This volume assesses the situation for multinationals at the beginning of the 1990s, bringing together contributions from academics recognized as world leaders in the field and from practitioners with wide experience in international management. Drawing on perspectives from Europe, the USA and Japan, the contributors outline the shape of the global firm of the future. They focus squarely on the development of the corporation as a whole, rather than on the narrow management of individual foreign subsidiaries, and they also explore the specific implications for areas such as strategic planning systems, financial management, information systems and R & D management.

This book integrates the work of economists, management scientists and business historians. It applies the related concepts of transaction costs, internalisation, corporate strategy and market structure to explain the historical process of corporate growth in the international economy. Each chapter is written by a scholar who has specialized in a particular aspect of the growth of international business.

This book presents a world survey of multinational firms in the key parts of the service sector. The service sector has grown greatly in importance in recent years in many countries of the world. Many of the key parts of the service sector that are growing most rapidly are dominated by large multinational firms and this has important implications for the future shape of the world economy and for closer economic integration between countries. In addition, the particular style and operations of multinational firms in one sector can provide useful lessons for multinational enterprise in other sectors. The book examines the operations and the style of the firms considered and explores how they dominate their sectors. It charts how the firms have developed, discusses the critical issues facing them; and suggests how present trends may continue in the future.

The growth and proliferation of multinational companies has both imposed new responsibilities on and offered new opportunities to, the men who represent them around the world. This book dissects the functional responsibilities of the manager abroad in the light of his relationships with the home office and with his local environment, and explores the consequences of various types of relationships. The discussion is a practical one drawing heavily on a wealth of experience and actual case studies.

Government intervention can reduce the profits of multinational enterprises. These interventions also increase uncertainty and risk and distort trading and intra-firm sourcing patterns. The focus of this book is a corporate survival plan that describes how a multinational can monitor its exposure to intervention and then seek to reduce it. It reports on the successes and failures of firms as they implement various global management systems and recommends a general strategy. Such a strategy will allow multinationals to continue foreign investment with the longer term horizons that will benefit both the firms and their host countries.

The main thrust of Part 1 is to give some understanding of the concept of ‘global competition’. In doing so, the chapters rely heavily on industrial studies. Part 2 deals with two different aspects of this change viewed from two different perspectives. The one is economic and more macro: the other political and social and more micro, being concerned with the way in which companies have to utilize their various organisational units and integrate information on a fragmented environment into a strategic whole. Part 3 deals specifically with technology, as the particular segment of the environment which often has the largest impact on future strategies. In Part 4 the perspective of global competition is applied at industry, country and company levels and it is shown that this perspective adds new dimensions to old problems. The final parts address the problem of management in global competition.