Tested in South Africa when US multinationals were facing diverse pressures from stockholders, governments and consumers to leave, the research provides a prism to isolate how different stakeholders' actions influenced multinationals' behaviours. Detailed analyses of subsidiary-level archival data over a period of four crucial years revealed that the multinationals engaged in diverse forms of leaving reflecting their involvements, strategies and stakeholders' influences. The research, the first to test which stakeholders' strategies, including boycotts and sanctions, influenced multinationals and which did not, and to identify their effects on multinationals' behaviours, has enormous implications for policy makers, managers and social activists.
What makes a country attractive to foreign investors? To what extent do conditions of governance and politics matter? This book provides the most systematic exploration to date of these crucial questions at the nexus of politics and economics. Using quantitative data and interviews with investment promotion agencies, investment location consultants, political risk insurers, and decision makers at multinational corporations, Nathan Jensen arrives at a surprising conclusion: Countries may be competing for international capital, but government fiscal policy--both taxation and spending--has little impact on multinationals' investment decisions. Although government policy has a limited ability to determine patterns of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows, political institutions are central to explaining why some countries are more successful in attracting international capital. First, democratic institutions lower political risks for multinational corporations. Indeed, they lead to massive amounts of foreign direct investment. Second, politically federal institutions, in contrast to fiscally federal institutions, lower political risks for multinationals and allow host countries to attract higher levels of FDI inflows. Third, the International Monetary Fund, often cited as a catalyst for promoting foreign investment, actually deters multinationals from investment in countries under IMF programs. Even after controlling for the factors that lead countries to seek IMF support, IMF agreements are associated with much lower levels of FDI inflows.
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.
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.
How multinationals contribute, or don't, to global prosperity Globalization and multinational corporations have long seemed partners in the enterprise of economic growth: globalization-led prosperity was the goal, and giant corporations spanning the globe would help achieve it. In recent years, however, the notion that all economies, both developed and developing, can prosper from globalization has been called into question by political figures and has fueled a populist backlash around the world against globalization and the corporations that made it possible. In an effort to elevate the sometimes contentious public debate over the conduct and operation of multinational corporations, this edited volume examines key questions about their role, both in their home countries and in the rest of the world where they do business. Is their multinational nature an essential driver of their profits? Do U.S. and European multinationals contribute to home country employment? Do multinational firms exploit foreign workers? How do multinationals influence foreign policy? How will the rise of the digital economy and digital trade in services affect multinationals? In addressing these and similar questions, the book also examines the role that multinational corporations play in the outcomes that policymakers care about most: economic growth, jobs, inequality, and tax fairness.
We have long been told that corporations rule the world, their interests seemingly taking precedence over states and their citizens. Yet, while states, civil society, and international organizations are well drawn in terms of their institutions, ideologies, and functions, the world's global corporations are often more simply sketched as mechanisms of profit maximization. In this book, John Mikler re-casts global corporations as political actors with complex identities and strategies. Debunking the idea of global corporations as exclusively profit-driven entities, he shows how they seek not only to drive or modify the agendas of states but to govern in their own right. He also explains why we need to re-territorialize global corporations as political actors that reflect and project the political power of the states and regions from which they hail. We know the global corporations' names, we know where they are headquartered, and we know where they invest and operate. Economic processes are increasingly produced by the control they possess, the relationships they have, the leverage they employ, the strategic decisions they make, and the discourses they create to enhance acceptance of their interests. This book represents a call to study how they do so, rather than making assumptions based on theoretical abstractions.
Introduction to Business covers the scope and sequence of most introductory business courses. The book provides detailed explanations in the context of core themes such as customer satisfaction, ethics, entrepreneurship, global business, and managing change. Introduction to Business includes hundreds of current business examples from a range of industries and geographic locations, which feature a variety of individuals. The outcome is a balanced approach to the theory and application of business concepts, with attention to the knowledge and skills necessary for student success in this course and beyond. This is an adaptation of Introduction to Business by OpenStax. You can access the textbook as pdf for free at openstax.org. Minor editorial changes were made to ensure a better ebook reading experience. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
"Multinational Corporations in Political Environments" advances and tests a theory of why foreign corporations leave host states. Theories of international business have often ignored the complexity of corporate decisions about leaving foreign countries, generally assuming that the economic and competitive reasons that prompt multinational corporations to enter host states also explain their subsequent reasons for leaving. Alternatively, this book proposes a theory of how different stakeholdersOCO values and ethics shape multinationalsOCO strategic leaving behaviors. Tested in South Africa when US multinationals were facing diverse pressures from stockholders, governments and consumers to leave, the research provides a prism to isolate how different stakeholdersOCO actions influenced multinationalsOCO behaviors."
The accurate assessment of political risk can make the difference between success and failure for a multinational corporation, which must keep corporate objectives in sight while operating in a large number of widely varying environments. While environmental or political risk assessment has become an explicit function in many firms and is inherent in all foreign investment, the uncertainties of foreign political environments continue to pose critical problems for managers. In Managing Political Risk Assessment, Stephen J. Kobrin describes and analyzes the techniques of political risk assessment employed by U.S. multinationals. His analysis draws on organizational theory, economics, political science, and international relations. The study reveals that those charged with political risk assessment have often not been fully integrated into the core of the managerial process, information from subsidiaries is often biased, and the flow of data is poorly controlled. As a result, virtually all firms experience difficulties in using environmental assessment in planning and making decisions. Kobrin persuasively argues that the thorough integration of the assessment function into the managerial process is a necessary step, as the need for political risk assessment intensifies with the increased interaction between international business and its social and political surroundings. Political scientists, institutional economists, managers, and students and teachers of international business will all profit from Kobrin’s excellent synthesis of knowledge in this area of scholarly interest. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1982.
