“Comparing firms from all across the world gives us a chance to transcend tried and tested managerial recipes that are all too happy to ignore the full range of options available…. the diversity of reactions and organisations found within any given market proves that a range of responses can apply to a specific set of economic challenges. In fact, it is highly likely that these differences will persist over time”.

Anyone familiar with GERPISA’s output could be excused for thinking that these sentences come a text written within our network. In fact, they are taken from a recent book by Susan Berger.1, who relies on several sectors, including the automobile.2, to defend (in the wake of a MIT Industrial Performance Centre study of 500 companies) the idea that firms have a broad spectrum of solutions which they can use to manage globalisation, a process where they serve as both actors and spectators. Based on the notion that the widespread modularisation of industry has encouraged production process fragmentation and led to the generalisation of a “Made In” World, this reveals the existence of a plurality of ways in which modularity can be applied and international business networks constituted.

Above and beyond the book’s conclusions, we believe that it lends itself to two conclusions. Firstly, at a methodological level, diversity is highlighted researchers adopt a methodology reflecting firm’s strategic analysis. In other words, by choosing to study companies operating in different sectors in different countries, S. Berger arrives at conclusions similar to those found in GERPISA’s automobile sector studies.

Far from leading to an uniformisation of individual strategies, competition, when construed as a process, implies that firms are willing and able to seek organisational, productive and market solutions differing from the ones applied by their sectorial rivals. As such, and even though the method clearly can be criticised for its lack of exhaustiveness, the very nature of competition seems to legitimise the notion that it is only through a detailed analysis of firms’ behaviour that we can grasp the subtleties of current realities and changes, even where this entails a subsequent and complementary mobilisation of other approaches (i.e., statistical ones) to achieve greater generality.

S. Berger then suggests a plurality of foundations for this diversity, averring that their detection requires the mobilisation of multi-dimensional criteria that can be difficult to identify. Refuting a purely sectorial determination by highlighting, for example, the oppositions that exist at this level between firms in the electronics and textile sectors, she nevertheless does not opt for the thesis that what we have witnessed is the prevalence of institutional or cultural dimensions, insofar as she underscores, in a very Gerpisian manner, that all firms in a given sector in a given country do not converge towards one and the same solution. What she offers is an. interpretation expressed in terms of dynamic heritages wherein the firm, over the course of its history and in the institutional and competitive contexts within which it has evolved, acquires certain competencies and seeks to develop others so that it can achieve the objectives it has set for itself. This interpretation has the merit of emphasizing historical contingencies and substantiating diversity, but it also raises questions as to a (possible) hierarchy of determinant factors. Berger suggests in fact that choices are all idiosyncratic in nature, which makes it hard if not impossible to hierarchise such determinants, or to systemise them.

All in all, S. Berger’s book offers us a (non-intentional) way of validating the ESEMK programme’s relevancy. By seeking to identify the links between institutional dimensions and firms’ individual strategies, it is an attempt to devise elements that will allow us to devise an appropriate initial hierarchisation. What we can expect is that within a year, our own research efforts will provide a few answers to the questions that S. Berger raises.

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1 S. Berger, How We Compete: What companies around the world are doing to make it in today’s global economy, Doubleday Broadway, 2005. Trad. Fr. Made in Monde. Les nouvelles frontières de l’économie mondiale, Seuil, Paris, Février 2006.
2 Even if few pages are ultimately devoted to this topic. Maily pp.110-117 where the limits of the automobile’s modularisation are highlighted.