that country. (The few exceptions include Anglo-Dutch operations
such as Unilever and Royal Dutch Shell.) Operations in specific
countries may, however, be minority-owned and largely staffed by
local personnel. Most significant multinational enterprises are owned
in the USA with Japan and European countries (including Britain)
some way behind. Nine out of the twenty biggest multinationals in
2007 were of US origin, whilst the US companies on Forbes list had a
combined market capitalisation of 13.9 trillion dollars.
In bargaining with governments in the ‘South’ a multinational
enterprise is a sophisticated and richer organisation bargaining with a
poorer and less skilled and well-informed one. This can be illustrated
by the problems even large Southern countries such as South Africa
and India have had in their relations with multinational pharma-
ceutical companies over drugs to treat HIV/AIDS (Seckinelgin, 2007).
Even in bargaining with a middle-rank power like the UK, a large
Japanese or American corporation has very considerable negotiating
power since it has the alternative of setting up elsewhere within the
EU and exporting to the UK from there. Even a US corporation
dealing with its own government can channel its funds and develop-
ment projects ‘off-shore’ to lower labour cost countries or tax havens.
In the past, multinational enterprises often ran virtually inde-
pendent operations in separate countries (e.g. Ford in the USA, UK,
Germany, Australia). But they are now increasingly pursuing inte-
grated global strategies in which financial resources can be swapped
around the globe, production is planned centrally, resources coming
from the cheapest country relevant to the market in mind whilst
profits are channelled to the most tax-efficient point. (Thus Ford has
implemented a ‘world car’ strategy in which all models will have
interchangeable parts and components can be shipped all over the
world to be assembled in models appropriate to the market in
question.) This is only possible as a result of a sophisticated global use
of information technology including the Internet (see Tansey, 2002:
Ch. 3).
Marshall McLuhan (1964) has familiarised many people with the
concept of the ‘global village’ in which rapid satellite reporting and
transmission of electronic images of events, from the invasion of
Baghdad to the Olympic Games, familiarise everyone instantly with
the same version of events all over the world. A shared repertoire of44 SYSTEMS