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1、THE MYTH OF THE GLOBAL CORPORATION1-Paul N. DoremusWilliam W. KellerLouis W. PaulySimon ReichChapter 2States and Firms:Conventional Images, Complex Realities2- 1998 Princeton University PressChapter 2States and Firms:Conventional Images, Complex RealitiesThe nature of MNCs3-The idea of the global co
2、rporation is not new. Therehas long been a tendency in popular commentary to exaggeratethe rootlessness of MNCs. Nevertheless, even close observersof such firms now refer to them as transnational corporationsor multinational enterprises, as though the intimateconnections between such firms and the s
3、tates originallychartering them is now fundamentally altered.In the 1960s, George Ball predicted the imminentemergence of cosmocorp, the progenitor of a liberal globaleconomy where economic nationalism would be a thing of thepast.1 Others took the evocative title, if not the moresubtle underlying ar
4、gument, of Raymond Vernons path-breakingbook, Sovereignty at Bay, and painted a picture of a worldeconomy where national frontiers gradually ceased to havemeaning.2 Within the significant body of internationalpolitical and economic theory organized since then under therubric of interdependence, MNCs
5、 came to be viewed as theembodiment of markets that spilled ever more fluidly acrosstraditional political borders.3 Within the United States,that work was often linked to explorations of theunderpinnings of American foreign economic policy after WorldWar II.In principle, according to the dominant vi
6、ew, thatpolicy sought to bind certain national economies ever moredeeply together, initially to counteract the kinds ofinternal social and political forces that were widely seen as4-leading the world from the Great War of 1914-1918 directly toglobal war three decades later. With the emergence of the
7、Cold War, both mainstream and revisionist scholars pointed intheir own ways to outward corporate investment from theUnited States as an effective tool for building bulwarksagainst the spread of communism, especially in Europe andEast Asia. Disagreements concerning the ultimate politicaland normative
8、 implications notwithstanding, by the late 1970smany analysts as well as policy-makers were convinced that athreshold had been crossed. The conceptual line betweennational firms with international operations and truly globalfirms was now so obscure as to be invisible.But national borders were soon t
9、o make a comeback. Inthe aftermath of oil, exchange rate, and debt crises, statesreturned to center stage as they appeared to savecorporations from the unintended consequences ofinterdependence. Bailouts, nationalization, implicitsubsidies, and sectoral protectionism were the visiblemanifestations o
10、f state assistance. The idea that state-less corporations were emerging, which had in any case beensomething of an American obsession, began to fade.At the same time, students of international businessdevoted increasing attention to the emergence ofmultinational corporations outside the United State
11、s. Yearsafter J.J. Servan-Schreiber issued his famous Gaullistanalysis of economic domination by American MNCs, a5-substantial empirical literature began to develop.4 LawrenceFranko, for example, wrote about the gradual evolution ofmultinationals in Continental Europe and concluded thatsystematic di
12、fferences existed between them and theirAmerican and British analogs in the nature of their linkageswith their home states.5 He suggested, however, that like theUnited States and Britain, Continental European states mightin the future face increasing difficulty in equating theinterests of their own
13、multinationals with clearly definablenational interests. Although Frankos methods and resultswere controversial, his core argument provided the seed formuch more research on European models of multinationalbusiness.6 By the 1990s, this research provided an array ofevidence documenting striking diffe
14、rences between thebehavior of most continentally-based firms and theircounterparts in Great Britain.In Great Britain itself, an upsurge in research onmultinationals also occurred in the 1980s. The research waspartly driven by related policy questions concerning bothinward corporate investment and po
15、tential linkages betweenoutward investment and national economic decline. Buildingon the foundational work of John Dunning dating from the late1950s, John Stopford and Louis Turner, for example, completedan extensive study of British multinationals and theircompetitors at home and abroad.7 Favorably
16、 assessing the netcontribution of multinationals to the British economy, they6-concluded that multinationals had become the agents throughwhich national interdependence is played out. In thefuture, therefore, important policy issues raised by theiractivities must inevitably be addressed at the inter
17、nationallevel.8Obviously influenced by such research, work also beganto be done on the emergence and evolution of multinationalsin Japan.9 In addition, a significant literature grew up onthird world multinationals. Although it developed out of atradition of research focused on the possible consequen
18、ces ofmultinational corporate activities for host states, this newliterature tended to buttress the idea that different homeenvironments produce different sorts of multinationalcorporations.10Louis Wells pioneered such research with studies of theoutward expansion of firms from southeast Asian count
19、ries.11In general, the research documented a wide variety of reasonsfor the growth of indigenous multinationals in developingcountries, and, most importantly for present purposes, a widevariety of incentives and reactions from home-states. It didnot simply establish the fact that governmental polici
20、esdiffered on such technical matters as the licensing ofoutward investments. It also demonstrated how firms soughtto exploit or ameliorate the effects of basic political-economic structures in their home environments. Boxed in bytight regulation and an anti-big business ideology at home,7-for exampl
21、e, Indian multinationals tended to seek more thanproduction efficiencies abroad. In contrast, Hong Kong-basedfirms looked for competitive advantages in long-standingtrading relationships and sought to compensate for risingland and labor costs in their home market.In the 1990s, similar research focus
22、ed on theindustrialized world began to hint at significant behavioraldiscrepancies between firms from different countries. Onestudy noted, in particular, important differences betweenGerman firms and others based on the Continent. Where, forexample, France and the Scandinavian and Benelux countriesw
