ABSTRACT
As the multinational corporations (MNCs) emerged as the main actors in the international business field, the control mechanisms in the MNC context have attracted considerable academic interest in recent years. Numerous studies have been conducted on issues concerning the relationships between HQ and subunits of an MNC (see Martinez and Jarillo 1989, for a review). However, existing studies have yet to produce a comprehensive explanation of the control mechanisms in the MNC context because of certain limitations. We believe that the limitation of existing studies is that their frameworks are mostly based on a single and narrow perspective on control and thus the validity of their explanations is limited. Another limitation is that they are static in their analysis. Most of the existing studies analyse organizations in a given time without referring to the possibility of dynamic changes. Considering that MNCs are living organizations, a static analysis alone may not be enough to explain control phenomena in MNCs.
