International Business, Multi-Nationals, and the Nationality of the Company

This book discusses challenges that arise for multinational companies from not having a single 'nationality' and being exposed to a variety of simultaneous country-specific, legally, and culturally constructed nationalities at home and abroad. The chapters were originally published in the journal Business History.

Autorentext

Boris Gehlen is Professor of Business History at Stuttgart University, Germany. His areas of interest are business and financial history, history of entrepreneurship, regulation and corporate governance.

Christian Marx is Researcher at Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History, Germany. His areas of interest are business history, corporate networks, social and economic history, financial history, and the European history of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Alfred Reckendrees is Associate Professor for Business History at the Copenhagen Business School, Centre for Business History, Denmark. His areas of interest include entrepreneurship, corporate governance, organizational change, economic and institutional change in the 19th and 20th centuries across Europe, and the evolution and change of social orders.

Inhalt

1. Nationality in Times of Economic and Political Turbulences 2. International business, multinational enterprises and nationality of the company: a constructive review of literature 3. The paradox of nationality: Foreign investment in Portuguese Africa (1890-1974) 4. Changing corporate domicile: The case of the Rhodesian Selection Trust companies 5. Corporate structural change for tax avoidance: British multinational enterprises and international double taxation between the First and Second World Wars 6. National conflicts in a multinational: The case of the Dutch-German AKU/VGF/Akzo, 1920s to 1970s 7. Filling a colonial void? German business strategies and development assistance in India, 1947-1974 8. 'American Management' vs 'Swiss Labour Peace'. The closure of the Swiss Firestone factory in 1978 9. The defence of cosmopolitan capitalism by Sir Charles Addis, 1914-1919: A microhistorical study of a classical liberal banker in wartime