States and Firms: Multinational Enterprises in Institutional Competition

States and Firms is a study in the political economy of the multinational enterprise. It looks at the internationalisation in the 1980s of the twelve leading French and German-owned multinational enterprises in chemicals and electronics, who form part of a European Challenge in international competition in technology- intensive sectors. The book examines how and why the internationalisation of these MNEs has interacted with their embeddedness in the domestic structures of their home countries (France and Germany) particularly in terms of their power relationships with home governments and financial institutions. The primary themes are the MNEs’ roles as political actors; domestic government policy vis-a-vis the MNEs; MNEs’ financial relationships with banks in France and Germany; MNE political activity at the level of the European Union, especially evident in technology policy. The primary contribution of this book is an inclusion of a firm-level approach to put the spotlight on fundamental questions of political economy and international business.