ABSTRACT
Introduction It is a generally accepted axiom of international business theory that a multinational firm must possess some ownership or firm-specific advantages over uni-national firms in order to be able to compete despite the higher costs of operating in more than one national market. These advantages are often assumed to come from global economies of scale or of scope. The competitive advantages that allow service firms to operate as multinationals are perhaps more subtle and thus more difficult to unravel. In the case of professional business service firms (PBS), the supply of services - such as legal counseling, valuation, executive search, or management consulting - is highly dependent on the skills of individuals, with little or no economies of scale or of scope, and few possibilities of standardization. Yet some firms in each of these fields have turned out to be very successful global operators (while thousands of others continue to confine their services to one nation or region).
