In SvD 19 April 2013, Näringsliv.
Conflict and powerplay between Volvo Cars and Geely.
Text & Photo © CM Cordeiro 2013
‘Five conflicts stirring Volvo in China’
Just recently this headline in war fonts headed the front page of the business section of one of Sweden’s most respected morning news papers. It was obvious that something had changed.
As one of many who keep a keen interest in the economic and geographic spatial reconfigurations of the global automobile industry, I did not expect a smooth process of acquisition of Volvo Cars by Geely from 2010 onwards.
Research literature charts a five times more likely narrative of a failed attempt at mergers and acquisitions than one of success. In the case of the Swedish then American owned Volvo Cars being acquired by Chinese Geely, language, culture, values and outlook on life per se are but the tip of the ice-berg to the multiple foundational layers of differences that need to be disentangled in this corporate marriage.
In studying Chinese and Swedish leadership and management styles, a field of research that I’ve worked with since 2004 (Cordeiro-Nilsson 2009), to say that China and Sweden have different cultures, is perhaps an appeal too much towards lex parsimoniae, where culture is here defined as a set of values, both explicit and implicit, shared by a collective of people with a shared ideology or mental framework that manifests itself in material action.
The overall picture is far more complex than what the media can at any one point in time represent. What is reflected in the media is often the result of much polishing and trimming of editorials and underlying narratives. And what is happening between Volvo Cars and Geely as reflected in the Swedish media, is but a synchronic snap-shot of a process that is inherently longitudinal in character. Organizational relations are ongoing dialogic processes that can be assessed in a more balanced perspective when placed in the context of a longitudinal timeframe, of years and decades past and what is also to come. As such, media representations of Volvo Cars – Geely relations need to be understood in the context of the larger socio-economic and political relations that have been built over time between their organizations, between Sweden and China.
Continue reading “Organization identity and the dialogic process of recreating corporate values”
