Multinational Corporations

Rubner offers an incisive study of the multinational corporation as its fortunes have waxed and waned over the years. The author traces the evolution of the modern multinational corporation, arguing that this entity is far from the all-powerful, supranational giant many have envisioned. In contrast, Rubner shows, the modern multinational is a fragile, strife-ridden business operation, often with significantly lower profit margins than smaller local or regional firms. This book provides a compelling look at the real and imagined power of the world's largest and most well-known corporations.

Since the operations manager of today is faced with global scenarios, people and cultural skills have become more critical for success than analytical tools in a global 21st century. The main themes in production and operations management are operations strategy, productivity, and quality. These themes are manipulated to serve those involved in production and operations management including employees, customers, and owners. Experienced operations managers recognize that they accomplish their goals through people, and that the skills in dealing with people are often neglected. This operations book focuses on a new type of human-centered production management designed to broaden the operations managers' thinking in the human interactions area, and to expand problem-solving processes geographically from domestic to global. This work will be of interest of CEOs and corporate and departmental executives who deal with operations and production. Individuals in academic areas dealing with management, operations management, international business, and organizational behavior will also find this book necessary reading.

At the turn of the century, questions about multinational firms' strategies as regards the forces of globalisation and of the regional and local dimensions are very much to the fore. This work examines issues concerning these topics.

This collection of essays shows the high degree of complementarity between foreign direct investment & home export, challenging the long held fear that firms investing abroad leads to a loss of employment & decline in the home country.

This study provides a timely and useful benchmark for analysis of the effects of the recently negotiated North American Free Trade Agreement on investment flows. It also presents a unified history of foreign investment in Canada, Mexico, and the United States over the twentieth century, stressing interactions among these countries and their changing policies towards inward and outward investment. Twomey analyzes economic theories of foreign investment from the perspectives of neoclassical economics and political science and places them in the context of the ongoing debate over neo-protectionist policies and the role of the United States in the global economy.

The globalization of business has ended "corporate colonialism" in international commerce, and out of this has emerged what the author calls the "global corporation." Differing in many important ways from the now obsolete "multinational corporation" it is replacing, the global corporation is actually a network of independent entrepreneurs, liberated from the control of headquarters, and thus able to implement a new vision of the overall enterprise, its competitive strategies, and how it coordinates and communicates within itself. The author carefully delineates the subtle distinctions among concepts that are often taken, mistakenly, as synonyms for globalization, such as multinationalization, and elicits the implications these distinctions have for the management of international business.

This study chronicles the unique relationship between the Federal government and the American multinational corporation, integrating it into the mainstream of American political history. It is a record of continuous adjustment on the part of both parties as each side navigated the unchartered waters of this uneasy partnership. Objectively presented, America and the Multinational Corporation provides the historical context for tracking the various presidential perspectives from Truman to Bush as well as the various congressional initiatives to redefine business-government relations in terms of corporate America's most aggressive offspring--the multinational.

It is a cliché to say that we live in a globalized world in which investment flows, communications and the operations of multinationals from all parts of the world have changed the character of the international business environment. But the easy concept of globalization poses as many questions as it answers and it is the purpose of this book to address these challenges. In Governments, Globalization, and International Business a prestigious group of international scholars explore in detail the consequences of globalization defined as the deepening structural interdependence of the world economy. In Part 1 John Dunning, Richard Lipsey, Susan Strange and Stephen Kobrin analyse these changes from different disciplinary perspectives and intellectual backgrounds. The basic question they address is what are the consequences of globalization on the nature, form, and level of domestic economic activity?. In doing so, they also consider the increasing mobility of knowledge and information, the role of international corporations, and the sovereignty of the nation state in the modern borderless world. In Part 2 the different experiences and policies of a number of economies are assessed in a series of country studies, These include the G7 countries as well as the developing East Asian economies, Latin America and smaller developed countries. In the final part John Stopford and Edward Graham stand back and look at the changing role of National and Supranational governance. In doing so they underscore a fundamental tenet of the volume, that globalization requires national governments to re-evaluate various factors of their systemic governance. Yet despite apparently convergent trends they argue there are no universal prescriptions for the way governments should respond to globalization, and the policy challenge is a more complex one than merely more or less government.

For years now, the ubiquitous business watchword has been "keep it simple." But as more and more businesses go global, keeping things simple for customers becomes increasingly complex. Managers must find new ways to deliver solutions_not just stand-alone products_to customers who expect seamless integration no matter where in the world they may be. This book gives readers the skills they need to master this new global complexity and retain their competitive advantage. Written by an internationally recognized leader in organizational design, Designing the Global Corporation helps companies identify the specific "level of internationalization" they are engaged in, from simply exporting product to managing multiple units that develop and sell product worldwide. It details the methods leading companies at various levels of globalization are using to build their business worldwide. These methods address the myriad issues that confront the modern multinational_issues defined by emerging geopolitical realities, the transformation and convergence of industries, and the strategic selection of new localities. Taken together, these methods form a framework that corporate executives, global strategists, and regional managers can use to create organizational designs that will work best for them given their company's own unique position. Based on twenty five-years of research with companies around the world, Designing the Global Corporation is the most comprehensive guide to creating organizations that can successfully compete in the global arena. It is the only book that presents solutions for both single businesses and multibusiness corporations, for both transnational and international divisions, and for beginning and experienced global managers alike.