December 2003
abstract
Gérer & Comprendre
Issue 74
Editorial
By Francis LEFEBVRE
Secrétaire général du Comité de rédaction
SMALL WORLDS
Small worlds and globalization: A comparative perspective
By Bruce KOGUT
INSEAD
and Gordon WALKER
Southern Medhodist University
Knowledge about who owns and controls firms uncovers interrelations between a country’s economy and its social and political groundwork. The relations between shareholders, companies and governments has done much to temper the impact of globalization as perceived in most lands. For many major strategic decisions, governance involves not a firm’s board of directors but instead a national network of shareholders. There is no absolute reason for affirming that traditional national systems either increase or decrease a country’s well-being. But there is little doubt that shareholder networks affect structural transformations in certain countries and that, ultimately, globalization is still local business.
Restructuring or disintegrating the network of German firms?
By Bruce KOGUT
INSEAD
and Gordon WALKER
Southern Medhodist University
Recent German history has seen a reduction in holdings by financial institutions. The German network of company ownership seems to be disintegrating; and a mode of governance more like the one in English-speaking lands is apparently being adopted. Given its persistence however, the shareholding network’s overall structure is still robust. The analysis of this small world makes a fascinating prediction: the banks owned by national and local governments will continue exercising control through interlocking shareholding. German capitalism is not global, and not even national. It is regional.
When networks resist : The financial crisis and interlocking directorates in South Korean conglomerates, 1996-2000
By Sea-Jin CHANG
School of Business, Koréa University
and Dukjin CHANG
Department of sociology seoul national university
As we can see from the South Korean case, neither an increasing globalization of financial markets nor even a financial crash necessarily disperses the ownership of capital and leads to more transparent governance. Following the country’s economic collapse, the IMF and world Bank demanded a reform of the chaebols. These reforms provide evidence of the limitations on restructuring firms at the behest of outside forces. Increasing competition, shareholder activism and the strict application of fair trade laws are forcing these conglomerates to concentrate on their major activities, and are making it harder for directorates to be interlocked. The idea of a small world takes on full meaning for the thus restructured chaebols.
Small worlds resist: Market reforms and shareholding networks in Italy
By Raffaele CORRADO
Université de Bologne
and Maurizio ZOLLO
INSEAD
In Italy, the development of better rules for protecting small shareholders and the limitation of holding agreements have reduced joint holdings and kept blocs of big shareholders from exercising control. These reforms have also split major groups of shareholders up into several smaller networks. The significantly changed density of this shareholding network has not affected its overall characteristics: relations with "co-shareholders" are still as closed and close. Despite massive fragmentation, the network of Italian firms is still a small world in the technical and practical sense.
The ever smaller world of big American firms: Joint holdings and interlocking directorates (1990-2001)
By Gerald F. DAVIS
University of Michigan Business School
and Mina YOO
Management and organization department
In the United States, networks of directors and boards of directors formed small worlds in 1990, and still do in 2001 despite major changes in the meantime. The makeup of the population of directors has changed; and boards have become smaller. Furthermore, firms are less inclined to share directors. Corporate governance reform is becoming a priority in Washington ; and a small number of institutional investors, now big enough, do potentially throw enough weight to enforce such reforms in the firms where they have holdings. Paradoxically however, this small world’s ownership of this network has apparently remained unaffected by this changing environment with its consequences on governance.
Mosaics
Lessons from a forgotten, failed attempt at globalization
On Suzanne Berger’s Notre première mondialisation : Leçons d’un échec oublié.
By Hervé Dumez
It’s too late
On Lost in La Mancha, a documentary directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe.
By Hervé Laroche
I remember
On Jean-Michel Saussois’ Itinéraire d’un sociologue au travail.
By Daniel Fixari
OVERLOOKED
From the science of business to the managerial sciences: A century of trial-and-error ?
By Marc NIKITIN
IAE, Université d'Orléans
At the end of the 19th century, the idea of rationality came to prevail as firms grew. A know-how arose with the prestige of a science grounded in the epistemology of physics and chemistry. Unfortunately, the weakness of theorizing in business and engineering schools at the time and academia’s lack of interest in business left ample room for extravagant publications. Do the managerial sciences, which have emerged over the past three decades, now deserve the label "science"? Has the shift from the business science of yesteryear to today’s sciences of management merely changed labels? Is there any real continuity between the two? Developments during the past ten years tend to confirm this second hypothesis.
For a history of project management
By Gilles GAREL
Université de Marne-La-Vallée
This history of project management tries to name and describe major phases, and understand how this technique has developed and diffused. It covers both practices that were seldom or not at all institutionalized and practices that were. Between the two, project management has become a model of management widely diffused in organizations.