文档介绍：KNOWLEDGE OF THE FIRM AND THE EVOLUTIONARY
THEORY OF THE MULTINATIONAL CORPORATION
Bruce Kogut*
University of Pennsylvania
Udo Zander**
Stockholm School of Economics
Abstract. Firms are munities that specialize in the
creation and internal transfer of knowledge. The multinational
corporation arises not out of the failure of markets for the buy-
ing and selling of knowledge, but out of its superior efficiency
as anizational vehicle by which to transfer this knowledge
across borders. We test the claim that firms specialize in the
internal transfer of tacit knowledge by empirically examining
the decision to transfer the capability to manufacture new products
to wholly owned subsidiaries or to other parties. The empirical
results show that the less codifiable and the harder to teach is
the technology, the more likely the transfer will be to wholly
owned operations. This result implies that the choice of transfer
mode is determined by the efficiency of the multinational cor-
poration in transferring knowledge relative to other firms, not
relative to an abstract market transaction. The notion of the
firm as specializing in the transfer and bination of knowledge
is the foundation to an evolutionary theory of the multinational
corporation.
The study of the multinational corporation has tended to be divided by
perspectives ranging from economics, anizational theory, and history
and politics. These perspectives plementary insofar that the multi-
national corporationis an anizationthat evolves from its national
origins to spanning across borders. The cornerstone of this evolutionary
*Bruce Kogut is Associate Professorat the WhartonSchool, Universityof Penn-
spent the academicyear 1992-1993 as a visiting scholarat the Centre
de Rechercheen Gestion at the Ecole Polytechniquein Paris, France.
**Udo Zanderis AssistantProfessor at the Instituteof InternationalBusiness (IIB)
at the S