Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Organization Theory - 31 (International Environment in Business)


In the last blog, we looked at the general environment view of the organization, in today's blog we look at a larger view - the international environment and the elements that would be part of it.

We could visualize the international organization in the following manner:


In the fast paced global world of today, managers cannot afford to just be limited to the general environment of an organization which generally operates within a national boundary. Today's businesses are always getting global. We have numerous companies opening up their manufacturing set up in China, and the software giant’s their offices in India. These trends come in with their own complexity. Such international context of the organization also get along with it the numerous treaties, etc that generally rule the international business environment. Let’s understand with an example:

Consider the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, (). Managers would need to be aware of the specific ways in which these changes might affect and are already affecting their inter-organizational network and their organization. 

As soon as an organization decides to expand its activities beyond the boundaries of its home nation, it will interact with representatives of organizations from other nations - joint venture partners, consumer groups, tariff collecting agencies, tax authorities all these will be part of the organization's network. Even before the organization enters international market or exchanges, it would have to face competition not just with in the international market but by firms that entre the organization's domestic markets from abroad!

Managers would have to broaden themselves in a way that more local aspects of the inter-organizational network are taken care of. This is pretty important and we have multiple cases where organizations ignoring such local flavors have had to pay a heavy price. In essence, organizations dealing in the international environment have to - "Think global, act local"

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