Business as usual: the image of the corporation in the cultures of globalisation (original) (raw)
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Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to discuss economic and social issues of contemporary capitalism through the views and works of Grazia Ietto-Gillies who has a long experience of research in these fields. The issues relate to strategies of TNCs, to globalization and transnationalization, to internationalization indices, to linkages between innovation and internationalization, to uneven development, and, finally, to issues related to the economics profession and the dissemination of research in the twenty-first century. Design/methodology/approach -In-depth interview; use of relevant literature to support statements by interviewer and interviewee; qualitative analysis of issues discussed. Findings -The article links together under the same theoretical umbrella the following issues: a theory of TNCs based on strategic approach towards labour, governments and suppliers; the development of an internationalization index based on the geography of TNCs' networks; and the possible impact of internationalization on innovation. Uneven development is linked to current problems in Europe. The need and opportunity to reconsider the economics profession and the peer review system in the digitalization era is presented.
2011
Abstract Whilst the 2008 crisis provided evidence of the strong (not to say devastating) interrelations between production and finance, giving a boost to the ‘financialisation’ approach, there is a need, forty years after the initial research on transnational corporations (TNCs), to re‐explore their natureIssues that require investigation include the reshaping of internationaltrade and production, the close interactions between non‐financial TNCs and financial (bank and non‐bank) TNCs, the development of global networks, and the strength of the relationships entertained by most of these companies with ‘their’ governments. A basic hypothesis of this paper, which is focused on non‐financial TNCs, is that they cannot only bedefined by the fact that they are bigger and more internationalised than other firms. The paper argues that, on the contrary, they constitute a category of their own, based upon a centralisation of financial assets and a specific organisational structure (with the core role held by the holding company). TNCs, organised and structured as groups of enterprises, are a locus for a global valorisation of capital, where productive and financial valorisation are closely intertwined. In the context of a global macro‐economic regime of accumulation dominated by finance capital, financial logic takes on a preeminent role in the strategies of TNCs. Unfettered deregulation of financial markets and a multiplication of financial innovations (products and institutions) have given a further boost to the transformation of TNCs, which can be defined as financial groups with industrial activities.
Transnational corporations and global capitalism: reflections on the last 40 years
Critical Perspectives on International Business, 2014
Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the author's research and teaching on transnational corporations and global capitalism over the last 40 years. Design/methodology/approach-A chronological account of the changing nature of TNCs and their impacts, and the evolution of critical studies within the field. Findings-Within the literature on TNCs, critical scholarship has played an important role in developing alternative perspectives. Research limitations/implications-The paper reports the author's personal reflections on his field of study, which are intentionally subjective. Practical implications-Appreciation of the scope and effectiveness of critical scholarship in international business. Originality/value-The paper's value lies in offering a broad-brush picture of the evolution of TNCs and their critical study over four decades.
Ietto-Gillies:Transnational corporations, nation-states and labour
2007
Following a brief review of the standard approaches to the explanation of transnational corporations (TNCs) and their activities the paper presents a theory based on the following building blocks. (1) The approach is strategic rather than based on efficiency. The strategic behaviour is linked to TNCs' power towards other actors in the economic system such as rivals, labour and governments. While a good amount of literature has concentrated on strategic behaviour towards rivals, this paper concentrates on power and strategies towards other players and particularly towards labour and governments.
Development and Change, 2007
This is an important book that cautions external authorities against subsuming the diversity of situations confronting many developing countries into singular descriptions of failed or collapsed states. States, Martin Doornbos advises, have never been static, have never followed identical pathways, and today face new pressures arising from globalization. In the past many societies survived without states. Some still do so today. Where states did exist, their control tended to be over people rather than defined territory. However this changed with colonialism, although in many cases the colonial impact was not deep, thereby contributing to today's many postcolonial grey areas between states and statelessness, states and non-states, and states and civil society. Doornbos implores us to understand these different trajectories and to look at the varied possibilities that lie beyond collapse (pp. 6-9). By focusing on post Cold War African states and comparing the European Union and India, Doornbos takes us on an exploration of the contours of the state, the changes brought about by recent globalization, and the loss of 'relative autonomy' that has left many states the target of rifts between middle classes and neglected populations (p. 47). This is a far cry from the nation-building primacy accorded states after independence. Today they contend with the 'good governance' agendas of interventionist multilateral institutions and aid organizations that are increasingly likely to view them suspiciously as obstacles to development. In doing so, however, multilateral organizations pay little attention to the internal dynamics required to legitimize and sustain the democratization they seek to engender. The apparent collapse of many states after 1989 revealed a fragility that had long been hidden by the Cold War. Concerned with the threats statelessness poses for treaties, debt obligations and terrorism, international agencies tend to respond to the challenge of collapse as if each 'failed' state