Power, reflexivity and difference in a Multinational Corporation

Abstract

The rationale for multinational corporations is the creation and sustenance of global networks to increase profits by enabling market expansion. Since corporate executives facilitate the transfer of knowledge, processes and practices across borders, they effectively embody the globalizing project. Yet do these people, who are employed to make globalization work, engage in everyday practices that denote distinctly ‘global’ modes of being? The process of transcending national differences to facilitate capital mobility in global organizations is far from complete. Center–periphery relationships persist in shaping power relations within corporations. Moreover, these hierarchies tend to reflect power inequities between nation-states in the global economy. This paper comprises analysis of the ways in which executives reflect on their identities and interactions in light of globalizing processes in a multinational corporation. The analysis identifies three distinct modes of appropriating a global corporate identity that are borne out in these executives’ reflexive deliberations about their jobs.