Big Business and the State1

This title is borrowed from Raymond Vemon (ed.), Big Business and the State: Changing Relations in Western Enrope (London: Macmillan , 1974).

Acknowledgments to the Ford Foundation which, in the early 1970s, funded a research project at Chatham House in London on transnational relations. I was the director and my interest in the role of international business was nourished by collaboration with colleagues Andrew Schonfield, Marcello de Cecco and Louis Turner as well as by others who came to study group meetings in St. James's Square.

I prefer the more accurate UN usage of 'Transnational Corporations', even though 'multinationals' is a shorthand everyone understands. But it is, after all, a misnomer: the enterprises are not truly multinational, though their markets are.

Kenneth Neal Waltz , Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison- Wesley, 1979): and Hedley Bull , The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1977).

For a discussion of how and why social systems, including the world system, should be analysed in terms of the 'mix' as well as the distribution of these four basic values, see the prologue and Part 1 of Susan Strange , States and Markets (London: Pinter, 1988).

Oliver Williamson. Market, and Hierarchies: Analysis and Antitrust Implications ( New York: Free Press, 1975).

UNCTC, Transnational Corporations in World Development: Trends and Prospects (1988). This was the third such report and its contents were the more surprising for coming from a body set up at the insistence of the Group of 77 as a kind of critical watchdog for LDCs over the behaviour of TNCs.

Strange, op. cit., in note 5.

Raymond Vernon , Sovereignty at Bay: the Multinational Spread of U.S. Enterprises ( New York: Basic Books. 1971).

John Stopford and Susan Strange , Rival States , Rival Firms : Competition for World Market Shares (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 forthcoming).

For the arguments for this synthesis as the next stage in the development of research and teaching in international political economy, see S. Strange, "An eclectic approach', in C. Murphy and R. Tooze (eds.), The New International Political Economy, IPE Yearbook, No. 6, (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 1991).