Powers and Limits of Transnational Corporations: The Case of ADM

Abstract This analysis employs the case of lysine price fixing involving the food‐processing transnational corporation (TNC) Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Asian‐based firms. In an “economy and society” conceptual framework grounded in the sociology of agriculture and food, we investigate the powers and limits of TNCs in the global era. We argue that TNCs maintain significant powers which allow them to avoid the laws and regulations of nation‐states. ADM was able to organize an illegal global cartel to control the world production and price of the feed supplement lysine. In addition, TNCs' actions in the global arena are limited by their inability to trust business partners and to organize and maintain systems of social control; these roles historically have been played by the nation‐state. We conclude that despite their significant powers, TNCs' contradictory position in the global arena provides opportunities that can be used to democratize society.     

Transnational Corporate Investment and Food the Third World: A Cross-National Analysis1

Abstract World-system theory, dependency theory, and other critical perspectives indicate that activities of transnational corporations (TNCs) promote hunger in the Third World. However, cross-national research on effects of dependence has largely ignored this fundamental manifestation of underdevelopment. This study examines the impact of transnational corporate investment on food consumption in 60 countries. Per capita consumption of calories and protein from 1970 to 1985 is regressed on 1967 transnational corporate investment penetration (investment stocks), 1967 consumption, and appropriate controls. The results strongly support perspectives critical of TNCs. Transnational corporate penetration has a substantial detrimental effect on food consumption which grows with the length of the lag between penetration and the dependent variables. This finding is confirmed by robust regression analysis. Over the 1967–1985 period, countries with minimal transnational corporate penetration are estimated to have gained approximately 700 more calories and 20 more grams of protein consumption per person per day than countries with maximal transnational corporate penetration.     

Institutional legacies in TNCs and their management through training academies: the case of transnational law firms in Italy

In this article we highlight the effects of heterogeneous institutional contexts on transnational professional service firms, a relatively poorly studied issue. Specifically, we provide empirical analysis of how the specificities of the Italian institutional context affect the activities of English legal professional service firms in Milan. This reveals the intimate connection between a variety of capitalism, place specific workplace cultures and practices, and the institution‐related challenges transnational professional service firms and all transnational corporations (TNCs) face. We also reveal the way institutionally generated differences at the level of work practices are managed in transnational law firms through worldwide training programmes designed to ‘govern’ the practices of workers in different parts of the TNC's network. This emphasizes the importance of studying attempts to manage institutional heterogeneity at the level of workplace practices, something often missed in existing mesoscale studies of TNC governance structures. Consequently, we highlight detailed empirical archaeologies that explore the direct links between institutions and practices as an important component of future research on the effects of institutions on TNCs.     

CROSS-BORDER ACQUISITIONS AND BOARD GLOBALIZATION IN THE WORLD'S LARGEST TNCS, 1995–2005

Because of their size, power, and undemocratic nature, the cross-border activities of the world's transnational corporations (TNCs) are of particular interest to sociologists. Previous research shows that over the past decade the boards of directors of the world's largest TNCs have become more multinational, in other words are increasingly composed of individuals from different countries. During the same period there was also a dramatic increase in the number of cross-border TNC mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Anecdotal evidence suggests a connection between cross-border acquisitions and the increasingly multinational composition of TNC boards, and this study explores that relationship using data on the 148 largest TNCs and commercial banks. We find that a cross-border acquisition almost always results in a more multinational board of directors, that multinational boards are more likely to do cross-border deals, and that once a board becomes multinational it stays that way. The evidence also shows that multinational boards are concentrated in Europe, suggesting another dynamic between the integrating forces of the European Union and its TNCs. Because the results show increasing cross-national contact between the corporate elites who serve on multinational TNC boards, the results also provide some support for claims about the recent emergence of a "Transnational Business Class" or "Transnational Capitalist Class," at least in Europe, although it is recognized that more study is needed to make the case that such a class is forming.     

