MULTINATIONAL ENTERPRISES

Multinational Enterprises

Multinational Enterprises

Introduction: Multinational Enterprises

Problems such as defense and environmental quality leap across national borders. As travel and digital media, including the Internet, expand, other problems that might have once been local or national, such as human rights violations or national voting fraud, also draw global focus. These trans-national problems elicit ongoing, organized trans-national responses from both the public and the private voluntary sector. Since times immemorial, separate political entities have united to oppose common enemies. At present, those enemies take more than military form, and the international organizations united to oppose them include not only intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), made up of collaborative nation-states, but trade associations and voluntary organizations, or nongovernmental organizations MNEs) that cross national boundaries. This chapter looks at the diverse forms of international organizations1 and their roles in providing for mutual benefit to advancing the democratic principles of a global civil society.

The idea and process of cooperation among independent political entities certainly dates back to the earliest governments. Governments, tribes, and other political groups entered into treaties, for example. As early as 478 BCE, the independent city-states of ancient Greece formed alliances to cooperate for mutual security against Persian invasion. One such alliance, the Delian League, had a permanent structure and membership, a system of permanent dues, and an assembly for deciding policy. These alliances were more than ordinary treaties, which are most often left to individual states to enforce, because they put in place mechanisms to govern them. They were not IGOs in the sense we use that term today, for the nation-state system was not brought into existence until the peace of Westphalia in 1648. Nonetheless, these shared obligations and governing mechanisms foreshadowed today's IGO distinguishing characteristics. (Birkinshaw, 1996)

Virtual Organization

Increasing demands of global competition, changing market structures and the potential of global information and communication technology infrastructure structures form the background for the emergence and spread of 'virtual Organizations', ie, cooperative, network-like forms of organization between hierarchical control and market coordination. Cover Stories in Business magazines and first Book publishing show that 'virtual Organization 'to a new beat and become a buzzword, associations to which the synthetic, simulated reality, the 'virtual reality' Scope of computer science raises, as well as a space for new only temporary and flexible forms of organization and thus a departure from traditional, relatively stable business organization forms can be imagined. (Hedlund, 1980)

Perspectives on virtual organization 'Virtual Organisation' from Mowshowitz, which, at its Admission, has coined the term, in analogy to virtual memory management in the Computer science seen. We distinguish between physical and logical storage separately: for applications to optimize the available space to be Information blocks from the fast and expensive primary storage to the temporary Secondary storage be outsourced. Applied to the management of virtual Organizations, it is about the dynamic and flexible allocation of abstract Performance requirements to provide and the specific location of the Service delivery. For the client the benefits of a virtual organization transparent, ie they appear to be from one source, although ...