ABSTRACT
This chapter sheds light on the different sorts of tensions and contradictions confronting expatriate managers. It conceives of the modern multinational corporation (MNC) as a "transnational social space"—that is, as a structured arena in which different sorts of actors meet and negotiate order on an everyday basis. The chapter reconstructs the different tensions on the basis of the theories of the MNC developed in the IB and management literature and in more sociologically oriented approaches to MNCs throughout the past decades. Whereas the contingency and the institutionalist approaches to the modern MNC have their merits in pointing to fundamental tensions that characterize MNCs, they suffer from a structuralist bias. The micropolitical approach to MNCs represents a major advance with regard to grasping and understanding the complexities of MNCs' structures and internal processes and in making up for lack of consideration of the role of actors in negotiating these structures and propelling these processes.
