MORSe (Management and Organization Research Seminars): "THINKING GLOBALLY BUT (RE)ACTING LOCALLY: ORGANIZATIONAL POLYMORPHISM AS COEVOLUTIONARY INDIGENIZATION"
Institute of Management and Organisation
Start date: 12 November 2009
End date: 13 November 2009
November 12th, Room 251; 12:30-14:00
JOHN USHER and ROSSITSA YALAMOVA
Abstract:
We attempt to forge common understandings among three sets of ideas: organizational ecology’s niche width theory, complexity theory’s NK[C] model, and globalization’s dominant outcome theses of monoculture, polarization, and hybridization. The common thread is the demonstration of how the polymorphic adaptation of multi-unit organizations, such as chains and franchises, to local conditions through the indigenization of spatially distributed ‘packets’ of corporate routines might be seen as consistent with an autopoietic view of multi-unit organization and the global environment. As globalization drives the world economy and its manifold cultures toward increasing interconnection, the ability, indeed the competitive advantage, of polymorphic organization to incorporate limited, culturally sensitive local adaptation as a means of counteracting the damping effect of complexification may stand as an exemplar for the ameliorative effects central to the hybridization thesis.
