How can a multinational company manage to keep a global cultural identity while being locally integrated ? Case study of Mérieux NutriSciences

The Multinational Corporations (MNC) are growing beyond cultural frontiers and it is about making people from different countries and cultural background work together (Hofstede, 1983). The use of religion as a rallying subject can be compared to the use of corporate culture in a multinational, as corporate culture is the way people are interacting and directing their actions. Although this corporate culture is supposed to be coherent among the global group, it is constantly challenged by the local national culture. Corporate culture is asking for homogenization and national culture for fragmentation (Friedman, 1990). What are the best practices in order to ensure a good global coherency among the subsidiaries while allowing each of them to be locally integrated? This is the reason why I decided to focus my study on “How can a multinational company manage to keep a global cultural identity while being locally integrated?” The subject is not new, and international business researches have been focussing on MNCs and how well they were performing since their great expansion in the 20th century. In the theory, going on international markets should lead to substantial benefits as MNCs can use other markets for hedging and reduce risks or realize economies of scales (Vermeulen & Barkema, 2002). However, Vermeulen and Barkema (2002) emphasise the fact that even if the potential gain of internationalization seems to have found an agreement among theoreticians, the theory that would confirm that it is always the case is quite mixed. Understanding what makes the success of certain MNCs and the difficulties of others is an important topic. MNCs have one thing in common: they are all active in more than one country. However, the rest of their definition will be parameters that can be adapted in function of strategy, competition, environment, etc. Their ability to adapt to other countries must be specifically studied. Cultural diversity influences MNC’s performance in different ways. Gomez-Mejia and Palich (1997) studied MNCs and the impact of cultural heterogeneity. It came out that in some proportion cultural diversity will affect positively or negatively production synergies, innovation, market responses, interpersonal dynamics, organizational control systems, human resources programs, etc. How the management can make those influences positives and use it as a real long-term competitive advantage?