Survival of the biggest: Business policy, managerial discourse, and uncertainty in a global business alliance

By virtue of their crossing national and cultural borders as a matter of normal practice and growth, transnational corporations' internal arrangements are constitutive of institutional, commercial, and cultural transnational flows simultaneously. This article examines ethnographically a visible instance of such growth, in the formation of a "global strategic alliance" between an American and a French advertising agency. The article illustrates how certain managerial notions (for example, globalization, flexibility, customer orientation) are employed as "regulating" tools within the corporation; they are self-consciously adopted by managers for purposes of reducing uncertainty in the face of rapid institutional growth. The author then discusses how the managerial terminology employed by corporate executives in this instance are representatives in a transnationalizing lexicon of managerial culture.