Towards A Prospectus…
Working title: “The Development of a
Multinational in Time and Space:
A Case Study of Mahindra Tractors”
Inspiration
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Pasco County Fair – It rained, what shall I do?
Look at all those tractors!
Tractors from India?!
How can I make sense of this discovery?
Novelty:
– An India-based transnational
– Foreign investment in the U.S.
– Tractors: an unlikely 3rd world import
Some facts about Mahindra Tractors
• 1945 Mahindra begins to assemble Willys Jeep for US Army
in Asia (under license ??)
• 1963 J.V. with International Harvester
– engineering, tooling, mfg. know-how
– goes on to develop its own indigenous tractor design
• 1994 Enters U.S. Market
– Final assembly/testing in Texas and Georgia
• 1995 J.V. with FoMoCo to build Escorts in India
• 2003?
Towards a Research Question…
• How can we understand and explain this?
• How is Mahindra growing in a highly
concentrated, technologically advanced,
global industry?
• And why is it investing in the U.S. – the
heartland of farm machinery production?
• Why from a base in India?
Smaller models – this is a 3 cylinder
Quick, what can we learn about
India as a home country?
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India is highly dependent on agriculture…
In 1947, small market, all tractors imported CKD
Now it’s the world’s largest tractor market!
India has a tractor density of 10.5 tractors per
thousand hectares of Gross Cropped Area (GCA):
international average of 28/ Kha of GCA.
• Mahindra is #1 but new entrants in India: FordNew Holland (JV?) and L & T John Deere (JV?).
Look! Some regional data!
Alluvial soils of the Punjab and Haryana (beneficiaries of the Green
Revolution) are best tilled with low powered tractors while laterites
and black soils of south and west need higher powered tractors!
Low-powered
tractors
Punjab
Haryana
High-powered
Tractors of south
and west
Now we need some theory
• Start with the textbook:
– Product Life Cycle (p. 162 & 183)
– Sequential model of TNC growth (p. 191),
International strategic alliances ideas (p. 227)
– Are there any references in Dicken that I can use?
• Now let’s expand our reading list
• Time to get off the web and into the library!
So then I try Web of Science
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“tractor geography”: nothing!
Then try “tractors” – 53 hits
Many on safety/health issues, not relevant
But some are recent and worth looking at…
Reshaping the landscape: The impact and diffusion of the tractor in
American agriculture, 1910-1960, Olmstead AL, Rhode PW
JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY 61 (3): 663-698 SEP 2001
This article analyzes the revolutionary impact the tractor had on rural
America and examines the economic, technological, and institutional
factors governing the machine's diffusion. Our simultaneous-equation
regression model helps decipher the complex relationship between farm
scale and diffusion. In addition, analyzing diffusion as a capital
replacement problem reveals that the shift to the new technology was far
more rapid than what has generally been thought and provides anew
perspective on the long co-existence of both horses and tractors on
farms.
Eureka! We have this one!
• The diffusion of tractors on the Canadian prairies: The threshold
model and the problem of uncertainty Lew B. EXPLORATIONS IN
ECONOMIC HISTORY 37 (2): 189-216 APR 2000
• The diffusion of tractors during the late 1920s proceeded more slowly
than predicted by the threshold model. This lag is reinterpreted as a
failure of the threshold model to incorporate farmers' expectations of
future prices. Volatility in wheat prices and falling tractor prices are
shown to make delaying a tractor purchase a rational decision for
wheat farmers in Saskatchewan in the late 1920s. The pattern of
diffusion is better explained by a threshold model modified to include
uncertainty. (C) 2000 Academic Press.
• Not in library! ILL
• Debating farm power: draft animals,
tractors, and the United States Department
of Agriculture, Ellenberg GB
• AGRICULTURAL HISTORY 74 (2):
545-568 SPR 2000
• No abstract
The changing spatial networks of large state-owned enterprises in reform-era China: A company
case study, Li XJ
TIJDSCHRIFT VOOR ECONOMISCHE EN SOCIALE GEOGRAFIE 93 (4): 383-396 2002
Abstract:
In the past two decades China's transition from a planned economy to a market-oriented
economy with enterprise reform - targeting an increase of enterprise autonomy and
improvement of productive efficiency - has resulted in many changes in spatial networks of
large state-owned enterprises. Detailed data from interviews with China's largest agricultural
machinery company, China First Tractor Group Corporation Ltd, reveal that the density of
networks was being strengthened. Except in sales and material supply, networks in
management, technology and other types of material linkages were spatially expanding. Behind
these changes were many political and economical factors. Personal relationships or guanxi
only played a secondary role. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China experienced different
mechanisms from the chaebols in South Korean and Chinese business in other Asian countries
in networks formation and evolution. While the changing patterns of spatial networks in general
favoured SOEs,
their negative effect of shrinking the market area cannot be ignored.
Eureka! We’ve got this one!
