New Geographies of Global Managerial Practice: The Case of Business Services

Abstract

In recent decades, economic globalization has radically transformed the ways in which firms in all sectors organize themselves and operate in the global economy (Dunning 1993; Morgan et al. 2001; Dicken 2007). Since the 1980s in particular there has been a recognition within a range of social science disciplines — notably management and business studies, economic geography and organizational sociology — that firms have been subject to a wide set of transformations linked to the intertwined transnationalization, amongst other influences, of their organizational form, operations, working practices and markets (cf. Ashkensas et al. 1995; Bartlett & Ghoshal 2002; Galbraith 2000). Whilst earlier understandings of internationalization of firms thus focused on rather narrower concepts of the multinationalization through the setting up of productive facilities in multiple countries or the acquisition of existing national champions (Cohen et al. 1979; Held et al. 1999; Morgan 2001), the nature of the transnationalization of corporate activity has shifted in new and complex ways in the last 15 years that social scientists have struggled to keep up with (Jones 2009). This has resulted in widespread debate about the respective validity of (often) competing concepts of multinational, transnational or global corporations (Doremus et al. 1998; Dicken 2003; Jones 2005) and a growing recognition of the empirical and theoretical difficulty in effectively understanding the complexity of corporate forms and activities in the contemporary global economy.