ABSTRACT
Organizations and their policies should be contextualized in order to describe and to explain their characteristics and actual behaviour. The basis of globalization and Europeanization are also endogenous processes that start as innovations in different types of organizations. A. M. Pettigrew and R. Whipp distinguish between the internal and the external context of an organization. The internal context consists of resources, capabilities, culture and politics. The main dimensions of the external context are economic or business, political and social characteristics. From a theoretical perspective the link between organizations and globalization has an analogy to the local/global debate in the social sciences, particularly in organization studies. The consensus in this debate is that the analytical focus in research should combine the local/micro level with wider structural constraints and resources that shape the process of organizational reproduction or 'ordering'. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
