ABSTRACT
Recently, there has been a questioning of the concept of globalisation including the idea of the global corporation. Most telling here are the findings that the majority of multinational companies remain overwhelmingly oriented to their home economies (Davies and Lyons 1996) while only a small proportion of world output is derived from the overseas operations of multinationals (Lipsey et al. 1995, cited in Allen and Thompson 1997). Without doubt truly global corporations and truly global corporate strategies have never existed except as academic and managerial ideas which gained some currency during the 1970s and 1980s. Instead, commentators now perceive a retreat from corporate strategies of global integration to integration centred on major regional markets such as the EU and North America (Hirst and Thompson 1995; Ruigrok and Van Tulder 1996). To an extent, these ideas resonate with those of the Commission for the European Communities which has promoted important ideas regarding European-wide industrial restructuring accompanying the creation of a single European market. These ideas centre on the exploitation of economies of scale and greater integration among plants within multinationals.
