Introduction and Overview

Abstract

As an organization that operates simultaneously in many diverse environments, the multinational corporation (MNC) would seem to be promising territory for testing and developing organization theories, particularly theories about the relationships between organizations and their environments; and yet organization theory and the study of the MNC have not had a particularly close relationship. Organization theorists have rarely taken the MNC as an arena for study. Theorists who have focused on case studies of individual organizations have found the MNC’s size and complexity forbidding, whereas those favouring large-sample quantitative studies have preferred to look at categories of organizations with much larger populations.