Works
- Organizing for worldwide effectiveness: the transnational solution, California Management Review 31(1), 54 to 74, 1988
- Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 1989
- Internal differentiation within multinational corporations, Strategic Management Journal 10(4), 323 to 337, 1989
- Matrix management: not a structure, a frame of mind, Harvard Business Review (July to August 1990), 1990
- Differentiated fit and shared values: alternatives for managing headquarters-subsidiary relations, Strategic Management Journal 15(6), 491 to 502, 1994
- Bad for practice: a critique of the transaction cost theory, Academy of Management Review 21(1), 13 to 47, 1996
- Bad management theories are destroying good management practices, Academy of Management Learning and Education 4(1), 75 to 91, 2005
In Organizational Structures
Known for
The transnational corporation and the differentiated network.
Ideas
The transnational solution. With Bartlett, the case for the transnational as an integrated network of differentiated units. Caveat: Case research in nine companies, more prescription than test; Leong and Tan (1993) found partial support, and Devinney, Midgley, and Venaik (2000) dispute that the transnational is optimal.
Internal differentiation in the MNC. Headquarters-subsidiary relations are governed differently according to each subsidiary's context: hierarchical, federative, clan, or integrative. Caveat: Cross-sectional association.
Differentiated fit and shared values. MNCs that fit structure to each subsidiary's context, and that build shared values, perform better, and best when they do both. Caveat: The abstract does not give the sample or the performance measure.
Critique of transaction cost theory. With Moran, Ghoshal argued that prescriptions drawn from transaction cost theory are likely to be wrong and dangerous for managers, because organizations are not mere substitutes for failed markets but govern some activities through a logic of their own. Caveat: An argument, not a test.