Multinational enterprises, international relations and international business: reconstituting intellectual boundaries for the new millennium

Abstract

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.

Notes

1. Contrary views are forcefully expressed by Hirst and Thompson (1996: 76–98). See also the anti-globalisation thesis postulated by Weiss (1988) who disparages notions of the retreating state. Contrary views are expressed by Sassen (1998).

2. Most recent figures are from UNCTAD 2003 and Held, et al. (1999: 236).

3. There are exceptions to this, of course. The path-breaking studies championed by Susan Strange tended to reorient the ontological reification of the state so typical of most IR theory, and began to privilege equally state and non-state actors like MNEs. See Stopford and Strange (1991). See also Strange (2000).

4. See also Keohane and Nye (1972). Keohane continues this tradition of scholarship in Keohane (1984). Similar perspectives can be found in Maghroori and Ramberg (1982). See also Rosenau and Czempiel eds (1992); Rosenau and Singh eds (2002).

5. For a critical perspective on regime theory see Crawford (1996).

6. These arguments are, of course, predicated on the technological innovations in shipping (container shipping) and associated cost reductions, as well as revolutions in communications and the associated enhancement of logistic supply chain management.

7. Similar perspectives in terms of the geography of postmodernism can be found in Soja (1989). See also Jameson (1991).

8. See, for example, Greider (1997). Similar perspectives can also be found in Klein (2001); Becker et al., (1987). On the transnational Diaspora of global wealth and wealth management see Palan (2003).

9. The extensity of MNE Transnationality is assertively questioned by various authors. See, for example, Hirst and Thompson (1996). See also Doremus, Keller, Pauly and Reich (1998).

10. Baran and other neo-Marxian theorists continued a long established class-based analysis of international relations prevalent since the writings of Vladimir Ilich Lenin. See Lenin (1969).

11. Dunning further notes that the second phase was also marked by vexed debate about the elemental value of international business as a stand-alone discipline compared to international business simply being viewed as an extension of, or series of specialised studies within, the broader discipline of business.

12. Dunning's point about the American-centric nature of IB knowledge production, and thus the intellectual images it produces, has its corollary in IR where the same American-centredness has for a long time produced a monocultural view of international politics because of the dominance of US perspectives and US academics in the field. This tends to create a less than international discipline despite its subject matter which, after all, professes to concern itself with things international. See, for example, Crawford and Jarvis eds (2001).