ABSTRACT
The issue of national (or regional) specificities of organisational forms and their relatively inertial reproduction over time is entangled with the identification of organisational and behaviourial elements that make one firm 'more competent' than another at doing something, whether in the efficient exploitation of an innovation, the penetration of foreign markets, or the search for new products. In my view, these differential competencies entail more than simply the quality of the discretionary decisions of the strategic management: if it were so, one would observe much less persistence of inter-firm asymmetries and less country-specificity, given the abundant supply of international management consultants! Rather, in tune with several like-minded colleagues, I suggest that differential competencies are also hidden in the diverse sequences of organisational routines and rules of interaction with customers, suppliers, workers, bankers and so on.
