Abstract
This Introduction discusses the contrast between, on the one hand, the current popularity of addressing MNC organization in knowledge terms and, on the other, the lack of adequate understanding of many of the causal mechanisms and contextual factors in relations between knowledge processes and organizational factors. A number of the relevant research challenges are identified, and it is clarified how the five articles in this Focused Issue addresses some of these.
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Notes
As signaled by the recent conferment of the 2003 Palgrave Macmillan/Journal of International Business Studies Decade Award to Bruce Kogut and Udo Zander for their article, Knowledge of the Firm and the Evolutionary Theory of the Multi-National Corporation (Kogut and Zander, 1993).
This is not to say that the market failure approach of internalization theory and transaction cost economics theory have provided very detailed comparative treatments of issues of organizational control, but at least these issues are more clearly framed and conceptualized than in knowledge-based approaches.
These gaps are not necessarily problems of complete neglect, and they are not absolute. The literature on the ‘differentiated MNC’ is, in fact, characterized by paying considerable attention to organizational mechanisms (e.g., Hedlund, 1986; Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1986, 1989; Birkinshaw, 1996; Gupta and Govindarajan, 1991, 1994, 2000; Holm and Pedersen, 2000; Foss and Pedersen, 2002, 2003). However, even in this literature the organizational dimension of MNC knowledge processes is not addressed, conceptualized and theorized in any coherent and systematic manner.
It is perhaps somewhat overlooked today that the theme of MNC-specific knowledge comes prior to the advent of explicitly knowledge-based approaches to the MNC in the 1990s.
The dominant knowledge-based approach to the MNC may therefore be a continuation with a different twist of existing themes in the MNC field rather than a radical theoretical discontinuity (as argued by Tallman, 2003).
Cf. also Kogut and Zander's (1992) observation that much work on organizational learning (flows) has neglected organizational knowledge (stocks).
Control variables are those that can be set quickly (in principle, instantaneously) at the various values within their feasible ranges, while state variables are those that change under the influence of the control variables.
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Foss, N., Pedersen, T. Organizing knowledge processes in the multinational corporation: an introduction. J Int Bus Stud 35, 340–349 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400102
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400102