Building a truly global organization? ABB and the problems of integrating a multi-domestic enterprise

ABB, a Swiss-Swedish electrotechnical giant, has been heralded as a new kind of international enterprise, using an innovative matrix and lean management to combine global resources with decentralized local presence. Starting from a criticism of the "process school" in international management research, the article demonstrates the validity of Chandler's insistence on analysing organizational structure from the perspective of corporate strategy. The argument is elaborated in a comparison of ABB and GEC-Alsthom, another electrotechnical cross-border merger with a very different strategy and structure. The importance of a dynamic analysis is emphasized and illustrated by an account of the development within one business area, Power Transformers. The emergence of a third dimension, in addition to the two-dimensional matrix, is another example of organizational dynamics within ABB. The conclusion points to the gap between competitive realities and the ideal of the transnational corporation.