To ‘Almost See the World’: Hierarchy and Strategy in Hymer’s View of the Multinational

Hymer introduces one of the key texts of his later analysis (Hymer, 1970, p. 441) by adopting Robertson’s view of firms as ‘islands of conscious power in an ocean of unconscious cooperation’. Thus he suggests that MNCs ‘are a substitute for the market as a method of organizing international exchange’. One mode of later analysis consonant with the latter view is, of course, internalization theory (Buckley and Casson, 1976; Hennart, 2000). As recent work has argued and documented (Horaguchi and Toyne, 1990; Pitelis, 2002; Casson, 1990), Hymer (1960/76, 1968) was himself fully cognizant of the issues raised by internalization analysis and of how Coase’s formulations could be co-opted to resolve this area of MNC theorizing. This, then, predominantly addresses reasons why MNCs reject various markets for intermediate goods. Hymer, we argue here, was also concerned with the adopted alternative, in the sense of analyzing and questioning how and to what ends the ‘conscious power’ was exercised. Two strands of the analysis of his later years address this, in ways that to some degree reflect ideas now seen as central to the conceptual breakthroughs of the PhD research (Hymer, 1960/1976).