مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” Act III, Scene I, King Henry IV by William Shakespeare It is widely accepted in management science and practice today that most of multibusiness or multi-unit firms are organised as a multidivisional firm. M-form firms, as they are also called, are usually led by a corporate headquarters (CHQ) and divided into business-level management and corporate-level management. Most scholars agree that the legitimisation of a multi-unit firm derives from the corporate level’s ability to add more value to its businesses (corporate surplus), which they are not able to realise as standalone operations. For instance, Grant (2002, 90) explains this as follows: “Empirical research shows that there are no generally superior corporate strategies. The critical issue is achieving fit between the resources and capabilities of a company and its corporate strategy, organization structure and management system.

However, the question remains: How well advanced are our scholarly and policy-oriented understandings of multidivisional firms? How can firms achieve this fit? Which levers can they use to add rather than destroy value? While the phenomenon is certainly not under-researched, many of the key questions seem to occupy scholarly and managerial thinking today as much as 30 years ago. Informed by this observation, this retrospective special issue seeks to take a fresh look at influential research in the past and to shed light on these findings from today’s perspective.

Since the late 1980s, a broad research stream has discussed the management of the multidivisional firm’s corporate level (e.g. Chandler, 1991; Doz and Prahalad, 1991; Hedlund, 1986; Grant, 1996). Particularly, studies have paid attention to strategic direction (vision, mission, goals, values), the structure of the portfolio of businesses, the interplays between portfolio strategy and organisational structure, the CHQ’s value-adding roles, and the realisation of synergies across operating units. Concerning the changing roles of the centre of multidivisional firms, over the last years, we have observed waves of centralisation and decentralisation e augmenting or reducing the roles and the power of the centre (see also Ambos and Mahnke, 2010; Kunisch et al., 2014; Menz et al., 2015).