German machine-tools industries. Actor-systems constellations better prepared
German industry for developing and manufacturing universal, flexible CNC
machines and control systems, giving them a better position in the machine-
tool market and leading to better outcomes in terms of market share and
employment. The French machine-tool industry entered a severe crisis and
shed employment on a larger scale after a series of redundancies, bankruptcies
and take-overs by competitors from abroad. Interestingly, the French manu-
facturers that survived or did better were those which produced more single-
purpose CNC machines. French industry had already possessed more
manufacturers of single-purpose machines, whereas German industry had pre-
viously been stronger in universal machines.
In Germany, success was attained through the manufacture of universal
machines, while France achieved it by manufacturing single-purpose machines
of a more specialized kind. And this was valid both for the period preceding
and for the period after the rise of CNC as a major metal-cutting innovation.
All this attests to the reproduction of institutional patterns, even when the up-
and-coming innovation is basically the same everywhere, and even when a
large number of technical, industry structure, human resource and organiza-
tional changes are in evidence. The simple fact is that such changes are not
quite the same in every society, even when they are technical. International
state-of-the-art technology, management practice or other novelties are
adapted and internalized into the existing institutional patterns. They there-
fore exhibit change to the same extent as continuity (see Maurice et al., 1988).
The importance of institutionalized settings has also been documented for
the patterns which specifically apply to R&D departments in the electronics
industry. Multi-specialization in Japan favors applied market and production
research and development. Conversely, the fragmentation of organizations and
careers and the generalist approach to engineering in France favors a high cali-
ber of basic research and development which is more decoupled from produc-
tion implications and marketing concepts. Hence, the internationalization of
competition and the advent of a similar basic technology may imply that enter-
prises in different countries develop different strengths and weaknesses, focus
on different market segments and localize different functions in different coun-
tries. Although there is ‘institutional learning’, whereby firms in one society try
to emulate ‘best practice’ from another country, this does not mean that the
practices they arrive at remain the same. Even when firms and societies do learn
from each other, internationally, they will usually achieve comparable perfor-
mance outcomes in ways which are institutionally different. This is illustrated
by the contrast in the institutionalized methods employed by the Japanese and
German firms to ‘mechatronize’. In the Japanese case, the internal labor market
and interprofessional job chains are central; in Germany, professionalized
multi-specialization and an inter-firm labor market remain important.
What kinds of outcomes firms achieve, how successful they are in which
market segment or activity, can then be explained by the society in which they
Cross-national Differences in Human Resources 127