Note that convergence between France and Germany is tricky. Of course,
there was technical and educational upgrading in both countries. And yes, the
time pupils or trainees spent at school or college to undergo education or train-
ing increased. Furthermore, there was an emphasis on obtaining more versatile
human resources in both countries. But institutionally, the new education and
training regimes are still rather different. On this count, convergence did not
occur. From this outcome, we learn something very important: novel educa-
tion and training arrangements, and conceivably just about any other new
arrangement, are distinctive for their creative combination of old and new
patterns. This is evolutionary dialectics within dynamic change; the novelty of a
new arrangement lies in the re-combination of received patterns with new ele-
ments. This insight can be generalized and leads to the notion that full ‘con-
vergence’ hardly ever takes place; since any change tends to consist of
non-identical reproduction, convergence can only be partial and will be
balanced by divergent developments.
5 GLOBALIZATION, EUROPEAN INTEGRATION
AND INSTITUTIONAL DIFFERENTIATION
More recently, globalization has been widely discussed. The issue is where, in
which respect and to what extent convergence of everything mentioned in this
chapter (values, institutions, markets, strategies) is occurring or will occur. It is
impossible to deal with the topic reasonably competently and in detail in the
final section of this chapter. However, let us suggest what might happen on the
basis of societal analysis. It argues, as the end of the last section showed, that
internationalization and universal technical change lead to different outcomes
in each society. Any convergence will be balanced by divergence.
Convergence and divergence combinedThis is what emerges from a societal analysis of actors and systems embedded
in contexts which are invariably local, in addition to international. But there
is another aspect regarding changes in whole populations of organizations,
rather than changes in the behavior of existing organizations and other exist-
ing actors. Internationalization of economic exchange also entails an intensifi-
cation of the international division of labor. Countries have come to specialize
in sectors, industries, or their segments, or in product-market combinations.
When they do, the implication is that the properties of business systems may
become more locally specific, rather than following a more international
model. Consider the example of different evolutions in the French and
136 International Human Resource Management