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Multinational Subsidiary Mandates

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Abstract

The overall organizational profile of the contemporary multinational comprises a differentiated network of subsidiaries, through which it can address the range of its strategic needs for both current performance and longer-term survival. Thus individual subsidiaries are mandated to play distinctive roles, determined by the needs and/or potentials of their location, which feed into the wider competitive performance of the group. These can be resource seeking, securing access to primary products; market seeking, targeting optimally responsive supply to the host-country market; efficiency seeking, co-opting cost-effective inputs into current production processes; or knowledge seeking, internalizing host-economy creative expertise, technology and R&D capability into innovation and group renewal.

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Papanastassiou, M., Pearce, R. (2016). Multinational Subsidiary Mandates. In: Augier, M., Teece, D. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-94848-2_356-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-94848-2_356-1

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