The Multinational Corporation as a Playing Field of Power: A Bourdieusian Approach

Kostova, Roth and Dacin have called in 2008 for the advancement of a theoretical conception of the multinational corporation (MNC) that takes into account both power relationships among actors, and the structure of its internal institutional field. While micro-political scholars of MNCs have answered the former part of the call regarding power, the second has been mostly disregarded. Furthermore, the agentic aspects typical of power games and the structural aspects characterizing institutional fields have not been combined. Leaning on Bourdieu we offer an integrative answer to the pending call. We theorize the MNC as a playing field of power emerging around the issue of finding a meta-rate of conversion of the actors’ capitals constituted in national fields. We conceive such issue field in a dynamic state due to the constant entry and exit of new national players and, hence, due to the need to test the validity of exchange rates. The role of the metainstitutional field level of the MNC as a global category is also discussed.