represents the same problem and can be addressed by substantially similar solutions. Invariably this one-size-fits-all approach ignores the internal dynamics of ethnicity and its abuses, with the result that new disillusionments and inequities quickly generate or consolidate new fragmentations. Doornbos provides us one powerful example-Somaliland in Somalia-which, with the collapse of the Somali state in 1991, emerged as a sub-state with all the functional ingredients of stateness with one exception-sovereignty. International law, he argues, must deal with fluidity at the margins and recognize different degrees of stateness, if it is ever to come to grips with the problems facing many contemporary societies under stress. States may come in many shapes and forms, and their colonial precedents do not provide a benchmark for present or future outcomes. In this respect both Europe and India also represent the changing nature of the contemporary state, the former 'not yet a state' but utilizing (perhaps unwisely) regionalism as a means to develop central strength, the latter weakened by the resurgence of regional and community politics. No states, Doornbos concludes, are static. All are subject to constant change as they gain new roles and lose others (p. 201). The record of nation states in Africa is dismal and no model for inspiration. The EU, on the other hand, is an attempt to create a post nation state. Like India, it is a work in progress, open ended in terms of both identity and outcome. The same might be said of many states, but it is a point often missed by globalizing forces as they seek to preserve world order by intervening in countries or by imposing conditions in return for assistance. As in the colonial past, indirect rule is unsustainable. State systems need to regain autonomy and become
A good scholarly book helps the reader gather otherwise fragmented thoughts while also prompting her to cast a new eye on the previously taken-for-granted claims and concepts of long standing debates. It draws attention to underrecognized aspects of seemingly familiar topics and raises questions about the sufficiency of traditional ways of analyzing them. A good scholarly book, in other words, clarifies and destabilizes as the same time. Politics and Power in the Multinational Corporation is, in its ambition and scope, such a book. Dörrenbächer and Geppert argue that a focus on power and (micro) politics in multinationals is justified by far more than a need for "filling in a gap" in the literature, and they make a convincing case with the book they have put together with contributions by scholars mostly in International Business and Management (IB/M) departments in Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, the United States, and Singapore and the United Kingdom.
Global Capitalism Meets National Spirit
Journal of Management Inquiry, 2003
In this article, the authors explore media coverage of a recent acquisition across national borders. Their starting point is that the media represent a key arena of "discursive strategizing" for actors such as corporate managers. They illustrate and specify how global capitalism, as discourse relying on economic and financial rationale and exemplified here by the acquiring firm's attempts to expand, meets national spirit, exemplified here by the complexity in selling the acquisition target to foreigners. The main contribution of this study lies in identifying how key actors draw on and mobilize rationalistic and nationalistic discourses in public discussion. The analysis illustrates that the same actors can draw on different-even contradictory-discourses at different points in time. Furthermore, different actors-even with opposing objectives-may draw on the same discourse in legitimizing their positions and pursuing specific ends.
A commentary on Grazia Ietto-Gillies' paper: 'The Theory of the Transnational Corporation at 50+
Economic Thought, 2014
This paper offers a splendid overview and a succinct summary of the theory of international business. It should be especially helpful for Ph.D. students in this field, and perhaps for other scholars that are coming into the area from other specialisms, or considering doing so. The article extends the author’s recently revamped book, Transnational Corporations and International Production: Trends, Theories, Effects (Ietto-Gillies, 2012), which book I commend and indeed which I use myself as a central text on my own doctoral course in the Theory of International Business. The author knows already of my views on many of the issues she discusses, both because she refers to some of my earlier work in the paper, and from some direct correspondence that we had in the past over her book, when she was writing it or re-writing it. Ietto-Gillies is right to recognise that the issues addressed by the theory have altered over the 50+ years as the environment has changed, and with it the nature o...
Capitalism and 'the International': A Historical Approach
Routledge Handbook of Historical International Relations, 2021
This chapter provides an overview of recent Historical International Relations (IR) literature that transcends several limitations associated with the study of capitalism in ‘traditional’ IR. First, it critically reviews existing definitions of capitalism that were refined and adopted by canonical IR theories from the classical works of Smith, Weber, and mercantilist thinkers like Antoyne de Montchrétien, while comparing them to the more radically historicist approach of Marx. Second, it juxtaposes these perspectives against more recent IR works that uncover the ‘international’ dimensions of the origins of capitalism and highlight the variegated historical forms capitalist development has taken. Furthermore, the chapter highlights the ahistorical tendency in traditional IR of associating capitalism with certain perennial features (such as markets, commerce, and private property), whilst excluding from analysis other ostensibly ‘external’, but nonetheless constitutive features of historical capitalism, such as the continual search for social control and pacification, and the violent practices these processes often entail. In so doing, the chapter reviews several avenues of inquiry that engage with these constitutive characteristics of capitalist development and explore how gendered, racist, and other exclusionary practices have been historically used to legitimize the imposition and reproduction of capitalist social relations. In conclusion, the chapter outlines additional avenues for future research that reconnect the aforementioned themes of history-writing and ‘the international’ to capitalist modernity's distinctive ‘regime of historicity’.