Andrea Daniel not only compares headquarters and subsidiary managers’ perceptions of a subsidiary’s role, but she analyzes the implications of perception gaps for the headquarters-subsidiary relationship.

This volume of Research in Global Strategic Management, the first under the new editorship of William Newburry, provides new perspectives on headquarters-subsidiary relationships in the context of the contemporary multinational corporation

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.

Julia Maurer offers the first comprehensive conceptual and empirical approach to the relationships between foreign subsidiaries. She develops a novel framework for the analysis of intersubsidiary relationships and applies it to the large-scale plant engineering industry. The empirical study confirms that an MNC`s strategic orientation has a considerable impact on its intersubsidiary relationships.

This book shifts the debate on knowledge transfers within multinational corporations (MNCs) back to its core: How can we increase the effectiveness of cross-boarder transfers of knowledge? Several perspectives on international knowledge flows, from control issues to cultural barriers, are integrated into a comprehensive framework. Based on a sample of leading MNCs, empirical results show which managerial mechanisms have to be implemented to increase the benefit from knowledge transfers in headquarters and subsidiaries.