ABSTRACT

Most academics still subscribe to the view that globalization is more a work in progress, the boundaries of which are still hard to fathom. Only a few firms are considered to have developed an effective capability to locate, source and manage human resources anywhere in the world (Lewin and Volberda, 2003) and multinational enterprises (MNEs) continue to have assets, sales, ownership of workforces and control concentrated in home countries or regions (Rugman and Verbeke, 2004). The observation that stateless organizations operating independently of national borders under global rules of economic competition are few and far between (Ferner and Quintanilla, 1998) would still seem to hold true. Yet, considerable globalization is in progress, with 63,000 transnational corporations (TNCs) shaping trade patterns account for about two-thirds of all world trade but the top 100 of these corporations accounting for 12 per cent of foreign assets, 18 per cent of sales and 14 per cent of employment of all TNCs in the world (UNCTAD, 2005). We need to understand better how this process operates in relation to the human resource management inside organizations.