This book offers the first comprehensive discussion of the foundations, applications and new directions of politics perspectives in MNCs.

This book was first published in 2011. The current financial and economic crisis has negatively underlined the vital role of multinational companies (MNCs) in our daily lives. The breakdown and crisis of flagship MNCs, such as Enron, WorldCom, Lehman Brothers, Toyota and General Motors, does not merely reveal the problems of corporate malfeasance and market dysfunction. It also raises important questions, both for the public and the academic community, about the use and misuse of power by MNCs in the wider society, as well as the exercise of power by key actors within internationally operating firms. This book examines how issues of power and politics affect MNCs at three different levels; the macro-level, the meso-level and the micro-level. This wide-ranging analysis shows not only that power matters but also how and why it matters, pointing to the political interactions of key power holders and actors within the MNC, both managers and employees.

Over the past decade, politics perspectives in international business have moved into the mainstream repertoire of research, theory development and teaching about the organisational behaviour of multinational corporations (MNCs). Politics perspectives contribute substantially to understanding the behaviour in and of MNCs in their different contexts and environments but so far these burgeoning perspectives have not been systematically and comprehensively reviewed. This book offers the first detailed overview of the theoretical foundations, methodologies and empirical applications of politics perspectives in MNCs. A group of international authors discuss twelve seminal contributions to the study of politics, power and conflict in MNCs, followed by a summary and synthesis of the literature into a comprehensive analytical framework. The book closes with a discussion of future directions in the field. This is a thorough introduction to political behaviour in MNCs written for scholars and graduate students in the fields of organisation studies and international business.

This volume covers a range of on-going and newly emerging debates in the study of multinational companies (MNCs). A key aim is to consolidate and make available in one place new conceptual, methodological and critical MNC research.

This authoritative book examines the power of multinational corporations (MNCs) to exert influence in global politics. Focusing on the actions and motivations of MNCs, it explores how they attempt to shape the political issues that affect them.

Patricia S. Mann explains our current period as a time of social transformation resulting from an 'unmooring' of women, men, and children from the nuclear family, gender relations having replaced economic relations as the primary site of social tension and change in our lives.