2005 Volume 78 Issue 1 Pages 28-47
This paper critically reviews geographic studies of multinational corporations and presents a future research agenda. Studies on multinational corporations appeared in the fields of economics and business administration much earlier than in geography. Since the 1980s, however, the number of geographic studies has increased rapidly.
The focus of these studies has expanded from the location patterns of multinational corporations and spatial characteristics of foreign direct investment to intra- and interfirm linkages, relations between foreign direct investment and the regional economy, transfer of management methods and technology of multinational corporations to local areas, and power structures between multinational companies and state and local governments. Also, although studies on multinational corporations in the manufacturing sector have dominated the research in sheer numbers, studies focusing on the multinationals in the service sector, which have been expanding their businesses in many areas in the world, are now increasing. Most previous studies were conducted at the nation-state scale, but recently, the number of studies at the local scale has also been rising, stimulated by researchers' increasing attention to locality, which embeds multinational corporations in a place.
From now, it is necessary to develop studies based on the viewpoints referred above and also to accumulate “firm”-based studies such as those dealing with the corporate culture of multinationals and its transformation.
