TOWARD A MANAGERIAL THEORY OF THE MNC

This introductory chapter presents a personal perspective on the challenges of building a managerial theory of the multinational corporation (MNC). By managerial theory, I mean a practice theory (Van de Ven & Johnson, in press); i.e. a theory that draws upon discipline-based knowledge to show how more general abstract conceptual analysis can be brought to bear on specific real-life managerial problems (Simon, 1996). Developing such a managerial theory is fraught with challenges and pitfalls. Such a theory has to provide a conceptual link between academic disciplines (traditional science or at least academic research) and practical knowledge (learning from action). Each follows very different theory building rules (Christensen et al., 2002; Cook & Brown, 1999;Van de Ven & Johnson, in press), and yet a managerial theory needs to incorporate both. It needs to be useful in the context of an evolving phenomenon: Today’s global companies neither carry the same activities nor draw their legitimacy or competitive advantage from the same sources as yesterday’s multinationals. A theory that attempts to bring theoretical disciplines to bear on practice also needs to be multidisciplinary and eclectic. Thus, there are three challenges addressed in this chapter.

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