Change Management in MNC: How Global Convergence Intertwines with National Diversities

The paper presents three case studies of three of the four global players in the liftsand escalator industry (controlling 3⁄4 of the respective world market). It is based on chiefly qualitative data from the headquarter level (based in the US, Finland and Germany) and comparative data from their British and German subsidiaries. The object of the research are change management processes in the work systems on the subsidiary level. The central research question of the study is to analyze how these processes are shaped by globalization on the one hand and national institutional contexts on the other hand. In doing so, the authors position their research between the two dominant families of approaches in international business research, recently characterized by Child as “lowcontext” and “high-context” approaches. Low-context approaches see forces of economic universalism, technology and psychological universalism as inevitably working towards globally increasingly convergent and uniform organizational structures in MNCs. Highcontext approaches see cultural and institutional factors as the dominant drivers which lead to organizations that are deeply adapted to national and regional specifics. The study is process(rather structure-) oriented and shows how global and national effects shape the design of the work systems at the subsidiary level and reveals that there is no one way of globalizing in MNCs. The analysis in this paper focuses on the cross-national comparison of the subsidiaries, but at the same time highlights the relevancy of the societal institutions of MNC’s home countries as well.