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Based on a detailed study of the competitor analysis (CA) systems in three large companies, this paper examines the assessments of the formal CA system by its members and its major users, the uses to which CA is put, and the organizational systems by which the function attempts to improve its contribution and strengthen its role.

Changing models of multinational enterprise (MNE) organization over the last three decades of the twentieth century are surveyed and their theoretical underpinnings examined. The potential of these theories for understanding the future evolution of organizations in international business is assessed. An appendix gives details of the basic models of formal MNE structure identified in the 1960s and 1970s, which are still relevant.

Bartlett and Ghoshal's transnational 'solution' for managing the MNC remains popular among scholars A u t h o r a c c e p t e d m a n u s c r i p t

Building on the neo‐institutional organizational translation approach and on interlingual translation studies, we undertake an historical case study of the movement of Japanese organizational practices to the USA from the 1970s through the mid‐1990s. Both American and Japanese translators struggled to bring Japanese management models into the USA, reversing the dominant translation flow and bridging wide differences between the sending and receiving contexts. We use the translation ecology approach to look at the interactions over time between translators, translations, and translation processes studied separately in much translation research. Our paper makes two contributions to research on organizational translation. First, it develops more precise and theoretically‐based categorizations of the elements of translation ecology – translators, translations, and translation processes. Second, it challenges the generalizability of the decontextualization/disembedding and recontextualization/re‐embedding processes that are widely accepted as a necessary process in moving management models and practices across contexts.