Restrictive Practices by Multinational Corporations: the Design for Multilateral Action

It is perhaps of some advantage to be able to look at this topic from a viewpoint involving three quite different sets of experience. The first is that of having been tucked within the command structure of a major multinational company for a number of years. The second is, at this point in time, to be able to look at it with the supposed objectivity and detachment of an academician with the opportunities for research and enquiry which that affords. And finally, simultaneously with the latter, from the point of view of one who, as an adviser to the National Economic Development Office in London, has some involvement in the current developments on the national and international level concerning multinationals. It has always been the case that the special problems presented by the strategies and operations of such corporations have made analysis of their activities a subject which spans the normal disciplinary grasp of people in the business-academic world hovering between the fields of the economist, financial and marketing expert and, increasingly, the political scientist.