Management and International Review

Professor DR. Niels G. Noorderhaven is Professor of International Management at Tilburg University, The Netherlands.

units. This can be seen as an indicator of the extent to which the MNC is capable of putting its corporate-level resources to work on aglobaI scale. Becerra and San tal6 find that about ten percent of the variability of regional units is attributable to corporate effects. The more internationalized the MNC is, the stronger the cor porate effect. This suggests that the more internationalized MNCs are also more successful in integrating their international operations, whether by employing worldwide home-grown advantages, or by spreading over the entire organization resources and capabilities developed by a particular subsidiary. This integration within the MNC, that can be assumed to be responsible for the stronger corporate effect in the more internationalized MNCs in Becerra and Santal6's sampie, is the focus of Mauri and Sambharya's paper. These authors study the effect of global integration on the performance of the MNC, operatio nalizing global integration as the inter-area product flows within the multinatio nal. They find a non-linear relation between global integration and MNC per formance. At low levels of global integration, there is a negative relation with performance, which turns positive at intermediate levels, but negative again at very high levels of global integration. Their explanation is that at very low and very high levels of integration the balance between the costs and benefits of global integration activities is negative.

Local Corporations going Global: Experiences

Multinational corporations (MNCs) are frequently pictured as being at the vanguard of global integration. They face strong incentives to maximize economies of scale in research and development, purchasing, production and marketing, and encounter low barriers in the dissemination of technologies and best practices. This special issue brings together various papers that focus on different aspects of the tension between global and local within MNCs.

Guest Editor's Introduction.- An Empirical Analysis of the Corporate Effect: The Impact of the Multinational Corporation on the Performance of Its Units Worldwide.- The Performance Implications of a Global Integration Strategy in Global Industries: An Empirical Investigation Using Inter-area Product Flows.- The "Country-of-origin Effect" in Multinational Corporations: Sources, Mechanisms and Moderating Conditions.- The Art of Knowledge Transfer: Secondary and Reverse Transfer in China's Telecommunications Manufacturing Industry.- Internal Diversity and Culture's Consequences: Branch/Head Office Relations in a German Financial MNC.