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The research question is how home country corruption and nationalism may affect operations of BRIC multinational enterprises. BRIC composition permits a comparison of two authoritarian regimes and two constitutional democracies. Each BRIC features a different combination of corruption and nationalism. The chapter adds South Africa information for two limited reasons. First, from 2010 South Africa is a member of the BRIC summit process. South Africa is an important entry point to Africa, for BRIC multinationals and particularly for China. Second, concerning corruption and nationalism South Africa is analytically useful as a control context that helps illustrate but does not appear to change highly exploratory BRIC findings.

The chapter draws on limited literature and information concerning corruption and nationalism in BRICs to suggest tentative possibilities. Transparency International provides bribe payers index estimates for 28 large economies, with important multinational enterprises, and corruption perceptions index estimates including those 28 countries. These estimates include the four BRICs and South Africa. The available sources suggest some suggested findings about varying impacts of home country corruption and nationalism on operations of BRIC multinationals.

China and Russia are authoritarian regimes in transition from central planning-oriented communist regimes. They are global military powers, expanding influence in their respective regions. Brazil, India, and South Africa are constitutional democracies. India, a nuclear-armed military power, seeks a regional leadership role in South Asia. Brazil and South Africa are key countries economically in their regions. BRIC multinationals are positioned between home country and host country conditions. Chinese and Russian multinationals may reflect a stronger nationalistic tendency due to home country regimes and ownership structure.

The chapter is an original but highly exploratory inquiry into impacts of corruption and nationalism on BRIC multinationals. Extant BRIC literature tends to understudy effects of home country corruption and nationalism on managerial mindset and incentives in either commercial or state-owned enterprises.

This paper provides a primer on European multinational business groups (BGs) and their subsidiaries. Firms in these BGs appear to have higher sales performance than firms in domestic groups (15% higher). This leads us to investigate which elements increase the likelihood that a group will transition towards multinational status. BGs’ characteristics matter for foreign acquisition: groups becoming multinational are usually larger, have a more hierarchical structure with respect to the number of layers in a group, and are more diverse in terms of sectors. Groups tend to expand into bordering countries or countries providing particular advantages, such as a large internal market. The first acquisition is a corporate-level decision that appears to be made by the group’s controlling firm and is often a diversification into a different industry.

Among the prominent economic trends in recent decades is the exponential increase in flows of goods and capital driven by technological progress and falling of restrictions. A key driver of this phenomenon has been the cross-border production, foreign investment, and trade both final and intermediate goods by multinational corporations. Research has sought to understand how foreign direct investment (FDI) affects host economies. This paper reviews the main theories and empirical evidence of two streams of literature: the mechanisms by which multinational activity might create positive effects and externalities to countries and the role of complementary local conditions, also known as “absorptive capacities,” that allow a country to reap the benefits of FDI paying particular attention to the role of factor markets, reallocation effects, and the linkages generated between foreign and domestic firms. The survey focuses mainly on work related to developing countries.

Schedule UTP requires that firms disclose to the IRS the uncertain tax positions that comprise the federal portion of the tax reserve disclosed on their financial statements. To investigate whether Schedule UTP has been an effective audit tool to the IRS, we use financial statement disclosures of reductions in reserves due to a lapse in the statute of limitations (Lapse). We find that the probability of a Lapse is 3.4 percent lower after Schedule UTP. However, this result is driven by domestic firms; we do not find evidence that Schedule UTP has been effective in the audit of multinational firms.

This article takes stock of interdisciplinary research on Multinational Corporations (MNCs) by elucidating paradigmatic shifts in the world of MNCs in the new millennium and analysing more recent developments in the disciplines of International Business (IB) and Organization Theory (OT). The article also introduces the altogether 14 individual contributions of this 49th volume of the Research in the Sociology of Organizations series. It closes by looking into the questions of where interdisciplinary OT/IB research on MNCs is now and where it is likely to go in the future.

This chapter presents a conceptual framework to understand the role of multinational enterprises in the process of environmental standard setting in the global economy. Inside the multinational, we discuss the impact of path-dependency and irreversibility on environmental investment, and the importance of the integrated network structure of the multinational in enabling the transfer of standards within the firm. Outside the firm, we discuss the impact of regulation and market forces, and particularly the role of NGOs, in triggering change in firm behavior both at home and abroad. We conclude by considering the impact of supranational institutions on the environmental behavior of multinationals.

Dispersed multinational teams include people from multiple nations, some of whom are not collocated. In a knowledge economy, such teams must locate, store, allocate, and retrieve knowledge. Three central questions are: (a) How can dispersed multinational teams manage knowledge resource flows? (b) What factors influence knowledge resource distribution in these teams? and (c) How do dispersed multinational teams evolve over time? This chapter examines knowledge resource sharing in multinational teams through three theoretical lenses: transactive memory theory, collective action theory, and evolutionary theory, and concludes with practical suggestions for managing dispersed multinational teams that are derived from these three theoretical lenses.

One of the most important trends that supporting the rise of institutional theory research is the increasing number of leading multinational enterprises headquartered in a greater number of countries. Although early international business studies focused on multinationals from the United States, the developed countries of Western Europe and Japan, some of the largest multinational enterprises today are from non-Triad countries, including Brazil, China, Korea, India, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and Taiwan. These new multinationals exhibited behaviours different from those of established Triad multinationals and, in many cases, competed with distinctly different strategies. The result was that international business scholars, who traditionally concentrated on studying host country factors as the key to understanding corporate behaviour began to pay much more attention to the characteristics of the multinationals’ home institutional environments as a potential determinant of the multinationals’ internationalization strategy. For example, a growing number of studies have examined the variance in corporate governance systems around the world and their implications for the strategies of multinational enterprises (La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, & Shleifer, 1999; Pedersen & Thomsen, 1997). The shift in the population of leading multinationals has also led to the emergence of research on business groups. Although Japanese multinational enterprises had the kereitsu structure and some European firms were parts of conglomerates these structures were considered by most scholars to be inefficient. However, this viewpoint is changing as the body of new multinational enterprises originates from countries where business group membership has been the norm, rather than the exception (Guillén, 2000; Khanna & Palepu, 2000; Khanna & Rivkin, 2001).