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California Management Review
California Management Review is a premier academic management journal published at UC Berkeley
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Article Information
Business Enterprise in a Global Context
Kolde, Endel J.
8
/
4
(
Summer
1966
):
31
-
48
World business is in a greater state of flux than ever before. A tri-level process of multinational fusion is developing in the Industrial West; tension and instability characterize the Sub-industrial South; while the Communist East mounts a frontal attack on the free enterprise system. Since World War II, international business relations of the United States have undergone far-reaching changes in scope, composition, and structure. Foreign trade that used to comprise the bulk of transboundary business has shrunk to a minor fraction; total exports are now less than a third of the estimated overseas sales of United States companies. International intermediaries-export and import merchants, commission houses, and trading companies-have been submerged by new arrangements and are on the verge of disappearing from the institutional structure of United States business. Multinational corporate ventures have risen to remold not only the channels of international trade but also the internal organization, as well as the external relations, of the corporation itself. The spans of corporate incentives and impediments have shifted, widened, and diversified as more and greater impacts from foreign environments compound domestic norms for managerial behavior and action. The purpose of this article is to identify the main sources-the apparent prime movers-of this process of change and thereby to move a step closer to a conceptual scheme for the emergent multinational business system. To minimize any dogmatic prejudice which a narrow frame of reference might tolerate, the subject is viewed from a broad interdisciplinary perspective.
