Multinational Corporations in Political Environments: Ethics, Values and Strategies

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"Multinational Corporations in Political Environments" advances and tests a theory of why foreign corporations leave host states. Theories of international business have often ignored the complexity of corporate decisions about leaving foreign countries, generally assuming that the economic and competitive reasons that prompt multinational corporations to enter host states also explain their subsequent reasons for leaving. Alternatively, this book proposes a theory of how different stakeholders' values and ethics shape multinationals' strategic leaving behaviours. Tested in South Africa when US multinationals were facing diverse pressures from stockholders, governments and consumers to leave, the research provides a prism to isolate how different stakeholders' actions influenced multinationals' behaviours. Detailed analyses of subsidiary-level archival data over a period of four crucial years revealed that the multinationals engaged in diverse forms of leaving reflecting their involvements, strategies and stakeholders' influences. The research, the first to test which stakeholders' strategies, including boycotts and sanctions, influenced multinationals and which did not, and to identify their effects on multinationals' behaviours, has enormous implications for policy makers, managers and social activists. The book also applies the findings and explores implications for recent stakeholders' attempts at influencing multinationals and governments, such as Nike in Asia and the Burmese government, through sanctions, resolutions and boycotts.

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Usha C. V. Haley (PhD, Stern School of Business, New York University) is a Professor of Management, focusing on Strategic Management and International Business, in the School of Business at the University of New Haven in West Haven, Connecticut. She has more than 90 books, journal articles, book chapters and research presentations on international strategic management. She has taught International Business and Strategic Management at major universities in the United States (including Harvard University), Singapore (at the National University of Singapore), Australia (at the Australian National University), and Mexico (at ITESM, Monterrey Campus). Additionally, she has taught in major corporate, governmental and universities' executive-development programs, for top and middle managers and policy makers, in the United States, Australia, Mexico, Vietnam, Italy, Russia, Hungary, Finland, India and Singapore. She also serves as a consultant on issues concerning strategic management and foreign direct investment for several multinational corporations in North America, Australia, Europe and Asia and as Regional Editor (Asia Pacific) for two academic journals. In 2003, she received a Life-Time Achievement award in Management from the Literati Club (UK) and a panel of businesspersons, policymakers and academics, for her contributions to the understanding of business in the Asia Pacific. She is listed in Who’s Who in America.