The Future of Global Organizing

This research and teaching volume was composed in honour of the late Alan Rugman, a distinguished thought leader, organizer and educator in the field of international business (IB). The volume addresses Rugman’s main research focus in a career that spanned almost 40 years, namely the organizational challenges facing Multi-National Enterprises (MNEs), with a focus on state-of-the-art conceptual and fact-based empirical developments in IB research.The rapidly changing and volatile institutional environments, within which MNEs must operate, have put traditional organisational forms under pressure. What are adequate organizational responses to the mixed pressures of globalization and regionalism? How to internalize external inefficiencies, inter alia in the broader stakeholder sphere? MNEs have been responding along a variety of paths. One path has been to redraft relationships between headquarters and existing subsidiaries. Another path has been to adopt new organisational forms, both internally (team-based approaches and asymmetrical networks) and externally (advanced management of value chains and stakeholder ecosystems). As a result, new organizational arrangements have appeared, including micro-multinationals, ‘born globals’, springboard multinationals, as well as other types of international new ventures.This tenth volume in the Progress in International Business Research series presents accounts of the contemporary scientific debate on how to assess the comparative performance (e.g., in efficiency or effectiveness terms) of organizational forms adopted by traditional as well as ‘newcomer’ MNEs. It also includes a substantial number of case studies that can serve as illustrative material for teaching IB in each area where MNE managers must search for resilient organizational forms.