"The businessman whose master plan controls the world each day" Multinational enterprises and their actor images in IR Bitte nicht ohne Erlaubnis zitieren -Für Kommentare & Anregungen ist der Autor dankbar! (original) (raw)
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2016
International Relations scholars increasingly recognize multinational enterprises (MNEs) as relevant actors in world politics. Framed within the narrative of global governance, corporate actors assumingly became global governors, engage more actively in the provision of collective goods today, and hence need to be considered. For a discipline traditionally resting on the dichotomy between public and private, however, studying corporate actors implies certain challenges. By arguing that actor images are expressions of underlying ontological and epistemological assumptions as well as conventional wisdom, the paper focuses on how MNEs have been studied in IR. Reconstructing different corporate actor images advanced in research, it will be shown that MNEs are often portrayed as a homogeneous group of actors. While traditionally considered as driven by rationality, recent research supplements the the notion of corporate profit-seeking by considering the social dimension of corporate acti...
While International Relations has for a long time been informed by state-centric approaches, processes of globalization, the emergence of transnational actors, and their increased cross-border activities have contributed to a disciplinary opening in terms of which actors are considered to be important. Especially multinational enterprises ("MNEs"), according to transnational private authority research, become integrated and thus more involved in political processes of global governance. For a discipline which rests on the dichotomy between public and private, such a development poses far-reaching challenges in terms of how to study its phenomena. By arguing that actor images are expressions of underlying ontological and epistemological assumptions, the paper focuses on how MNEs were and are integrated into IR as a research object. Reconstruction of how research on MNEs was and is conducted shows that, despite being constitutive for any normative assessment, actor images and action-theoretical assumptions are seldomly reflected or discussed within IR research on MNEs. Instead, due to the influence of economics on the subject, multinational enterprises are predominantly conceptualized as having clear and exogenously defined interests while corporate rationality and interests are essentialized as parsimony is favored over complexity. Because of this essentialization and complexity reduction, research on MNEs appears to be at best one-sided and at worst limited and based in normative judgments. To better understand corporate changing roles and to integrate MNEs into global governance in more reasonable ways, IR needs to reflect upon its current corporate actor images and complement these by drawing on existing alternative actor images and developing new ones.
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.
2005
The rapidly changing nature of the international political economy along with its increasing complexity, poses challenges for both theoreticians as well as policymakers; the former in terms of developing innovative frameworks of analysis able to model and understand the constitutive nature and contours of its parameters; the latter in terms of developing suitable frameworks of analysis able to inform policy analysis and practical management strategies. This article explores these dilemmas from two disciplinary perspectives. First, from international relations (IR) theory, particularly how various theoretical approaches have failed to consider more fully the role of non-state actors like multinational enterprises (MNEs) despite the growth in their importance and the resources they control. Second, from the perspective of international business (IB) which, while focusing on MNEs, has done so in the absence of more contextual approaches that situate MNEs in power-political, regulatory, and inter-state environmental settings. By highlighting the weaknesses of both disciplinary approaches, the article then suggests that the construction of new interdisciplinary rubrics jointly created from IR and IB, offers a better means of appreciating the changing character of the global political economy and some of its most important actors and emerging processes.
States versus Corporations: Rethinking the Power of Business in International Politics
Over 25 years ago, Susan Strange urged IR scholars to include multinational corporations in their analysis. Within IR and IPE discussions, this was either mostly ignored or reflected in an empirically and methodologically unsatisfactory way. We reiterate Strange’s call by sketching a fine-grained theoretical and empirical approach that includes both states and corporations as juxtaposed actors that interact in transnational networks inherent to the contemporary international political economy. This realistic, juxtaposed, actor- and relations-centred perspective on state and corporate power in the global system is empirically illustrated by the example of the transnationalisation of state ownership.
Transnational Actors in the era of Complex Interdependence and Globalization
2020
Of particular importance for International Relations (IR) are transnational actors (TNAs) that wield considerable influence on politics across borders, such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), multinational corporations (MNCs), religious actors, terrorism rebels, criminal actors, and diasporas and ethnic actors. ‘Transnational’ is a frequently mentioned key word in International Relations (IR) today, to denote in a simplifying manner an organization working beyond state boundaries and acting independently from traditional state authorities. The scholarly recognition of such actors occurred relatively late in the field and advanced with the acceleration of globalizing economic, political, cultural and social processes. This paper emphasizes that despite the appearance of transnational actors (TNAs) as a topical and palpable concern for academics and practitioners alike, questions of conceptual vagueness and relational indeterminacy remain, and the continual proliferation of the...
POLITICS AND POWER IN THE MULTINATIONAL CORPORATION: AN INTRODUCTION
POLITICS AND POWER IN THE MULTINATIONAL CORPORATION: THE ROLE OF INSTITUTIONS, INTERESTS AND IDENTITIES, 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 but also raises important questions, both for the public and the academic community, about the use and misuse of the power by MNCs in the wider society, as well as the exercise of power by key actors within internationally operating firms.
International Organisations Research Journal, 2020
Social problems in the global South are often explained by reference to domestic decisions or "institutional quality" in the Southern countries, while there are also prominent criticisms of such "nationalist explanations". Crucially, the dispute over correct mode of explanation is not only epistemological, but also political, as has been often noted in analyses of hegemony. This paper develops such ideas about "hegemonic" forms of explanation by analysing how an explanatory tendency becomes institutionalised in the operating logic of international organisations. We analyse as a case study the long-term developments within the UN in the field of multinational enterprises (MNEs). We follow the process in which an agenda focused on the regulation of MNEs shifted into the direction of focusing on local institutional quality and emphasising "partnerships" instead of regulation. The analysis demonstrates how political momentum and external challenges affect explanatory tendencies, and generally the deep impact of organisational embeddedness of these tendencies.
THE MULTINATIONAL CORPORATION AS A PLAYING FIELD OF POWER: A BOURDIEUSIAN APPROACH
Kostova, Roth and Dacin called in 2008 for the advancement of a theoretical conception of the multinational corporation (MNC) that takes into account both power relationships among actors and the structure of its internal institutional field. While micro-political scholars of MNCs have started to answer the former part of the call regarding power, the second part has not been thoroughly addressed yet. Furthermore, the agentic aspects typical of power games and the structural aspects characterizing institutional fields have not been fully combined in a multilevel perspective of MNCs so far. Leaning on Bourdieu, we suggest an answer to the pending call. We theorize the MNC as a playing field of power emerging around the issue of finding a meta-rate of conversion of the actors' capitals constituted in national fields. We conceive such issue field in a dynamic state due to the constant entry and exit of new players (e.g. through mergers, acquisitions or divestitures) and, hence, there is a need to continuously test the validity of exchange rates. The role of the metainstitutional field level of the MNC as a global category is also discussed.