Warring Brothers: Constructing Komatsu’s and Caterpillar’s Globalization

Abstract

We detail how the world’s two largest engineering machinery firms, Japan’s Komatsu and the us’s Caterpillar, actively managed geographical concerns to become global actors. We argue that their globalization was not a teleological given but had to be proactively made. Both the state and organized labor played significant roles in shaping their geographical evolutions, as did their efforts to outmaneuver each other spatially. Their globalization, then, was part of a broader spatial politics under capitalism.

Strategic Intent: A Conceptual Approach

“…The TMT dominant functional diversity, on the other hand, denotes the "heterogeneity in the functional areas in which each TMT member has served the longest" (Cannella, Park, & Lee, 2008, p.769). Caterpillar responded with its version of strategic Intent by reinventing its factories in response to Komatsu (Goods, Herod, Ellem, & Rainnie, 2021;Miller & O'Leary, 2002;Tucci, Barbara, Cappel, & Wyld, 1998).…”