Review of Multinational firms, innovation and productivity by Castellani and Zanfei

When business writers and consultancies advocated their management-by-buzzword recommendations of the 1980s and 1990s, expatriats at multinational firms were mocked for management by helicopter: expats would be flown in by surprise, swirl up much dust upon landing, and be lifted out for replacement before the dust had settled. In their monograph Multinational firms, innovation and productivity Castellani and Zanfei don’t shy buzzwords either, of the economic sort in their case. Multinational firms (MNFs) are “asset-seeking” or “asset-exploiting” or both, they form “double networks” to realize their “exploration potential,” and they “bridge innovation systems” through their “embededness” against “cultural resistance,” the “liability of foreignness” and the “incompatibility of knowledge.” But Castellani and Zanfei emphasize the long-lived links that persist after the expat dust has settled. Castellani and Zanfei point to knowledge transfers and innovations that MNFs might be uniquely fit to pursue and implement across their locations. In the first chapters, Castellani and Zanfei march through the topic in bold steps. Select theories serve as landmarks for orientation, and potentially conflicting evidence is cleared from the way, mainly to arrive at the authors’ descriptive notion of MNFs as double networks: internal networks of affiliated companies and external networks of suppliers, clients, and cooperation partners. Given the unavoidable omissions under the authors’ fast moves, this reader expected them to head towards a similarly bold ultimate thesis as a reward. Along the way, an implicit proposition seemed to emerge: that today’s MNFs tend to seek otherwise inaccessible or