogatives. However, as DiMaggio and Powell (1983) pointed out, there are other pressures as well which incline to promote isomorphism. Even without coercion, organizations tend to exhibit similar behaviour as a result of imitation, particularly under conditions of uncertainty (see, for example, Engwall, 1996). Thus we can expect homogeneity even in systems where the different units are not owned by a single owner. Rather, the homogeneity is an effect of social processes among the actors in an organizational field, which (according to Berger and Luckmann, 1967) will together create images of appropriate behaviour in their interaction with one another.