A Critical View of Theories of the Multinational Enterprise

It is conventional to trace the origins of the modern theory of the multinational firm to the doctoral dissertation by Stephen Hymer, written in 1960 and eventually published in 1979. The strands of the theory, however, go back much further, to Coase (1937), Kaldor (1937) and Robinson (1931, 1934). More immediately, Hymer drew heavily on the work of Bain (1956) and Dunning (1958). Current developments suggest a trend towards a general theory of the firm, encompassing the multinational enterprise as a special case (Buckley, 1983).