ABSTRACT
The strategic direction of national and international business organisations lies at the heart of wealth creation in modern industrial societies. Stephen Hymer (1976) formulated research on internationalisation by recasting foreign direct investment (FDI) in micro analytic terms.1 Since Hymer’s pathbreaking conceptualisation of the multinational corporation (MNC), a generic model of the international activities of firms has slowly evolved. While the model’s lineage is multidisciplinary, it draws heavily on new industrial economics and new institutional economic theories of internalisation, challenging neoclassical economic models of international capital flow.