23、ere estimated to invest at home between 10 and 35 times theamount they invest abroad, German firms maintained a ratio inexcess of 80:1 in favor of domestic investments.12 In theface of such differences as well as an increase in cross-border mergers and acquisitions, European business analystswere st
24、arting to speculate on the possible emergence ofregional, as opposed to national or Anglo-Saxon corporateidentities outside of Germany. By the mid-1990s, Europeanmultinationals had become the subject of intense scrutiny inthe context of larger on the future of the European Union ina changing world e
25、conomy.13The internal European debate on such matters occurredjust as Americans once again argued among themselves aboutwhether the era of the global corporation, prematurelyannounced in the 1960s, had finally arrived.14 In the8-aftermath of the Cold War, dramatic shifts were underway asformerly soc
26、ialist countries turned toward market models inthe reconstruction of their economies. This matched aheightening movement in many developing countries towardeconomic openness, including openness to foreign directinvestment. An array of acronyms-from NAFTA to APEC to WTO- began to suggest that this mo
27、vement had solid politicalroots.At the same time, intra-firm trade was accelerating andcross-border direct and portfolio investments weremushrooming. In certain industrial sectors, especiallypharmaceuticals and telecommunications, a rise in cross-border mergers and acquisitions, strategic alliances,
28、 andtrumpeted international redeployments of corporate resourcessuggested a qualitative change in the nature of multinationalcorporate operations.15 Careful comparative business studiessuggested that receding national divergence might be still beimportant in industries characterized by regulatedcomp
29、etition.16 But in many industrial sectors, the globalcorporation seemed a caricature no more.Global-local politicsWithin the contemporary field of internationalrelations, systematic study of the linkages between9-international political orders at the broadest conceptuallevel and global business firm
30、s began some twenty years ago.It was then that Robert Gilpin related the global spread ofAmerican firms after 1945 to the international politicalposition of the United States. As Gilpin summarized hisview:The necessary condition for the rapid growth ofmultinational corporations over the past several
31、decades has been the steady emergence of the UnitedStates as the worlds dominant power. This processbegan in the latter part of the nineteenth century,when American industry began to supersede itsEuropean rivals. As American power grew, the UnitedStates created an increasingly large sphere ofinfluen
32、ce. This expansionism reached its zenith inthe decades after World War II: Following itsvictory in war and in response to the Sovietchallenge, the United States created in its ownsecurity interests the pattern of relations amongthe non-Communist countries within which Americanmultinational corporati
33、ons have flourished.17Gilpins argument provided a provocative riposte to thethen-common assertion that a new era of international10-economic interdependence-beyond the nation-state-haddawned. But the world has changed a great deal in the pasttwo decades. At the very least, the relative decline ofAme
34、rican power, the rise of Japan and Germany, and otherchanges in the international distribution of power demand arecalibration of Gilpins original formulation.18 Morefundamentally, it is necessary to move beyond what scholarsof international relations would label a straightforwardrealist analysis tha
35、t conceptualizes states as centraldecisionmaking organizations and emphasizes their competitionfor power at the system level. An analytical framework isneeded that can take central insights from system-levelarrangements of power and combine them with political forcesat the domestic level that can in
36、 principle have vitallyimportant influences on multinational businesses.19 The keyvariables and their inter-relationship are more subtle thanrealists often allow or expect. Stephen Krasner recentlycaptured some of that subtlety as follows:If states are understood . . . as institutionalstructures or
37、polities, then the basicinstitutional structure of transnationals will beinfluenced or even determined by the institutionalcharacteristics of states.2011-Although this perspective helps to inform the analysisof MNCs, we believe that it does not go far enough. The coreinstitutions worth emphasizing i
38、n such a conceptualizationembody distinctive and durable ideologies or, as someanalysts now prefer to call them, belief-systems. We seecorporations internalizing both the basic politicalinstitutions and underlying ideological frameworks withinwhich they remain most firmly embedded. And unlike others
39、cholars who acknowledge such effects but assume that theywill inevitably recede over time, we see them as hard-wiredinto core corporate structures.21In reshaping the foundations of the internationalpolitical economy, multinational corporations are clearlymuch more important now than they were in the
40、 early decadesafter World War II.22 Intra-firm trade and foreign directinvestment, for example, have are powerful features of theinternational economy, and the activities of multinationalfirms are central in both regards. Moreover, an increasingnumber of firms cannot simply be described as national
41、firmswith international operations.23 But states-especially homestates-remain decisive. They do not just matter. Inanalytical terms, our approach remains open to thepossibility that states retain their priority with respect toother factors influencing the operating environment of themodern corporati
42、on.12-The domestic political structures within which a firminitially develops and from which it then expands may leave apermanent imprint on its strategic behavior. Adapting a termfrom electro-magnetics, economists label such a process ofmarking, hysteresis. A lagging effect after a causal forcehas
43、been removed, the implication is that the impact ofunique histories will inevitably diminish over time.24Business analysts refer in the same way and with the sameimplication to corporate inertia, path dependence, thelegacy of past choices, and administrative heritage.25Our argument and evidence raise strong doubts about theinevitable erosion of the effects of history on the corestructures and strategies of mu
