Global and local orientation in organisational actorhood: A comparative study of large corporations from Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States^*

* The research was conducted at Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

ABSTRACT

In this study we employ the glocalisation perspective in institutional theory to investigate the simultaneous existence of similarity and variation across organisations in world society. By focusing on responsibilities that organisations display, we analyse both global and local orientations of large publicly listed corporations. We first investigate whether the adoption of globally diffusing formal templates (such as ISO 14001, the United Nations Global Compact) is accompanied by a lower degree of variation in organisations’ orientation in a supralocal field. Second, we investigate the relationship between the corporations’ local origin and the variations in the adopted orientation regarding the responsibilities that they display. We apply natural language processing methods to analyse the self-representations of large corporations from Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Our findings indicate that a high extent of the adoption of globally diffusing formal templates corresponds with a lower degree of variation across organisations. However, we also find that the respective local origin of organisations explains the remaining variation and the patterns of variation regarding the responsibilities that the corporations display.

KEYWORDS:

• World society
• glocalisation
• organisational actorhood
• responsibility
• natural language processing

Acknowledgements

We thank Michael Hunoldt, participants in the 13th New Institutionalism Workshop at Hebrew University and participants in Friedrich Schiller University’s research colloquium on management and organisation studies, and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Jan Goldenstein http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2538-0559

Philipp Poschmann http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7056-6013

Sebastian G.M. Händschke http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4888-7125

Notes

* The research was conducted at Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

1. Provided by Apache (nutch.apache.org).

2. We use these node words because we found that they are most commonly used by corporations when referring to their responsibilities.

3. We deleted all paragraphs in which the content was 100% identical.

4. A lemma is the root form of a word. In our case, the lemma ‘responsibility’ comprises both the singular and plural forms.

5. Developed by Stanford University (http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/lex-parser.shtml).

6. Amadeus database of Bureau van Dijk: https://amadeus.bvdinfo.com/.

7. EDGAR database of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission: http://www.sec.gov/.

8. As an alternative measure of institutional pressure, we also considered global elitism as a factor influencing the orientation of organisations. We followed the approach of Carroll and Carson (2003) and measured the extent to which representatives of the corporations in our sample attended the meetings of the five most important elite policy groups (such as the Bilderberg conference). We found that the variable correlated highly with visibility and that the findings regarding our independent variables remained constant.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft under [grant number WA 2139/16-1].