Organizational Responses to Regional Integration Among MNEs in Latin America

Abstract

0 contingency theory predicts that companies facing increasing market integration within a region need to develop more centralized strategies that require greater harmonization of business structures, closer inter-subsidiary coordination and the adoption of managerial policies that support such an organization. 0 the political and economic reforms that took place in latin america in the 1990s and led to greater market integration offer a natural experiment in which to study the response of multinational companies to changes in their competitive environment. 0 a survey of MNes reveals that they undertook greater coordination of regional operations during the decade, as expected, but not along all dimensions and not always proportionally to the changes perceived by their managers. the linkages between different dimensions of perceived market integration and organizational responses are largely significant and in the predicted sense.

The World is Spiky: An Internationalization Framework for A Semi‐Globalized World

“…When applied to the context of firm internationalization, reconfiguration captures the mode of learning that enables firms to link hitherto isolated countrylevel operations and to remove redundancies in order to optimize firm activities at the regional level. The priority in reconfiguration is to learn how to integrate country-level operations and develop coordinated responses on a regional scale in order to maximize the benefits of operating in a semi-globalized world (de la Torre, Esperanca, and Martinez, 2011;Piekkari, Nell, and Ghauri, 2010). Thus, reconfiguration at the regional level entails aggregation-clustering certain value chain activities in one area within the regionsand arbitrage activities-divesting and reallocating foreign operations within the regional boundaries (Arregle et al, 2009;Ghemawat, 2003).…”

Monitoring regional market-building in Africa: a critical perspective

“…Let us have a look at these connections one by one. First, in the international business literature, it has been discussed and empirically assessed for some time how multinational company strategies are adjusted to the processes of regional economic integration (Dunning and Robson, 1987; Robson and Wooton, 1993; Buckley et al , 2001), and how they adapt their organizational structure and functioning to the dynamics of regional (and global) integration (Sinkovics et al , 2011; de la Torre et al , 2011; Verbeke et al , 2016). It has also been shown that strategies of multinational companies are often to be understood as regional rather than global (Rugman and Verbeke, 2004; Rugman, 2005, 2008).…”

The U.S.–Brazil relationship opportunity: Business synergies for a dynamic global environment

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