The Competitive Advantage of Development Organizations

Departing from the discussion whether there is a tendency — or a coercive force — towards convergence within the working life of the capitalist countries, forcing the enterprises to adopt similar structures and procedures across national boundaries, this article presents a brief discussion of the nature of some of the aspects of this assumed coercive force, namely the conditions of competition with which each enterprise has to cope. It is shown that analysts of capitalism with such different views as Karl Marx and Michael Porter agree that any enterprise has to be able to meet the actual productivity requirement within its own branch of industry at any point in time, if it is to survive in the market. However, it does not follow from this that there is only one way, or just a few, to cope with these requirements. Thus, starting with a simple model showing the broad scope of both the internal and the external general conditions of competition of any enterprise, we argue in favor of the importance of making all employees participate in well-organized work with a broad scope of improvement or development tasks, by means of a development organization. The thesis is that locally created development organizations within enterprises will not necessarily increase the uniformity of future developments: local variety may well be increased.