ABSTRACT
Several mechanisms for coordinating economic activities have emerged in modern times, including states, markets, and transnational business enterprises. Stephen Hymer’s analysis represents a pioneering effort to examine transnational business enterprise and transnational modes of production in a manner relevant to world political economy, hence to uneven development, and, ultimately, to distributive justice. In the pre-capitalist system of production, the division of labor was hierarchically structured at the macro level, that is for society as a whole, but unconsciously structured at the micro level, that is, the actual process of production. Product development and marketing replaced production as a dominant problem of business enterprise. The product cycle involves stages in the research, development, production, and marketing of any major commodity or service. One way to regard the phenomenon of production abroad is as a system of production geared to retaining competitiveness for firms in developed countries after a product has entered the down side of the product cycle.
