Preface: Dominance, best practice and globalisation

Summary

The chapters in this section examine the ideas of dominance and best practice, the tendency for prescriptions for ways of working or organising business to emerge as pre-eminent standards that all organisations should follow because they offer the universal benefit of superior performance. The idea of ‘dominance’ is employed within the SSD framework to check two tendencies within the bipolar thinking around convergence and divergence between countries.

First, within the divergence camp is the idea that societies face each other with equivalence: equally efficient and effective ways of organising. If this were the case, progress and change would be difficult to explain. By introducing the idea of ‘dominance’ such equality is rejected; instead, societies face each other with both difference and relative strengths, and some societies evolve techniques or practices that are (for a period) celebrated as ‘modern’, ‘superior’ or ‘best practice’. These are paraded by consultants and academics as new paradigms or concepts for organising work and management, whether scientific management, just-in-time production or the flexible firm. The problem with a simple equivalence position – the United Kingdom and France have different ways of doing business – is that it ignores a ranking process evident at the system level: capitalist competition naturally places companies (and countries) against each other, and so the system part of the SSD model introduces inequality.

Furthermore, from a variety of capitalism or societal effects approach, one cannot explain diversity as producing diffusion of ideas from one society to another and an appetite for new ideas about management or working.