The Globally Integrated Enterprise

The multinational corporation (mnc), often seen as a primary agent of globalization, is taking on a new form, one that is promising for both business and society. From a business perspective, this new kind of enterprise is best understood as “global” rather than “multinational.”

The corporation has evolved constantly during its long  history.  The mnc of the late twentieth century had little in common with the international firms of a hundred years earlier, and those companies were very different from the great trading enterprises of the 1700s.

The type of business organization that is now emerging—the globally integrated enterprise—marks just as big a leap. Many parties to the globalization debate mistakenly project into the future a picture of corporations that is unchanged from that of today or yesterday. This happens as often among free-market advocates as it does among people opposed to globalization. But businesses are changing in fundamental ways—structurally, operationally, culturally—in response to the imperatives of globalization and new technology.