Leviathans: Multinational Corporations and the New Global History (review)

The advertising extract, which is this book's first sentence, reads "Leviathans represents a path-breaking effort to look at multinational corporations in the round, emphasizing especially their scope, history, development, culture and social implication, and governance problems" (p. i). Given the appropriately global prestige of the editors and of several of the chapters' authors, one's curiosity is unavoidably piqued. While few readers will ultimately judge the book to be path-breaking, many will welcome its contribution to placing the study of multinationals corporations (MNCs) in a global historical context. The book is organized into three parts, effectively arranged to guide the reader through a wide-ranging subject matter: the first part is on the history and development of MNCs; the second part covers cultural and social implications; and the third part is on MNC governance. A sister publication from this research project is a historical atlas on MNCs—Medard Gabel and Henry Bruner's Global Inc. (2003).

The high points of the book for this reviewer are the two chapters by Mira Wilkins and Geoffrey Jones that summarize the literature on the history of MNCs, for which the year 1930 serves as the dividing point. Topics receiving emphasis include the variety of forms of MNCs, economic sectors, their modes of conduct, products and services produced, and several regional and geographical considerations. The chapter by Jones touches briefly on changes in the international business environment after the 1980s, facilitated by widespread liberalization of foreign investment laws, the reduced profile of the large integrated industrial corporation because of factors such as increased outsourcing, and increased reliance on technological development through strategic alliances. The historical surveys are enriched by the chapters by Robert A. G. Monks, and by Zhu Jia-Ming and Elliott R. Morss, which analyze changes in corporate governance and MNC finance, respectively. The very strong contrast between a United States or West European model and the experience of Japanese MNCs is amply illustrated by the quite informative chapter on Japanese MNCs by Sei Yonekura and Sara McKinney. One looks forward to future work describing the experience of MNCs from countries such as South Korea, Taiwan and China, South Africa, Brazil, and Mexico.

Because the above-mentioned chapters inevitably focus on MNCs in their home countries, they create expectations for the corresponding chapters in the book that deal with the cultural and social impacts of MNCs in their host countries. However, one is struck that those chapters are much less reviews of a particular literature and more the presentation of new ideas, including empirical work. For example, Bruce Mazlish and Elliott R. Morss ask if there exists "A Global Elite?" and test some relevant hypotheses by analyzing a list of invitees to the 2000 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. While this is undoubtedly an interesting approach to a question well worth asking, the reader will be disappointed in not finding summaries of what must surely be an ample literature of the impact of MNCs on host-country labor movements, national governments (is sovereignty still "at bay?"), mass consumption habits, and the global environment.

The chapter by Stephen J. Kobrin compares the current opposition to MNCs and globalization with that of earlier times, asking if and why today's movement has more resonance. His survey begins with some of the classic Marxist works, then touches on the dependency and neo-imperialist writings of the 1960s, and moves on to examples of more recent anti-MNC writings by Kari Levitt, Thomas Biersteker, Richard Barnett, and Ronald Müller and the actions of many nongovernmental organizations today.

The use in the book's title of the opprobrious term 'Leviathans' to characterize MNCs reflects an apparently preconceived conclusion about the impact of these firms with which this reviewer, and perhaps many readers of this journal, will be quite uncomfortable. That term does...