Enabling Conditions for Organizational Learning: A Study in International Business Ventures
type: CreativeWork
description: The significance of international business in the world economy has greatly increased since the beginning of the 1980s, mainly as a consequence of the expansion in the flow of foreign direct investment. Declining costs of transportation and advances in information technology have allowed transnational corporations to spread the production of goods and services around the world. Increasing competition has represented a continuous pressure on organizations for faster or better adaptation to a changing environment. Despite these pressures for change, organizations also need some stability in order to make sense of both the direction they want to take, and the actions which can help them to keep the course. Knowledge about an organization's internal affairs and its interaction with the external environment has become a main source of competitive advantage. The process by which organizations create or acquire this knowledge has been called organizational learning. This dissertation seeks to identify and discuss some key factors which facilitate the occurrence of organizational learning in International Business Ventures (IBVs), here understood as the involvement of foreign investing companies in host countries, with some degree of management that is shared between nationals of both local and foreign countries. The dissertation describes four in-depth case studies in two IBVs, one located in the UK and the other in Brazil. The first company is a subsidiary of Toshiba, which produces television and air conditioner sets for the European market. The second company is a joint venture between Toshiba and Semp, a local company, which produces television sets, VCRs and audio equipment for the Brazilian market. Due to the lack of empirical research in the field of this study, data collection and analysis followed the broad lines of the grounded theory approach. Two processes of organizational learning occurring during the last few years in each company were identified and reconst…
abstract: The significance of international business in the world economy has greatly increased since the beginning of the 1980s, mainly as a consequence of the expansion in the flow of foreign direct investment. Declining costs of transportation and advances in information technology have allowed transnational corporations to spread the production of goods and services around the world. Increasing competition has represented a continuous pressure on organizations for faster or better adaptation to a changing environment. Despite these pressures for change, organizations also need some stability in order to make sense of both the direction they want to take, and the actions which can help them to keep the course. Knowledge about an organization's internal affairs and its interaction with the external environment has become a main source of competitive advantage. The process by which organizations create or acquire this knowledge has been called organizational learning. This dissertation seeks to identify and discuss some key factors which facilitate the occurrence of organizational learning in International Business Ventures (IBVs), here understood as the involvement of foreign investing companies in host countries, with some degree of management that is shared between nationals of both local and foreign countries. The dissertation describes four in-depth case studies in two IBVs, one located in the UK and the other in Brazil. The first company is a subsidiary of Toshiba, which produces television and air conditioner sets for the European market. The second company is a joint venture between Toshiba and Semp, a local company, which produces television sets, VCRs and audio equipment for the Brazilian market. Due to the lack of empirical research in the field of this study, data collection and analysis followed the broad lines of the grounded theory approach. Two processes of organizational learning occurring during the last few years in each company were identified and reconst…
author: Drummond, Aldemir Jr
language: en
keywords: international business, transportation, Toshiba, transnational corporations
license: https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/221c9a6e-e930-477e-89fd-22c0b658d325/download
date published: 1997-02
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:24Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.78550