The financialization of the non‐financial corporation. A critique to the financial turn of accumulation hypothesis

One aspect in which non‐financial corporations (NFCs) are said to be financialized is that they have been increasingly engaged in financial accumulation from which they derive a growing proportion of financial income. This is what we call the financial turn of accumulation hypothesis. In this article, we show that the evidence used to sustain it, in the U.S. setting, has to be reconsidered. Our findings show that, contrary to the financial turn of accumulation hypothesis, financial income averages 2.5% of NFCs’ total income since the 1980s, oscillating since the beginnings of the 1990s until 2005 and then declining. In terms of assets, some of the alleged financial assets might actually reflect other activities in which NFCs have been increasingly engaged, such as tax avoidance, internationalization of production, activities refocusing and M&As.     

跨国公司理财环境问题研究

理财环境是跨国公司生存和发展的空间。跨国公司的理财环境具有整体性或系统性、层次性、多变性的特点。任何一个跨国公司的理财活动都受国内和国际环境的影响。东道国对跨国公司的影响主要有政治和法律环境、经济环境、社会和自然环境、技术环境等。而受国际环境影响的主要因素有国际法律环境、金融环境和多国经济组织等。     

跨国公司研发投资技术外溢效应探究:浙江案例

近年来,浙江吸收的跨国投资在促进产业结构升级、推动经济增长方式转型方面具有独特的优势。本文综合运用相关理论,通过实证研究,对跨国公司研发投资的技术外溢效应进行了实证分析。本文创新点在于,外溢效应的大小,更多地取决于本土企业竞争力的强弱,只有不断增强本地企业的技术创新能力,才能吸收跨国企业的技术外溢效应。     

Putting Culture in its Place? A Critical Engagement with Cultural Political Economy

Ngai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop present Cultural Political Economy (CPE) as a project that seeks to deepen Critical Political Economy (C*PE) through an engagement with the cultural turn. This article critically assesses their success in such an enterprise. It begins by framing CPE within Jessop and Sum’s previous work on the Regulation Approach, in order to show why the former can only be understood as the result of a critical dialogue with the latter. Next, my reconstruction of the main elements of Sum and Jessop’s CPE is presented. After having carefully examined its main assumptions and concepts, I criticise CPE’s main novel element, an ontological cultural turn, due to the culturalist risks it engenders. In order to substantiate and exemplify that theoretical criticism, I review CPE’s application to the analysis of the North Atlantic Financial Crisis. This article concludes by showing the main difficulties that CPE faces as an alternative for deepening C*PE and proposes the Amsterdam School of Transnational Historical Materialism as a more suitable direction in which that initiative could be advanced.     

跨国公司撤资研究的述评与展望

随着跨国公司不断地在全球范围内进行直接投资和调整布局,由此引发的撤资行为逐渐受到一定的关注。尽管现有研究成果十分丰富,但作为国际商务活动的跨国公司撤资行为仍然没有得到应有重视和充分解释。本文从跨国公司撤资的含义与类型、动机与原因、影响与对策等方面对国内外现有研究进行梳理,评述了相关研究的进展与不足,并提出未来应该从微观层面对撤资行为进行多学科交叉研究,构建完整的跨国公司撤资理论体系。     

建筑企业国际工程总承包的造价管理与成本控制

随着我国整体建筑实力的不断增强,我国的建筑企业已越来越多的走向国际建筑市场。如何在国际建筑项目中做好造价管理与成本控制,实现建筑企业的利润最大化,是所有走出国门的建筑企业面临的共同问题。本文作者从国际工程总承包业务角度,结合自身的实际经验谈谈在进行国际工程总承包过程中如何合理的进行造价管理与成本控制。     

Learning Sustainability? Absorptive capacities as drivers of sustainability in MNCs’ purchasing

MNCs are expected to operate in a sustainable fashion. Implementation of sustainability requires the ability to acknowledge external (sustainability-related) knowledge, and to apply it in intra-company activities such as purchasing. We focus on absorptive capacities as potential drivers of sustainability, and investigate the effect that a purchasing function’s capacity to absorb and process knowledge has on social and environmental sustainability practices, and subsequently on economic performance in purchasing. We compare MNCs and non-MNCs using a structural equation model of a large set of survey data from four European countries and find that only realized absorptive capacities impact sustainability practices in purchasing and this impact is smaller in MNCs than in other companies. We suggest that companies respond to the demand for sustainability by strengthening their implementation capabilities: the potential to acquire and transform knowledge within a purchasing function is less relevant, and what matters is its application.     

Aligning corporate transfer intentions and subsidiary HRM practice implementation in multinational corporations

We study HRM practice implementation in subsidiaries of multinational corporations (MNCs) and diverge from extant research by focusing on alignment, which we conceptualize as the degree to which subsidiary implementation of HRM practices corresponds with the subsidiary-specific transfer intentions of corporate headquarters. In explaining alignment we examine different aspects of the headquarters–subsidiary relationship, namely, the extent of formal control, interpersonal relationships and subsidiary strategic HRM capabilities. Based on a sample of 105 subsidiaries from 12 Nordic MNCs, the results highlight the importance of expatriates, trust and the strategic HRM capabilities of the subsidiary HR function. We conduct post hoc analyses to shed further light on (i) the relationship between our independent variables and the two separate components of alignment – corporate intentions and subsidiary implementation, and (ii) two different types of misalignment – excessive and insufficient.     

Subsidiary knowledge flow strategies and purpose of expatriate assignments

Although a general association between the role of international assignees and knowledge transfer has been noted in the international human resource literature, very little is known on how subsidiary knowledge flow strategies influence the purpose of expatriate assignments. Building specifically on Gupta and Govindarajan’s typology of subsidiary knowledge flow strategies and Hocking’s expatriate assignment purpose, we examine the link between subsidiary knowledge flow and the purpose of expatriate assignments using a mixed method approach. Combining survey data and qualitative interviews from 156 subsidiaries in the service and manufacturing sector in Malaysia and Singapore, we find that subsidiaries with divergent strategic roles have different knowledge flow strategies, thus leading to different purposes of expatriate assignments.