Abstract
The articles in this special issue of Transfer report and reflect upon a specific aspect of the activities of transnational corporations: their role as political players. Power and politics often come together as the raw truth of any organization. This is particularly true for multinational enterprises where the term ‘political’ is used to refer specifically to the ‘power’ exerted in such transnational corporations. This exercise of power can be considered from different perspectives, ranging from internal governance, via internal power and politics, to the influence that such companies have on existing institutions regulating employment and industrial relations. In a more general sense, it also involves the macro-politics of the transnational social space that multinationals create around them, covering for example trade and transfer pricing, and the setting of prices for goods and services within the enterprise but also across national borders.
This issue focuses on two interconnected elements. The first involves the macro-politics of the transnational social space, looking for example at the financial aspects of transnational corporations and their internal strategic decision-making processes. The second involves the influence of these processes on the distribution of social wealth and power in and around multinationals, such as their effect on local players, employment relations, labour standards and industrial relations institutions.
The introduction sets out the main theme of the special issue, looking at three dimensions. First, the growing importance of current developments in the characteristics of multinational corporations, including their ‘financialization’ and their internal decision-making strategies, has garnered the attention of the authors in this issue. Secondly, because of their controversial and complex nature, we ask whether and how the role of the national subsidiaries of a multinational corporation might evolve in relation to regional and corporate headquarters, and how this might affect the way we understand the interactions between transnational organizations and the various institutional contexts in which large transnational corporations operate. Finally, looking beyond their influence on local social and political institutions, the issue examines the extent to which power in multinational corporations can lead to self-created changes to the transnational ‘rules of the game’, allowing such corporations not only to escape national regulatory systems, but also – and more importantly – to create, to some extent, their ‘own’ labour regulations. Organized along these three dimensions, all articles reflect upon the resulting challenges facing the trade union movement.