Government, business, and academia: origins of Raymond Vernon's understanding of multinational enterprises

Abstract

As the senior member of the panel to honor Raymond Vernon, I was charged with ` giving a retrospective on Ray's work going back as far as [I] want to go. . . and laying the territory for the other commentaries.'' Ray's work on multinational enterprises was shaped by his careers in government, business, and academia. One can, of course, only speculate about some of the exact links between his interests and ideas and his several careers. I will, however, indulge in such speculation by reviewing Ray's experience and some of his early publications to search for the origins of basic ideas that made his work on multinational enterprises so creative. Raymond Vernon (no middle name or initial) was born as Raymond Visotsky on September 1, 1913, in New York City. He completed his bachelor's degree at the City College of New York in 1933, in the worst of the Depression, when jobs were extremely scarce. His first job was with an advertising agency. In describing his job search decades later, he told his students that he had convinced the agency to hire him on a short-term basis to let him try his hand in the rather new field of statistics. His task was to solve one particular problem the company was facing. He solved the problem, and the company kept him on.