Transnational institution building and the multinational corporation: An emerging field of research

Abstract

Since the 1980s, the international business and management field has produced a large amount of analysis and research on the multinational corporation (MNC) as an organization. Particularly influential has been the work of Prahalad, Doz and Bartlett (see particularly Doz et al., 1981; Bartlett, 1986; Prahalad & Doz, 1987) who, drawing on contingency theory, developed the integration-responsiveness framework to depict the different environmental forces exerting conflicting demands on MNCs. This literature is concerned, for example, with how organizations respond to task-related demands by centralizing or decentralizing activities. However, the analysis of environmental forces is restricted to the task or technical environment and the effects it has on the structuring of organizations. In contrast to this by and large more strategy-oriented literature, MNCs have not received sustained attention from other organization theorists (see for exceptions, Rosenzweig & Singh, 1991; Morgan et al., 2001, 2005; Westney & Zaheer, 2001; Ghoshal & Westney, 2005). This is surprising; after all, it would seem that MNCs offer great potential for developing and testing organization theories (Evans, 1981) and research on the organizational aspects of MNCs could be enriched by the insights of organization theorists (Ghoshal & Westney, 2005). These arguments apply especially to the different strands of institutional theory which emphasize the relationships between organizations and their institutional environments, namely new institutionalism (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; Scott,

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