Transnational land investment web: land grabs,TNCs, and the challenge of global governance

ABSTRACT

Despite international media’s waning attention, research and political debates on global land grabbing have not subsided. We argue the importance of understanding the ‘transnational land investment web’ of corporate and state actors and institutions, which are not always immediately visible. Focusing on transnational corporations (TNCs) based in the European Union (EU), we examine five sets of actors and institutional spheres through which these actors are able to grab lands beyond Europe. It is crucial to understand these not as individual sets of actors or institutions, but as interconnected sets, comprising a web. These are EU-based: (1) Private companies using regular institutional platforms; (2) Finance capital companies; (3) Public–private partnerships; (4) Development Finance Institutions; and (5) Companies using EU policies to gain control of land through the supply chain. One implication of this complex web is that democratic governance in the context of land grabs becomes an even more daunting challenge.     

Intra-Firm Transactions of TNCs in Ukraine: Empirical Investigation

Modern transnational corporations (TNCs) are integrated, internally deterministic systems characterized by sustainable organizational, production and financial interrelations between their subsidiaries located in different countries. Intra-firm shifting of financial resources within TNCs has become an important means of covering funding needs of particular subsidiaries in a more efficient way and responding to opportunities and threats of the macroeconomic environment. Although the literature on intra-firm transactions of TNCs is already sufficiently developed, most research is either theoretical, or is based on secondary sources of information. There is a lack of relevant research in Ukraine. In contrast, this study is one of a few in the contemporary economic research on intra-firm activities and the second one in Ukraine which is based on empirical information collected from primary sources. The study shows that most TNCs operating in Ukraine decide on financial terms of their intra-firm transactions based on a mixed decision-making system with a centralized system also commonly used. Responsibility over intra-firm operations is largely spread within different units of the group financial function and inside different departments of local subsidiaries. We found significant difference in the use of intra-firm financial instruments depending on the type of control over their Ukrainian subsidiaries. In particular, TNCs use a wider range of intra-firm financial instruments in their relations with subsidiaries with lower degree of control from the parent company than with wholly-owned subsidiaries. We found that tangible or intangible character of core activities of a TNC has an impact on the use of some instruments.     

Portfolios of mobility: the movement of expertise in transnational corporations in two sectors — aerospace and extractive industries

This article is about how UK‐based transnational corporations source expertise and move highly skilled people among their sites. TNCs rely heavily on their internal labour markets for skills. We examine patterns and trends in the ways that TNCs in two sectors, aerospace and extractives, dynamically orchestrate and deploy their networks of expertise internationally to address the demands of different markets. We chart the types of mobility that exist, identify how and why they are used, and explore some of the institutional, industrial, organizational and technological factors that influence these trends. We show that different types of mobility play distinct roles in organizations. Companies respond to mobility calls from diverse stimuli by linking together mobility options into portfolios of moves that represent negotiated responses to industrial and individual requirements.     

Diasporic Memberships in Historical Perspective: Comparative Insights from the Mexican,Italian and Polish Cases1

This article compares the evolution of diaspora‐sending state relations for Mexico, Italy, and more briefly, Poland during their peak periods of out migration. I argue that sending‐state diaspora relations evolve through the state's changing relations with the global system, their domestic politics, and migrants' ability to act politically with respect to the homeland. This research shows the state helping to create diasporic or transnational space. It also contributes to the analytical work of fleshin out examples of transnational life in history, and examines a case (the Polish one) where the global system and other conditions combine to overwhelm transnational life.     

Transnational Debt Groups: The Challenges of Campaigning Within the Internationalising State

A central question facing transnational civil society campaigns is where they can exercise power most effectively in a globalising world. Is the nation state still a worthy site for struggle, or has power shifted significantly to the international arena? Taking transnational debt campaigning as a case study, and using Robert Cox’s concept of the internationalising state, this article examines these questions. While building common cause transnationally, and developing a transnational profile, were important dimensions of debt campaigning, the evidence from the study is that debt campaigns focussed strongly on national governments in order to influence international decision-makers. In this context, the article argues that transnational debt campaigns were re-articulating their governments towards greater accountability to domestic societies, countering the thrust towards the internationalisation of the state.     

A reconceptualization of state transnationalism: South Korea as an illustrative case

Our reconceptualization of state transnationalism underlines the active role that states can play in generating and sustaining cross‐border flows between a nation's homeland and its diasporic communities. This represents a sort of ‘middle ground’ between formerly hegemonic state centric’ approaches to global processes (focusing heavily on the ‘international’) and more recent ones emphasizing ‘transnational’ dynamics (which primarily arise through the agency of cross‐border migrants). We discuss a typology of approaches and avoid the tendency to set nation‐states against global and transnational processes. In fact, we highlight the various ways in which states often initiate key transnational flows, such as migration and the integration of diasporic communities into the sending nation, as well as maintain and regulate various processes instigated by immigrants. As an iconic case, we present an illustrative study of the South Korean government and Korean diasporic communities in the USA. Finally, in a brief conclusion, we outline some challenges for future research.     

