What happened to the transnational? The emergence of the neo-global corporation

Jacqueline Mees-Buss (), Catherine Welch () and D. Eleanor Westney ()
Additional contact information
Jacqueline Mees-Buss: University of Sydney Business School
Catherine Welch: University of Sydney Business School
D. Eleanor Westney: MIT Sloan School of Management

Journal of International Business Studies, 2019, vol. 50, issue 9, No 5, 1513-1543

Abstract: Abstract Bartlett and Ghoshal’s transnational ‘solution’ for managing the MNC remains popular among scholars and practitioners alike. However, our in-depth qualitative study of Unilever, an exemplary case of a transnational, found that in the period 2000–2012 the company evolved into a very different organizational form with a distinct set of characteristics. We call this the neo-global corporation. In explaining how and why this transformation occurred, we turn to organizational evolutionary theory, and use our case to generate a multi-cycle process model of MNC evolution. Given the dynamism of the MNC and its environments, we anticipate that the neo-global will also eventually transform, and call for more organization-level case studies of MNCs in future international business research.

Keywords: case theoretic approaches; evolutionary theory; organizational change; multinational corporations (MNCs) and enterprises (MNEs); neo-global corporation; process model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1057/s41267-019-00253-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:jintbs:v:50:y:2019:i:9:d:10.1057_s41267-019-00253-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... nt/journal/41267/PS2

DOI: 10.1057/s41267-019-00253-5

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of International Business Studies is currently edited by John Cantwell

More articles in Journal of International Business Studies from Palgrave Macmillan, Academy of International Business
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().