ABSTRACT
By any standards, the last two decades have been ones of fundamental global environmental change. The nature of this change and its effects on business have been well discussed in the literature, as have been the problems of developing appropriate mechanisms for receiving environmental signals and interpreting them for operational practice. This age of discontinuity has produced challenges for international business on many fronts: for example, it has frequently required a new balance to be struck between the economic and political imperatives. Equally, as technological change has adjusted the optimum size of business units, while at the same time making possible quantum leaps in productivity, there have been growing pressures towards the integration of international business systems. The international company is more frequently regarded as a network and a series of hieràrchies than heretofore. Associated with these changes, has been the emergence of multi-mode operations within major international companies. By this process, global environmental change has enforced a whole series of organisational responses to cope with the changing situation.