Rural Masculinity in Transition - Gender Images in Tractor Advertisements
BRANDTH B JOURNAL OF RURAL STUDIES 11 (2): 123-133 APR 1995
The article investigates stability and change in images of masculinity in a
technologically well-developed agriculture. By analysing tractor advertisements, it is
shown how agricultural machinery is a male arena, and how tractors represent many
qualities important to rural men and their masculine identity. The article also shows
how technology and masculinity are mutually and simultaneously constructed. The
users, the men farmers, give the tractor gender, and the tractor makes the farmers
into real men. As the tractor is becoming computerized and more comfortable, new
images of masculinity are in the process of evolving. The ideal of the farmer as a
strong, dirty, manual mechanic is giving way to a more business-like masculinity. A
question is whether the traditional, hegemonic type is being replaced, reconstructed
or whether the two types will coexist peacefully, as variation in the meaning of
gender is a general feature of late-modern culture.
Now let’s try GeoBase
• Tractor
• India and development, India and
multinational, India and industrial, India
and transnational
'Appropriating' technology? Tractor owners, brokers, artisans and farmers
in rural Bangladesh. Lewis,D.J.
Journal of International Development. 1996. 8(1), pp 21-38.
Although tractors have long been regarded by policy makers in
Bangladesh as being technologically 'inappropriate' to local conditions,
they have nevertheless been in use in Comilla District for several decades.
The failure of cooperative institutional arrangements for farm
mechanization in the 1960s has stimulated local rural entrepreneurs to
establish their own custom ploughing arrangements. This is a response to
a continuing draught power shortage and the needs of farmers to achieve a
swift turnaround time between harvesting rain-fed paddy and planting
the increasingly profitable potato crop. This type of arrangement forms
part of wider entrepreneurial service delivery systems which are becoming
increasingly important in rural Bangladesh, where small-scale agriculture
interacts with 'lumpy' technological inputs.
Need ILL for this one
What is in Eureka?
• Nothing explicitly on agricultural
machinery
• What about multinationals based in third
world countries?
• Try TNC/MNE AND Third
World/Developing as key word combos
• Transnational corporations in world development:
third survey / United Nations Centre on
Transnational Corporations. -- Publisher New
York : United Nations, 1983
• Multinational managers and poverty in the Third
World / Lee A. Tavis, editor. -- Notre Dame, Ind. :
University of Notre Dame Press, c1982
• Transnational corporation linkages in developing
countries : the case of backward linkages via
subcontracting : a technical paper / United
Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations.
New York : United Nations, 1981
Now let’s check the web for more
applied/empirical work
• Google on Mahindra
– all promotional/advertising/farmer testimonies
– No use to me
• Try Google on Mahindra AND “case study”
• Wow!
• http://www.srijansolutions.com/october02/ermcase.asp
• ERP Case Study: “Going Strong, The SAP Way ”
• A case study of ERP enabled business process change
at automotive giant Mahindra & Mahindra
• This is a case study, apparently by Indian management
consultants (SAP), on the implementation of ERP at
Mahindra, explaining a major strategic change
(Business Process Reengineering (BPR) initiative)
which started as early as 1991. What is ERP?
“Enterprise resource planning” attempts to integrate all
departments and functions across a company onto a
single computer system that can serve all those
different departments' particular needs.
http://www.cio.com/research/erp/edit/erpbasics.html
Remember the goal (mandate)
• I am writing a ten page paper not a book!
• It must investigate a problem of geographical
relevance, that develops some aspect of industrial
location, the behaviour of firms, the development
of industries in space or the globalization of an
economic activity.
• Use course concepts…
• integrating geography and industry…
• …and support all this with some data
Drafty outline to guide work
• Intro
• Research question:
– How can we understand and contextualize the growth
and restructuring of Mahindra Tractor in terms of the
theory of multinational firm development?
• Method: A case study to illustrate theory
• Theory: Product Life Cycle with a twist
– Role of home country conditions
– Technology transfer via licensing/JV
– Role of host country conditions: U.S./Uganda!
Drafty Outline (concluded)
• Empirical section
– Explain how Mahindra development conforms to
theoretical expectations
– PLC/home country/tech transfer/host country expansion
• Conclusion: What have I learned?
– What do I want to teach my reader at the end of the
piece? Is this what I promised in the intro?
• References (I think that I have enough to start; are
they all available?)
What to do now?
• Library work/find and photocopy
– IL loans must be requested now!
• Read, read, read to fill in blanks
• More library work inspired by reading
• Revise outline in light of mandate & reading,
iterative process
• Think about data, presentation and analysis to
support qualitative stuff.
• Time to think about that working title….
Working title: “The Development of a
Multinational in Time and Space:
A Case Study of Mahindra Tractors”
“Small Wonders: How Mahindra
Tractors is Becoming a Global
Competitor from an Indian Base”
If I knew what I was doing…
• this wouldn’t be research!
• But I know I am making progress in an
iterative learning and creation exercise.
• It all starts with inspiration from real world
observation informed by abstract concepts
and theory that give us words to describe
what we see and feel and want to teach to
others.