The practice and process of delivering integration through strategic planning

This paper explains how strategic planning is able to deliver strategic integration within organizations. While communication and participation within planning processes are perceived to have an integrative effect, we argue that these effects are unlikely to arise simply from bringing people together. Rather, we suggest that, given the varying interests of actors in different business units, integration will only arise from active negotiations and compromises between these actors. The paper is based upon a case of strategic planning in a multinational that was attempting to develop greater strategic integration across Europe. Drawing upon an activity theory framework, we examine how a common strategy emerges over time through modifications to the planning process and to different actors’ roles within it. The findings are used to develop a process model that shows how different business unit characteristics of planning experience and relative power shape different experiences of communication and participation activities and different processes for achieving integration. The paper concludes with a discussion of how this process model contributes to the literature on strategic planning, political processes of strategy-making, and strategy-as-practice.

Strategy tools as boundary objects: a strategy-as-practice perspective

This review is structured in three sections and provides a conceptual framework for the empirical analysis of strategy tools as they are used in practice. Examples of strategy tools are SWOT analysis or Porter’s Five Forces, among others. Section one reviews empirical research into the use of strategy tools, classifying them according to variations in their use. Section two explains the concept of boundary objects as the basis for our argument that strategy tools may be understood as boundary objects. Boundary objects are artefacts that are meaningfully and usefully incorporated to enable sharing of information and transfer of knowledge across intra-organizational boundaries, such as laterally across different strategic business units or vertically across hierarchical levels. Section three draws the two bodies of literature together, conceptualizing strategy tools in practice as boundary objects. This review contributes to knowledge on using strategy tools in practice.

Management of human resources in foreign firms operating in India:the role of HR in country-specific headquarters

Multinational companies (MNCs) are known to establish country-specific headquarters (CSHQs) or centres to create and transfer knowledge in order to better co-ordinate and control their operations, and also to share knowledge between affiliates both within and outside the country. This paper highlights the role played by the human resource (HR) function in Indian CSHQs. The analysis is based on interview and survey data from senior HR specialists in 74 foreign firms operating CSHQs in India. The study identifies the range of services that the Indian CSHQs' HR function provides to the local business units of the MNC. A high level of freedom from the MNCs' corporate headquarters to both develop and implement HR policies and practices is found. The CSHQ is found to be instrumental in the creation and dissemination of HR-related learning. The study also identifies the problems faced by the HR function operating with a CSHQ and the actions necessary to overcome these issues.

Conclusion : on multiple levels of analysis, context, contingency and capital

In this concluding chapter, we bring together the threads and reflections on the chapters contained in this text and show how they relate to multi-level issues. The book has focused on the world of Human Resource Management (HRM) and the systems and practices it must put in place to foster innovation. Many of the contributions argue that in order to bring innovation about, organisations have to think carefully about the way in which they will integrate what is, in practice, organisationally relevant — but socially distributed — knowledge. They need to build a series of knowledge-intensive activities and networks, both within their own boundaries and across other important external inter-relationships. In so doing, they help to co-ordinate important information structures. They have, in effect, to find ways of enabling people to collaborate with each other at lower cost, by reducing both the costs of their co-ordination and the levels of unproductive search activity. They have to engineer these behaviours by reducing the risks for people that might be associated with incorrect ideas and help individuals, teams and business units to advance incomplete ideas that are so often difficult to codify. In short, a range of intangible assets must flow more rapidly throughout the organisation and an appropriate balance must be found between the rewards and incentives associated with creativity, novelty and innovation, versus the risks that innovation may also bring.