in scope has been particularly influential. Such taxonomies might be usefully
refined to incorporate the salience of regional economic influences for marketing
strategies and production organization. In a rare empirical investigation of the
utility of the ‘Porterian’ categories, based on in-depth interviews with directors
and senior managers in 52 enterprises in ten industries in France, Atamer (1993)
found that firms differed in their perceptions of the impact of the creation of the
single European market. The impetus to develop European-level marketing and
production varied across sectors: respondents in the agro-chemical and food sec-
tors anticipated a strong impact, and hence the need for a European response;
those in paper, printing and plastics, currently perceived as essentially national
markets, anticipated little impact, and accordingly had plans to formulate a
European response in only a few specialist sub-segments; in machine tools,
already perceived as European in scope, little further impact was anticipated.
The process of constructing a European economy is driving industrial
sectors towards European-level production and/or marketing strategies at varying
speed. Reinterpreting the ‘Porterian’ taxonomy in the light of economic and
market integration, in some industries the multi-domestic category is no longer
feasible. The ‘domestic’ market and the ‘domestic’ scale of production are now
regional: Europe is the new ‘domestic’ context. But neither are such industries
necessarily becoming global: they might be appropriately categorized in
Porterian terms as ‘multi-regional’. Ruigrok and Van Tulder (1995), in arguing
that regionally focused internationalization strategies dominated globalization
during the 1990s, suggest a similar conclusion.
In sum, Europe exists as a distinct economic space for a growing number
of industries and enterprises. It is analytically useful to differentiate the
Eurocompany from the global corporation. But empirically this can be more
readily discerned in some industries than in others; it is also more apparent in
the organization of the business operations of some firms than in others. The
implication for the development of transnational industrial relations arrange-
ments in Europe is, first, that they will tend to be European rather than global
in scope and, second, that they will be more evident in some sectors and inter-
national firms than in others.
3 EUROPEAN COMPANY CHARACTERISTICS
WHICH TRANSCEND NATIONAL BORDERS
From below, an important source of differentiation between European MNCs is
the variety of national institutional forms within which they are located.
Societal contingency approaches, which constitute the prevailing orthodoxy,
insist that enterprises are primarily shaped by these nationally specific features.
Under the societal approach proposed by Maurice et al. (1986), which is
462 International Human Resource Management