The word “leviathan” conjures the image of something as huge as an ocean liner, and that’s appropriate for this look at the breadth and reach of multinational corporations, or MNCs.
Nine chapters in three sections cover the scope, governance, and cultural, historical, and social implications of multinationals. Chapter One, for instance, gives a broad overview of a typical MNC, Unilever. Unilever is a perfect illustration of the global reach of MNCs, and we are reminded that the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream business, to take one example, is no longer a “local” company but one of over 400 brands that Unilever owns.
Both editors are prominent business historians—Alfred D. Chandler Jr. is a Pulitzer Prize winner and emeritus professor at Harvard Business School, and Bruce Mazlish is a professor of history at MIT. The contributing authors are academics and practitioners who span the globe from Tufts University in Massachusetts to the Roberts Research Group of Australia. Their overall dispassionate approach, neither placing blame nor praising, is valuable and rare for a book about the economic, political, and social impact of MNCs.
The editors acknowledge focusing heavily on MNCs in the United States; future publications, they hope, will look around the rest of the globe. This book complements 2003’s Global Inc.: An Atlas of the Multinational Corporation. Both grew out of an academic project called “Mapping the Multinational Corporations” that tries to convey through pictures and text the power and complexity of multinationals.
Leviathans as a whole provides historical and present-day contexts for analyzing globalization. The “new global epoch” they describe—a time when economic gain spans national boundaries but so do concerns about human factors—is very much our own.
- Cynthia D. Churchwell