The Myth of the Global Corporation

In an era where one book after the other seems to extoll the story of the globalisation Juggernaut, the reader can all too easily get the impression that all in the economy is now globalizing. Do not borders cease to exist for one enterprise and sector after the other? Although you can argue this is true to some extent for a number of sectors and production processes, at the same time it is not quite the whole story and creates a false or misleading image. The authors argue that enterprises are not only economic but als political actors, and for me as an economist this was an interesting point. This book then provides a sober antidote to this misperception of transnational corporations as truly borderless production systems that only seek the most efficient way to produce and where nationality does not matter. It provides a convincing overview of how even the largest 'transnational' corporations remain to a large extent 'national', if not in their economics then in their politics. With thorough empirical work it is shown that globalizing activities of transnational enterprises in OECD countries mostly still have a home bias along a number of dimensions. I confess that this was also for me (economist dealing with glabalization) a good sobering read that helped me to keep a perspective and offered a number of novel ideas. Recommended.