National Stakeholders in the Global Contest for Corporate Investment

Abstract

In order to appropriate the benefits of their competences against contesting claimants - such as employees, trade unions, suppliers or governments - multinational firms employ strategies which can be attributed to three central motives: first, introducing competition into hierarchical intracorporate relations; second, imposing change in the established work regime in pursuit of rationalization; and third, building firm-specific corporate competences including employee involvement and teamworking. Examples from the automotive sector demonstrate the importance of bargaining over the location of future new investment, and how this is used to facilitate changes in the existing workplace regime. In order to understand such investment decisions it is necessary to refer to three indirect motives: a `signalling rationale', a `change rationale' and a `concession bargaining rationale'.