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With Reference to Bp Plc’s (British Petroleum’s) Strategies Analyse the Possibility That It Is Old Fashioned to Consider the Influence of the Firm’s Home Country’s Institutions and Culture.

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Globalisation is supposed to make national cultures and institutions more homogenous. With reference to BP plc’s (British Petroleum’s) strategies analyse the possibility that it is old fashioned to consider the influence of the firm’s home country’s institutions and culture.

Introduction

In this assignment I will attempt to explore the concept that despite the spread and influence of the globalization of business and industries on our world’s economies and cultures, a large multinational firm is still influenced in a fundamental way by its home country’s institutions and culture. I will illustrate this discussion with an analysis of the strategies employed by the multinational energy company BP plc (formally British Petroleum). …show more content…

We can observe that British cultural dimensions reflect low power distance tolerance, high individuality, high masculinity, low tolerance to uncertainty and a short term orientation.

BP plc. (British Petroleum)

When considering which international firm to use as a case study I was curious to apply this discussion to an industry and firm which is a product of the greatest possible degree of globalisation. In a world society with a hydrocarbon economy I find it hard to conceive of an industry more global than that of energy production and thus a multinational oil company.

BP plc, unsurprisingly, is a British company. It was founded in 1908 and owes its early prosperity to exploitation of Iranian (formally Persian) oilfields, where it continued to operate until the revolution in Iran in 1979. Although having lost access to the Iranian oilfields, BP plc had expanded operations to the North Sea and Alaska during the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1980s the British government sold off its holdings in the company under the privatization drive. At the end of the decade the company underwent severe corporate restructuring and downsizing. In the 1990s BP plc undertook several corporate acquisitions which resulted in BP becoming the second largest oil company at that time. Moving forward to the present day, according to the Forbes Global 2000

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