ABSTRACT
The past decades have been extremely challenging for the management of multinational companies (MNCs). Simultaneous trends towards globalization and towards regionalization changed their competitive environment to a remarkable extent. The fall of the iron curtain and the transition of formerly central planned economies to market economies on the one hand offer unique chances for MNCs but on the other hand lead to substantial changes in their task environment which may threaten their very existence. Consequently, how to respond adequately to these new challenges became an important issue of international management research. The notion that headquarters of MNCs could cope with these challenges in a centralistic manner in the meantime got replaced by the concept of the integrated network (Bartlett & Ghoshal, 1989) which enables the MNC to be globally efficient and locally responsive at the same time. Based on this concept of the integrated multinational network a new perspective about the different organizational entities within the MNC became popular in international management. Accordingly, the spectrum of possible roles for MNCs’ subsidiaries nowadays ranges from apparatchiks reliant upon the parent company to self-sufficient clones of the parent company to centres of competence with worldwide mandates. But, even though there is a quite well developed body of literature regarding such typologies of subsidiary roles the dynamic aspect of the development of these roles has not found full attention yet.
