Introduction

Abstract

The traditional academic approach to the multinational corporation (MNC), partly in reflection of the North American ethnocentricity of the principal researchers in the field, tended to regard its structure as being determined purely by the parent company, with power and strategic decision-making being completely centralized. Accordingly, during the 1960s and 1970s, most company-level research concentrated on the broad thrust of internationalization processes and associated corporate strategies and, less frequently, on issues involving the control and management of overseas subsidiaries by headquarters (for example, Alsegg, 1971). Any autonomy which a subsidiary had was viewed as having been granted by headquarters: a subsidiary, for example, was permitted independence in developing products (for example, White and Poynter, 1984). In this conception, a multinational firm was a clearly defined unit, with subsidiaries acting as the limbs merely obeying the head(quarters). There were, of course, exceptions. Aylmer (1970) had detected a tendency for MNCs to allow increasing market scope to their affiliates, and studies by Brandt and Hulbert (1976, 1977) examined aspects of communication and strategy-making between headquarters and subsidiaries.