Strategies of MNEs’ Subsidiaries in Romania

This chapter uses information from the survey of MNE operations in Romania to assess subsidiaries’ own perceptions of their roles, motivations and capabilities. The questionnaire (and in some cases associated interviews) addressed a very wide range of issues (of which other elements are investigated in the next two chapters), and a basic aim is to evaluate these disparate aspects of behaviour and competitive evolution in terms of the key strategic motivations of MNEs that are central to our analysis. To facilitate this we sought, firstly, to categorize each case in terms of a dominant strategic status (market-seeking MS; efficiency-seeking ES; knowledge-seeking KS), so that the implications of these imperatives (in terms of competitive scope and behaviour) could be investigated. The procedure for this classification is described in the Appendix and the outcome analysed in the next section.