2 Strategy and Structure of Multinational
Companies
Anne-Wil Harzing1 Introduction 33
2 Differences between domestic and multinational firms 34
3 Sources of competitive advantages and strategic objectives 36
4 Structuring multinational companies 41
5 An empirical test of typologies of multinational companies 51
6 Human resource management in MNCs 58
7 Summary and conclusions 61
8 Discussion questions 61
9 Further reading 62
References 62
Note 64
1 INTRODUCTION
The main topic of this book is international and comparative human resource
management. We cannot, however, look at these topics in isolation. In the pre-
vious chapter we explained the reasons for internationalization and discussed
the (future) international division of labour. Human resources were shown to
play an important role in several of the theories relating to internationali-
zation. Although we did pay some attention to the multinational firm, the
most important level of analysis was the country or region. In this chapter we