ABSTRACT
The eclectic paradigm as developed and expanded by Dunning (1977, 1979, 1988, 1995; Chapter 2) is an enduring and effective tool for understanding the factors leading to successful international expansion of the multinational corporation (MNC). Other chapters in this volume have gone into great detail about characteristics of Dunning’s thinking and the reader should refer to them for a more complete overview. These chapters show both the power of the paradigm-due to its flexibility in integrating new theoretical and empirical developments-and its weaknesses-due to that same flexibility in many respects. The purpose of this chapter is to put the eclectic paradigm into a more formal structure and integrate it with recent work done by Devinney, Midgley and Veniak (2000) (hereinafter DMV) that looks at optimal strategic orientation. The reason this is an effective exercise is that the views of DMV provide a parsimonious way in which we can move Dunning’s work into a more structured and more directly empirically verifiable framework that deals with many of the criticisms to which it is sometimes subject.
