Much has been wntten about the discontnuities takmg place in the
post industnal society (Galbrath (1967), Marcuse (1968). Bell (1973),
Toffler (1980), Huber (1984), Reich (199l), Lewm and Stephens (1993),
and Ilinitch, Lewin, and D'Aveni, (1998)) which are forcing multinational
companies and heretofore pnmarily domestic companies in
every country and in almost every business sector to re-examine their
management philosophies, strategies and organization designs In
contrast to searching for a single theory of internationalization or for
"the" theory of organizing for global compehhon, this paper focuses on
the sources of vanation as a way of understanding the firm specific
paths of companies' internahonalizahon and their organlzabon forms
The paper extends the concept of equifinality (Katz and Kahn (1978),
Doty, Glick, and Huber (1993). and Gresov and Drazin (1997)) for
compehng in global environment and as a basis for understandmg why and how companies evolve unlque configurations of strategies and
organizahon forms. The paper applies this framework to a discussion of
Japanese companies
