Corporate Flexibility and its Development in the Born Transnational Firm

Abstract

As was argued above, a high level of flexibility seems to be a key ambition of the born transnational firm. However, due to assorted interpretations of flexibility in the literature, it is further crucial to obtain a clear grasp on what this term encompasses in this context. In general, the use of the term flexibility is ubiquitous and one often intuitively has an idea what it refers to (Volberda, 1998: 82; Evans, 1991: 73). However, academic work on the subject has been carried out in a wide variety of fields and, as a result, the term flexibility applies to a broad range of disciplines and sub-disciplines, in which its interpretation differs from context to context (Sawhney, 2006: 477; Weiss, 2001: 347f.; Upton, 1997: 1080; Suarez et al., 1991: 2-4).