Introduction to the JIBS Symposium Honoring the 25th Anniversary of The Future of the Multinational Enterprise
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GUEST EDITORIAL
Introduction to the JIBS Symposium Honoring the 25th Anniversary of The Future of the Multinational Enterprise Bernard Yeung Stern School of Business Administration, New York University, USA
Correspondence: Professor B Yeung, Stern School of Business Administration, New York University, 44 West, 4th Street, KMEC 7–65, New York, NY 10012, USA; E-mail: [email protected]
Online publication date: 13 March 2003
Journal of International Business Studies (2003) 34, 101–107. doi:10.1057/ palgrave.jibs.8400022
It is a great honor for me to serve as guest editor for the JIBS symposium honoring the 25th anniversary of Peter Buckley and Mark Casson’s book The Future of the Multinational Enterprise. Many of us who study multinational firms and international business were raised on this book! We have learned a great deal from it, and from the authors’ numerous other writings. In addition, many of us have first-hand experience of benefiting from Peter and Mark’s insightful comments on our works and encouragement in our career development. Let me therefore begin by expressing our thankfulness to Professors Buckley and Casson as intellectual leaders and caring senior academics.
The book The Future of the Multinational Enterprise (Buckley and Casson, 1976, 2002) is a comprehensive and accessible book that advances a dominant theme that has served as the foundation for many directions of research on multinational firms. It begins with an abundant amount of data, which would be amazing even in the current high-speed computer era. The book’s country-level, industry-level and firm-level data effectively convey a description of the characteristics of multinational enterprises: they are productive, competitive, profitable large firms that undertake above-average investment in intangibles; they often operate in concentrated industries; and they are often horizontally and vertically diversified into multiple countries. The empirical effort delivers a set of empirical regularities that theories need to explain. This was the right book at the right time, advancing the right attitude for studying multinational firms and related public policies. In those days, multinational firms were treated with suspicion. To contribute meaningfully to the discussion researchers needed a comprehensive, empirical appraisal on which to build solid theoretical understandings. Professors Buckley and Casson seek a unifying theory based on the rational profit maximization mentality to explain the empirical
Guest Editorial
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regularities. Their theory is based on the Coasean framework: they cast the multinational firm phenomenon as a firm boundary question, and they focus on multinational firms’ knowledge-based capabilities with a public goods property. With the public goods property, knowledge-based assets can be utilized simultaneously in multiple applications. However, there are market imperfections in the transaction of knowledge-based as
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