Globalisierung und Wandel internationaler Unternehmen

In the globalization discourse the relation between the change of companies as business organizations and the diagnosed overall globalization process often remains unclear. Three different analytic levels of this problem are distinguished: (1) the relation between globalization and company internationalization, (2) the relation between international companies as a whole and their internationally distributed units as sub-organizations and (3) the relation between the internationalization of companies and their overall change as companies. Based on the example of the German automobile industry three dominant research programs are revisited (international automobile research, sociology of organizations and management sociology on international companies) and the conceptual framework of company-(internationalization)profiles is presented. It is argued that the specific dynamics of the German Big Three Volkswagen, BMW and Mercedes-Benz in the 1990s has to be interpreted as the coincidence of fundamental changes in headquarters, plants and the international division of labor between them.