ABSTRACT
Most academic work on services and on their globalization seems to have been done by marketing experts who increasingly emphasize the importance of quality and the need to reduce perceptual gaps between service suppliers and receivers. To some extent, of course, these Professional Business Service (PBS) firms share characteristics with other firms. Indeed, several participants stressed the need to build the theory of the global PBS as an extension of the tested theories they, and others, developed to explain goods-producing multinational enterprises (MNEs). More generally, the trade-offs between economic forces leading to a growing demand for globalization and political realities, as well as cultural traditions looking for differences between nations and a different distribution of benefits, must be carefully studied. More research is needed about the reasons for the differences in the magnitude of multinational operations of firms in different PBSs. The internationalization of PBS firms was to a great degree demand driven.