Transnational politics at the edges of sovereignty: social movements,crossings and the state at the US–Mexico border

This article documents the history of border crossings among a group of social movement activists located in southern Arizona. By comparing two types of US–Mexico border crossings separated ten years apart, the article explores how political groups become ‘transnationalized’ and in relation to what kinds of ‘states’. By contrasting the shift from a state‐centric movement to a transnational coalition, the case study analyses why, in the later period, political activists were no longer able to identify the same kind of state. In chronicling the disappearance of one kind of state formation and the emergence of a transnational one, this research argues that globalization—rather than simply reflecting a decline of the nation state—is a process entailing not only new forms of transnational political activism but also new forms of the state.     

Development,the state,and transnational political connections: state and subject formations in Latin America

Focusing on the processes of making and sustaining transnational political ties between actors, international actors and states, this paper reviews recent work from a number of disciplines on globalization and politics, and outlines an agenda for future research. Rather than seeing transnational political linkages merely as forerunners to the loss of local sovereignty, the paper argues for a wider conceptualization of transnational connections, embedded within processes of state formation in Latin America. Using a variety of examples, it is argued that transnational networks are associated with a wide range of meanings and a variety of responses by diverse actors. Drawing on recent work in political science, post‐structuralism and anthropology, it is suggested that geographical concepts ‐ related to scale, process and networks ‐ offer a means through which to analyze and ‘map out’ these transnational political processes.     

Governing transnational social problems: public health politics on the US–Mexico border

Governance research suggests that transnational networks are the key to developing and implementing cooperative public policy across borders. I examine this claim through analysing how the US–Mexico Border Health Commission, a policy instrument designed to enhance transnational public health cooperation, developed from idea to law in Mexico and the United States. Despite a long‐standing transnational network, the policy process took over ten years and was contentious, politicized by domestic policymaking in the United States. I show how transnational networked governance intersects with domestic politics and find that the structure of overlap between the two are places where actors promoting state and transnational interests struggle with each other to define public problems in an attempt to shape policy outcomes.     

Hometown associations,the rescaling of state spatiality and migrant grassroots transnationalism

Abstract Migration scholars have noted the recent growth of hometown associations (HTAs) in different parts of the world and have approached the topic within the nexus of migration, the increased flow of remittances and development. However, the question of the differential growth, spread and success of HTAs (even in the same national territory) is not addressed and/or remains under‐theorized in migration scholarship. In this article I concentrate on how different genealogies, discourses and policies of migration in Europe and the USA gave rise to different trajectories of transnational migration scholarship, including the research on HTAs. Focusing on the blind spots created by these different paths of transnational migration research, I frame migrant HTAs in the context of the changing state‐space relations of neo‐liberal globalization. In this article I attempt to break the spatial indifference to state territory in migration research and to relate the dynamics of migrant formations to uneven spatial development, rescaling processes, the changing geographical organization of state intervention and the transformations welfare states go through in times of neo‐liberal agendas. Finally, on the basis of a case study of a Turkish hometown association in Germany, I raise some questions about the narratives of power in transnational migration research.     

Cross‐border,cross‐ethnic,and transnational networks of a trapped minority: Israeli Arab citizens in Tel Aviv‐Jaffa

In this article, I provide a framework for studying the transnational networks of minority members as a political phenomenon. I make two claims. First, it is necessary to take into account the state and its capacity to limit transnational networks if one is to capture, analytically, the full range of such networks. Second, it is important to extend the theoretical framework of transnationalism to include populations other than migrants and to account for networks established by national minority members whose loyalty to the state can be challanged. I offer a typology of networks organized along two major axes – the state in‐border–cross‐border axis and the ethnic or religious identity axis. These two axes yield different types of in‐border and cross‐border, intranational and transnational networks. I base these claims on an analysis of four case studies of cross‐border and cross‐ethnic networks maintained by Israeli Palestinian citizens in Tel Aviv‐Jaffa.     

