This report is concerned with the London-based organisation, Balfour Beatty Plc. Balfour Beatty is involved in four major areas of business: construction, engineering, railways, and investment. The paper will be specifically concerned with the challenges faced by the organisation in regard to globalisation. The impact of globalisation on Balfour Beatty will be analysed with reference to various aspects of management theory. It has been claimed that "the work of management is to create organizations that work, in the sense that they use resources to create value" (Boddy, 2008, p. 7). Managers seek to increase the value of their organisations' products and services because value is the source of consumer satisfaction as well as profitability.
The assessment of Balfour Beatty's current status will be based largely on the use of SWOT analysis (i.e., the analysis of the organisation's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats). Reference will also be made to the methods of analysis known as PESTEL (the evaluation of political, economic, social, technological, environmental, legal factors) and Porter's Five Forces (threat of new entrants, substitutes, bargaining power of buyers, bargaining power of suppliers, and competition). Another important approach to analysing a global corporation is found in the Competing Values Framework (CVF) (see Appendix). The CVF, which was developed by Quinn and Rohrbaugh in the 1980s, is designed to incorporate the views contained in four business models: the rational goal model, the internal process model, the human resources model, and the open systems model. The logic of the CVF is found in the idea that these models are complementary to one another rather than being contradictory. In the words of Boddy (2008), "while each model adds to our knowledge of management, none is sufficient in itself - the four are complementary elements in a larger whole" (p. 43). The CVF contains a vertic...