The Multinational Enterprise and the Emergence of the Global Factory by Peter Buckley (review)

Peter Buckley is well known to all students of international business. Since the 1970s, he has provided a steady stream of books and articles (well in excess of 100) on multinational enterprises (MNEs). In 2012, he was on the Queen’s Honours List and appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Buckley’s very influential first book, written with Mark Casson, The Future of Multinational Enterprise (1976), argued for the application to MNEs of Ronald Coase’s ideas on internalization: that the growth of the MNE was “governed basically by the costs and benefits of internalizing markets” within a firm.¹ Subsequently, individually and with coauthors, Buckley has elaborated on and extended the reach of internalization theory.

The book under review contains fourteen articles that Buckley has published in eleven journals between 2010 and 2014. He had nineteen different coauthors on twelve of these articles, all of whom are acknowledged. Section 1 of the book is on internalization theory and the global factory. Section 2 deals with MNEs from emerging nations. Section 3 engages in spatial and institutional analysis. The fourth, and final, section is on policy analysis.

Two of the articles in the third section appeared in the British business history journal Business History. Buckley chose not to include in this volume his 2009 introduction to a special issue of Business History, in which he maintained that business history and international business were “cognate subjects,” and tried to explain how business history could illuminate the field of international business.² His two reprinted Business History articles included in this book are more specific: the first is on Japanese investments in postcolonial India and the second is on Japanese investment in the United Kingdom from 1991 to 2010. The Indian study looks at six chronological phases in the newly independent Indian government’s attitudes toward inward foreign direct investment, from phase 1, the “take off and first opening” (1951–1965) (p. 260), through phase 6, the “new experimental phase” (2002–2009) (p. 266)—covering, in between, the socialist shift, targeted deregulation, liberalization, and political cooling. As for the United Kingdom article, it is on change in the near past (1991–2010), after the surge of Japanese investments in industrial nations; it considers the Japanese tendency to cluster operations and exits, as well as the location effects of UK regional assistance programs.

It is splendid to have this recent group of Buckley’s writings in a single volume. Each article has an impressive bibliography that reveals the breadth of Buckley’s sources, as well as offers the reader a guide to related studies. I had a lot of fun following up on his references and becoming aware of the publications on everything from prospect theory (p. 59), to coevolution theory (pp. 68–73), to meta-analytic research (pp. 100–134), to “realized absorptive capacity” (pp. 293–325). Since his first book in the 1970s, MNEs have evolved, as have Buckley’s views and the burgeoning literature. In this book, Buckley defines in various places how his thinking meshes with that of the late John Dunning’s eclectic theory (as the latter took shape and incorporated, by 2006, network effects). Network effects have become part and parcel of the literature on internalization.

The “global factory” in the title of Buckley’s volume is today’s stylized MNE, whose chief executive of the focal firm is a conductor, coordinating the various participants. The analogy with the conductor of an orchestra is elaborated in interesting detail.

Just as Buckley tries to combine international business with business history, so in many of these articles he seeks to join his and others’ contributions to the international business literature with related literatures—all within the framework of seeking to understand the MNE. Thus, in Chapter 2 the combination is with the marketing literature; in Chapter 3, Buckley...