Introduction and Overview

Large multinational corporations (MNCs) have aroused the curiosity of researchers for many decades. While the MNC phenomenon can be defined remarkably simply — a firm that controls production assets in more than three countries, for example — its implications are far-reaching. A subfield of economics has grown up around the observation that the raison d’être of MNCs is their ability to internalise international transactions (Hymer, 1960/1976). In political economics, MNCs constitute a fundamental challenge to principles of national sovereignty (Servan-Schreiber, 1967). And in the field of management, MNCs represent the special case of organisations that span heterogeneous organisational environments (Westney, 1994).