Abstract:
Given the economic weight of multinational corporations and their privileged
access to resources, many different scenarios can be built about the future of
international business and about the future impact of international business on
economic, technological, and social development. In this paper, we argue that
multinationals do not form a uniform organisational population, and we provide
empirical evidence of the existence of traditional, rigid entities seeking
benefits from low-risk exploitative strategies on one hand, and of flexible
multinationals seeking higher performance levels by balancing the trade-offs
between exploration and exploitation on the other hand. As these two sub-
populations compete with one another for resources, we use a population ecology
perspective to study likely ecological scenarios for the future. Our conclusion
is that traditional multinationals tend to prevail over flexible multinationals,
and the conditions required for a future society to allow a genuine growth of
flexible multinationals are unlikely. This implies that multinationals remain
primarily exploitative, and that as such, they will only be associated with
marginal economic, technological, and social developments in the future. Other
organisational forms, such as entrepreneurial small business and communities of
practices are shown to be much more likely vehicles through which society can
progress and innovate.
