We compare two theoretical perspectives on the knowledge situation of headquarters (HQ) in multinational corporations: the bounded rationality perspective and the sheer ignorance perspective. We claim that these perspectives lead to different expectations when it comes to HQ's role and the...

This book expands the business network view on managerial issues in multinational corporations. Specifically, it scrutinises the importance of a subsidiary’s external and internal business network for its strategic and organizational role within the corporation.

There has been a growing interest in looking upon the MNC as a differentiated network in the sense that subsidiaries have access to different types of resources and therefore perform differently in its market-place and within the MNC. Yet, even though subsidiaries are the object of intense...

An important issue in the divisionalized firm are the relationsships between the three levels; top management, divisional management and the operational level. In the international firm the physical location of the divisional management level becomes especially problematic because of this...

This is a presentation of a research project which focuses on influence in divisions of Swedish international firms. Our aim is to study how some intraorganizational relations, i.e. relations between divisional managements usually situated in Sweden and subsidiaries mainly located in Europe,...

The lack of knowledge of foreign markets is critical for most theories about internationalization. In behavioural models dealing with the internationalization process, such as the Uppsala Model, knowledge and learning have a profound impact on how the firm is seen to approach foreign markets. In...

In behavioral models dealing with the internationalization process, such as the Uppsala Internationalization Process Model, knowledge and learning have a profound impact on how the firm is seen to approach foreign markets. In the light of recent work on learning in organizations, this paper...

In this paper, we argue that a fruitful approach to the analysis of inter-organisational power in multinational corporations (MNCs) is to model the organisation as a federation. In the federative MNC, the headquarters and the subsidiaries are involved in a perpetual bargaining process. Thus a...

The traditional theory of foreign direct investment is inadequate to explain the latest phase of the internationalization of Swedish industry. The theory does not recognize that the factors which motivate firms new to the foreign scene differ considerably from those relevant to already highly...