Response to Kay:'chandlerism in post-war Europe: strategic and structural change in France, Germany and the united kingdom, 1950-1993: a comment

摘要

Kay (2002) offers the following subtitle to his comment: 'The curious case of the persistent conglomerate'. It is a good choice. His analysis of both American and our own European data suggests a persistence with conglomerate diversification strategies that is surprising to orthodox interpretations of the resource-based view of the firm. He points out that the strategic stability we found amongst our European related diversifiers (Whittington et al., 1999) may be exaggerated by a broad categorization that obscures instability around the more finely defined related-constrained and related-linked diversification strategies. Kay (2002) argues too that unrelated conglomerate strategies may be more persistent than usually recognized partly because of their attractions as hedges against technological risk. He therefore invites us to reanalyse strategic persistence amongst our large European firms both according to different strategy categories and in the light of sectoral variations in technological intensity. This is an invitation worth pursuing. Conglomerates remain a substantial phenomenon empirically, accounting for about one-fifth of large American firms in the 1980s (Markides, 1996) and a quarter of large European firms in the 1990s (Whittington et al., 1999). They are also challenging theoretically, contradicting dominant understandings of the resource-based view. Conglomerates are both too important and too challenging to leave as simply 'curious'. The reanalysis that follows reveals a persistence to conglomerate strategies in line with the kind of re-evaluation that Kay (2002) is calling for. However, contrary to Kay (1982, 2002), these conglomerate strategies turn out not to be particularly concentrated in technologically risky sectors--rather the reverse. We shall offer an alternative explanation that extends the orthodox resource-based view both by emphasizing the value of corporate managerial resources and by allowing for headquarter costs. Conglomerates survive because they achieve a balance between headquarter costs and corporate value creation that is equivalent to that of related-constrained diversifiers and superior to that of related-linked diversifiers.