The multinational enterprise (MNE) has attracted much writing, scholarly and otherwise. Treatises bedecked with boxes and arrows instruct business managers on how to run MNEs. Passionate polemics chronicle their alleged misdeeds and call for the regulatory hand of government. Between these poles are found reams of description and comparison. Economic analysis has certainly not neglected the MNE. However, when the first edition of this book was written, the analytical treatments seemed seriously fragmented, as each branch of economic analysis carved its initials into the MNE without worrying much about what other branches made of it. This book's first edition (1982) therefore sought to integrate the research literature in two ways. It characterized the MNE as one form of internalization of transactions, thus placing it in the transaction-cost approach to economic organization, and integrated this core concept with the findings about MNEs reported by each standard functional branch of economic analysis. The second form of integration drew together theory and evidence, the former largely the domain of economics, the latter found adrift in the seas of business administration, political science, and the like. This integrative effort apparently proved useful to readers, which is why this organizational structure has survived two revisions essentially unchanged.

The book was written to reach a rather heterogeneous audience. It aims mainly to serve scholars in economics and business administration. Although it lacks the apparatus of a textbook, it was designed to also provide collateral reading for students in courses that touch on multinational enterprise.