2 COURSE REFLECTION
I am really happy to have taken the Management in a Globalizing Economy course at Stockholm School of Economics. As a business student planning to work in consultancy, I consider this course to be an important part of my professional development, because it allowed me to have a broaden aspect of current international management topics, what about I might not have the chance to learn about in such a structured way. I have learnt a lot from the articles and in-class discussions, but even more from the group assignments, as they have enabled me to put the theoretical knowledge acquired into practice. What I particularly liked about this course was the diversity of the topics covered. In this paper I try to give a general overview…show more content… It illustrates the hurdle which firms that grow through mergers and acquisitions integrally encounter: how to combine the foreign and home-country cultures and create a commonly shared group culture. Here, the pressure for global integration arises out of the need for aligning the corporate culture of all business units so as to create one strong entity. The pressure for local adaptation, at the other hand, is fuelled by the inevitable differences between the (corporate) cultures of different business units or different partners engaged in a merger or acquisition. This cultural gap cannot be overcome by merely imposing one’s cultural aspects on others, a process that is called cultural imperialism by Hamelink (1983). Instead, a balance between the different cultural aspects has to be sought. Ideally, a geocentric mindset is applied, which should result in the creation of a shared culture in which cultural clashes are turned into…show more content… First of all, the above discussed never-ending need for balancing the local responsiveness and global integration pressures should be taken into account. This is supplemented by an article by Birkinshaw and Hood (2001), who give practical tips on how innovation in subsidiaries can be nurtured so as to feed the need for decentralization, some local independence, and the transfer of best practices across the organization. Next to that, some advices are given on the topics of expatriate management and organizational learning, based on MGE 9, MGE 12, MGE 14, the work on the group assignment, and the articles by Tung (1987) and Black and Gregersen