ABSTRACT
Corporate needs to respond to the dual strategic demands of integration on the one hand and responsiveness on the other become increasingly complex in culturally distant markets. Nowhere is this more so than in the mix of commercial environments that constitute the ASEAN trading bloc. In the precrisis boom years of the 1980s and early 90s it was the latter – “responsiveness” – element that had held sway. Group reports and brochures of the period expounded at length on the companies’ goals of becoming “multilocal” or “multidomestic” and the optimum policy of bringing in the best of their international expertise while making sure that it was “absolutely right for the local people.”
