Corporate and business strategy at MNEs : A managerial practice view

Abstract: Corporate strategy is a foundation for companies operations, processes and  the ways in which its various businesses  work together to achieve particular goals.  Scholars and managers  recognize different levels of strategy for organizations. One of  the  differentiations  is  based  on  governance structure of the organization, and divides  corporate strategy on two levels: corporate strategy  and business-unit strategy. In many cases, some might think that business and corporate dimensions are the same. However,  when divided into strategies, there is a difference. This especially relates to MNEs (multinational enterprises), with their massive and sometimes complicated structure  and business units all over the world.  This study intends to find out whether and how corporate strategy as whole is employed and engineered in terms of this differentiation at MNEs, as well as to explore the additional factors   to well-known ones, affecting strategy development on both levels. Even though, a decent amount of studies have been done on a field,  the views on which questions should be answered by corporate level  strategies or business unit strategies are significantly differ. Hence, in order to develop understanding and contribute to the further research, this study has been undertaken.