What we talk about when we talk about "global mindset": managerial cognition in multinational corporations

Recent developments in the global economy and in multinational corporations have placed significant emphasis on the cognitive orientations of managers, giving rise to a number of concepts such as “global mindset” that are presumed to be associated with the effective management of multinational corporations (MNCs). This paper reviews the literature on global mindset and clarifies some of the conceptual confusion surrounding the construct. We identify common themes across writers, suggesting that the majority of studies fall into one of three research perspectives: cultural, strategic, and multidimensional. We also identify two constructs from the social sciences that underlie the perspectives found in the literature: cosmopolitanism and cognitive complexity and use these two constructs to develop an integrative theoretical framework of global mindset. We then provide a critical assessment of the field of global mindset and suggest directions for future theoretical and empirical research

The Role of Virtual Integration, Commitment, and Knowledge-Sharing in Improving International Supplier Responsiveness

Globalization has triggered significant structural strategy shifts of multinational enterprises (MNEs). With increasing global competition, MNEs have disintegrated their value-adding activities with their suppliers or subcontractors around the world (Buckley and Ghauri, 2004; Sturgeon, 2002). As a function of this mega-trend, the issue of how MNEs can effectively coordinate and control their global supply chain relationships with local suppliers becomes a critical task for MNE efficiency and competiveness

Sharing Logistics Information Across Organizations: Technology, Competition and Contracting

Information technology has altered the way companies manage their supply chains, and has resulted in a variety of new inter-organizational logistics management approaches. Many partners who are adjacent on the supply chain can both gain from sharing information that was previously accessible to only one of them; this situation is typical in retailer-supplier interactions. Our study analyzes these different kinds of virtually integrated corporations — independent companies which operate somewhat like a single vertically integrated firm — and classify them based on the impact that the information shared has on the contracting parties. We find that there are four primary levels at which firms can share information. We then investigate how competition and contracting affect the nature of value sharing at each of these levels. Our results indicate that retailers and other buyers can successfully contract to end up with more value than is generated by the sharing of information, and that if the possibility of information sharing exists, then suppliers will end up worse off than before. Using game-theoretic models of strategic interaction, we show that this effect intensifies as the competitive value of the information to the supplier increases--paradoxically, as the value generated by a supplier from information sharing increases, the supplier loses more and more value. Furthermore, we demonstrate that in order to extract the competitive value of information from a supplier, the buyer need not actually share the information; the possibility of sharing is sufficient, even when the buyer cannot create value from that information. We also analyze the effects of other factors such as technology costs and demand uncertainty on these information sharing contracts. Finally, we show that the a critical predictor of the level of information sharing between companies is their relative positions on the supply chain, and that the drivers of the level chosen are relative bargaining power and potential agency costs

Successful implementation of ERP systems in small businesses: a case study in Korea

Enterprise resource planning, Case study, Implementation, Jinyang Oil Seal Co., Ltd,