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The paper presents a critique of organizational theories that is based upon Robert Dahl’s famous definition: ‘A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do’. This definition highlights the fact that appreciating ‘power’ often demands knowledge not only about what B does but also about what B would otherwise do. Organizational theorists, it is argued, lacked such knowledge. Instead, they relied upon untested and ideologically biased assumptions concerning what B would otherwise do. Reviewing major conceptualizations of power in organizational theory, the paper unravels and categorizes six underlying assumptions of this sort. Then it goes on to promote an alternative, empirically-grounded and emically-oriented strategy for dealing with this issue. This strategy, it is argued, offers a new and less problematic research path with which to pursue the different theoretical interests in the field.

This paper presents an ethnographic study of the Israeli-Palestinian subsidiary of a multinational hi-tech corporation. Critiquing the tendency of globalization theorists to conceptualize multinational corporations (MNCs) solely in terms of their impact on their external environment, this paper looks inward and examines the ideological and practical constituents of the transnational regime of consciousness as expressed through what management titles 'the one-company approach'. We argue that this regime lays foundations for a transnational 'imagined community' which does not rival the national one, but internalizes it, creating an arena of discretionary power for managers: deciding when to activate and when to suppress nationality in the global organizational universe. This study analyzes the relationship between transnationalism and nationalism inside the organization, and its implications for understanding MNCs' role in globalization.

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