ABSTRACT
Multinational corporations (MNCs) are the primary drivers of globalization. Their investments have created many positive effects, including higher employment, and accelerated transfers of technology and management skills. As we have seen, however, these corporations have sometimes acted without restraint. The result has been a series of ethical morasses that have damaged corporate reputations and cast a shadow over global capitalism itself. These scandals range from bribery and corruption to unsafe sweatshops and environmental degradation. To the casual observer, the multinational corporation seems to be an entity with unchecked and limitless power, an amoral “empire of profit” which seeks to extend its tentacles into foreign countries to exploit workers and find incremental markets for its goods. Critics of multinationals worry with good reason over the scope and reach of these sprawling organizations that often seem obsessed with lowering costs through finding cheap labor. It is not uncommon to see multinationals castigated as “increasingly rapacious” and predatory. 1 As Barnet and Muller presciently opined decades ago, the MNC is “the most powerful human organization yet devised for colonizing the future.” 2
