Management Relations in a Multinational Enterprise: The Case of Canadian Industries Limited, 1928–1948

Historians of modern, multinational, diversified industrial economies have learned that to deduce rigid, authoritarian control of subsidiaries, especially those in foreign countries, from the fact of over-all corporate ownership from afar, often leads to very inaccurate conclusions. The case of Canadian Industries, Ltd., a diversified Canadian chemical company jointly owned by the American and British giants, Du Pont and Imperial Chemical Industries, Ltd., reveals that a remarkable degree of independence was retained by the Canadian subsidiary even in such globally important policy matters as diversification, entry into new geographic areas, transfer of technology, and inter-company pricing of materials. Transnational ownership of industrial facilities, in short, produced advantages that were shared by both headquarters and local enterprises, leaving most of the anti-multinational movement to be explained as simpleminded nationalism.