New insights in reproducing transnational corporate elites: the labour market intermediation of executive search in the pursuit of global talent in Singapore

In this article, I provide new theoretical and empirical insights into the reproduction of transnational corporate elites through the process of people moving between firms’ internal labour markets rather than from expatriation. Theoretically, the article advances understandings of the reproduction of transnational corporate elites by drawing on a pioneering engagement with global talent, transnational elites and labour market intermediary discourses. I generate these new theoretical insights through an original case study of how global executive search firms in Singapore create pipelines for the recruitment of transnational corporate elites between firms’ internal labour markets. The findings also highlight the vital role of Singapore's neoliberal labour market practices, as well as its foreign talent programme to ‘win the war for talent'. By situating this research on the agency of executive search in reproducing Singapore's transnational corporate elite, the article's key contribution is to decentre North American and Western perspectives on the reproduction of knowledge on transnational corporate elites.     

Corporations and the State in the Global Era: The Case of Seaboard Farms and Texas*

Abstract Employing the case of the expansion and regulation of hog confined animal feeding operations (CAFO) in Texas combined with the actions of the transnational agri‐food corporation Seaboard Farms, Inc., this paper probes the relationship between the state and corporations in the global era. It specifically investigates the ability of the state to control agri‐food corporations in a context in which the hyper‐mobility of capital has increasingly allowed corporations to by‐pass state regulations and requirements. Salient literature is reviewed by grouping it into three camps: the first views the state as largely controlled by corporations; the second stresses the powers left to the state and the fact that corporations need state assistance to successfully operate in the current global economy; and the third acknowledges the crisis of the nation‐state under globalization but maintains that the state has retained some ability to resist globalization forces. The case study documents the expansion of Seaboard Farms' hog operations in the Panhandle Region of Texas and nearby states and its interaction with local and state governments and agencies. The article indicates that the relationship between transnational corporations and the state is contradictory. Its source rests on the fracture between varying postures maintained by the state and the relatively homogenous behavior of the CAFO corporations. The case also reveals that the state's limited control of corporate actions is facilitated by state strategies; that corporate actions are successful if corporations enlist the cooperation of the state; and the state is able to control resistance and legitimize its actions to its constituencies. These conditions, however, do not prevent the emergence of anti‐corporate resistance at local and state levels. In the search for new forms of socioeconomic development, local residents and their leaders should be aware of corporations' ability to affect state action, state postures that favor corporate designs, and the fact that successful opposition to corporate designs can be, and is, carried out.     

Networks of organizational learning and adaptation in retail TNCs

Abstract In this article we contribute to a growing body of literature concerned with the socio‐cultural dynamics of learning and adaptation inside firms. Specifically, we apply a ‘competence‐based’ view of the firm to a newly emerging breed of retail‐industry transnational corporations (TNCs). We situate these firms within the context of ‘relational networks’ and then consider – from a geographical perspective – the complex interplay between ‘extra‐firm’ networks and ‘intra‐firm’ networks, and between store‐based learning and organizational adaptation. We argue that the competitiveness of the retail TNC increasingly rests upon its ability to adapt the portfolio of retail formats to different and rapidly changing business environments by mobilizing and blending knowledge from multiple locations. This, it is suggested, is leading to the emergence of a ‘reflexive’ or ‘hybridized’ model of retail globalization.     

Family and nation: Brazilian national ideology as contested transnational practice in Japan

Studies of Brazilian Nikkeis (Japanese emigrants and their descendants) living in Japan tend to conceptualize ‘family’ and ‘nation’ as two distinct entities. Such distinctions are filtered through mutually exclusive discourses and understandings of national and ethnic identity. In this article, however, I view national attachments and migrant experiences in Japan through the lens of ideology, embodied experience and kinship relations. Treating national ideology as lived process sheds fresh light on the dynamics of state—society relations in transnational social spaces. I suggest that the ability of Brazilian state actors to impose social, moral and economic regulation on its citizens in Japan is compromised by the extent to which such discourses are ontologically grounded in the social relations of migrant family life. It is through these kin ties, I argue, that people set the tone and rules of play for state interests to encroach or otherwise on their everyday lives in these transnational social spaces.