What happened to the transnational? The emergence of the neo-global corporation

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Mees-Buss, Jacqueline; Welch, Catherine; Westney, D. Eleanor
• 署名单位: University of Sydney; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS STUDIES
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2506
• DOI: 10.1057/s41267-019-00253-5
• 发表日期: 2019
• 页码: 1513-1543
• 关键词: case theoretic approaches; evolutionary theory; organizational change; multinational corporations (MNCs) and enterprises (MNEs); neo-global corporation; PROCESS MODEL

摘要

Bartlett and Ghoshal's transnational 'solution' for managing the MNC remains popular among scholars and practitioners alike. However, our in-depth qualitative study of Unilever, an exemplary case of a transnational, found that in the period 2000-2012 the company evolved into a very different organizational form with a distinct set of characteristics. We call this the neo-global corporation. In explaining how and why this transformation occurred, we turn to organizational evolutionary theory, and use our case to generate a multi-cycle process model of MNC evolution. Given the dynamism of the MNC and its environments, we anticipate that the neo-global will also eventually transform, and call for more organization-level case studies of MNCs in future international business research.