John Dunning was not only one of the founding fathers of the European International Business Academy (EIBA) in 1974; he was also a strong supporter of an independent and interdisciplenary IB organisation in Europe. Over the years he contributed not only by presenting papers and keynote addresses, chairing panels, tutoring doctoral students and guiding the EIBA Fellows during the first years after their establishment. The EIBA community recognized his academic work by awarding him the ‘Lifetime Achievement Award in International Business’ during the annual conference in Ljubljana in 2004. During the gala diner he received a standing ovation from the EIBA members that lasted several minutes. This spontaneous applause was more than illustrative for the personal appreciation and the academic recognition of the EIBA community.

The EIBA Conference in Catania in 2007 was the last meeting he could attend. During this conference a plenary session was devoted to ’The Eclectic Theory, the Multinational Enterprise and the Global Economy. John Dunning’s Magnum Opus’. With myself as chair the panel members discussed the following influential publications: Trade, Location of Economic Activity and the Multinational Enterprise: An Eclectic Approach, Journal of International Business Studies, 1977 and Multinational Enterprises and the Global Economy, 1993. At that time this completely rewritten book (with Sarianna Lundan as co-author) was finished but not yet printed. It would be published in 2008 fifteen years after the first edition.

Although he was already very ill at that time, John had intended to come to the EIBA Conference in Tallinn. However, he had to cancel his participation because the conference coincided with the ceremony organized by the University of Reading, his alma mater, to set up the John H. Dunning Center for International Business, an interdisciplinary research centre within Henley Business School at the University of Reading, and to award him an honorary degree. Yet John’s presence was felt in Tallinn even though he was in the UK, because his co-author presented two of his papers and his autobiography ‘Seasons of a Scholar’ was available at the bookstand.

At the Valencia meeting the EIBA Fellows will organize the opening plenary session: ‘John Dunning’s International Business Legacy: Back to the Future’. The panel members (Klaus Macharzina, Danny Van Den Bulcke, John Cantwell, Peter Buckley, Sarianna Lundan and Seev Hirsch) will discuss John Dunning’s posthumous volume: ‘Back to the Future: New Challenges for International Business Research’ that will appear in 2010. The book consists of 15 chapters divided over 5 parts. Most of the papers were published in the last few years of John Dunning’s life and appeared in journals or as chapters in edited volumes.

The volume is the eighth in which John Dunning put together his writings during a particular period and theme. In the past, he set each collection of essays within the framework of an emerging issue in IB. For example, two of his volumes in the 1980s focused on the new theories on the determinants of MNE activity then evolving, and another on the increasingly important role played by created assets, and especially innovatory capacity as a competitive advantage of MNEs. In the early 1990s, he turned his attention to the opening up of – both developing and developed - economies to the forces of globalisation, and its impact on the strategy of MNEs; and also to the increasing importance of service based MNEs. This was followed in 1997, by a volume entitled ‘Alliance Capitalism and Global Business’ (London, Routledge) which recognised and explored several new modalities by which international business operations were being conducted. In each of these volumes, he took an historical and analytical approach to the topic being explored, and, in so doing, discovered that, quite frequently, the germs of new scholarly advances in IB came from economists, organizational theorists and others working outside the subject area.

The two main foci of this last volume of John Dunning both reflect his reactions to the recent changes in the global economic scenario and in the direction of scholarly research. The first consists of a more explicit introduction of an institutional and evolutionary approach to the understanding of the motives for, and the determinants and effects of, FDI and MNE activity. In doing so, he has drawn upon the thinking and writing of a number of scholars outside IB. Of these, Douglass North on institutional theory, (1990, 2005), Richard Nelson on evolutionary theory (1982, 2002), Amartya Sen on a value based approach to development (Sen, 1999), and Joseph Stiglitz (2006) on the dynamic interface between the institutional instruments of international organisations, and the structural upgrading of developing countries, have been among the most influential in affecting the thinking of IB scholars. Also, in several of his recent contributions, some of which have been jointly written with Sarianna Lundan, he put more emphasis to the role of institutions in shaping the OLI configuration of MNEs, and its impact on economic and social development.

John and Christine Dunning with Danny Van Den Bulcke at the University of Antwerp

In April 2007 Rajneesh Narula organised the First Reading Conference on International Business on the occasion of 40 years of IB at the University of Reading and John Dunning’s 80th birthday. John Dunning was given a scrapbook with the title ‘John Dunning. A Global Celebration’ in which colleagues and friends had written short contributions about the man and the scholar. I was invited by Rajneesh and Klaus Meyer to show a PowerPoint presentation with pictures of John I had taken over the years. I took the risk of making fun of John Dunning by comments and anecdotes of mutual travel experiences and conference participations. He liked it so much that he asked me to present it again at the bithday party organised for his family and close friends in June of the same year. For me this was another illustration of a side of John that might have been unknown to a number of his colleagues.

In this special edition of EIBAzine, I have included a few of the contributions (Recollections) out the 2007 Reading scrapbook - with some minor changes, however. While Tony Corley describes the intellectual evolution of John Dunning’s writings, the comments by Nagesh Kumar (India), Constantina Kottaridi (Greece), Michele Akoorie (New Zealand), Rajah Rasiah (Malaysia) are used as examples to show how generous John was in supporing young scholars. He will live on in their memory and their scholarly work as will be the case for a huge number of students, colleagues and friends from all over the world. Little did they know that John Dunning would pass away less than two years after the birthday celebrations?

Also included in this Tribute to John Dunning as an influential academic is the obituary as it appeared in the Times of February 9, a few days after his untimely death. Vitor Corado Simoes describes how John influenced his career and the Portuguese FDI policy and promotion, while Alan Rugman relates the impact John Dunning had on the field of IB during half a century on borth sides of the Atlantic Ocean and beyond. Sarianna Lundan has worked closer with John Dunning than anyone else as co-author of the second edition of the magnum opus and expresses her amazement of John’s enormous capacity for work even when he was approaching eighty and his generosity to students and colleagues, while adding some persobnal touches. Seev Hirsch reviews the new edition of ‘Multinational Enterprised and the Global Economy’ which might be called called the super magnum opus.

During the Reading conference and EIBA conference in Catania in 2007 I had the opportunity to show some of John Dunning’s doodles. Many colleagues have noticed that during presentations of papers and speeches he would make these abstract doodles. Few of us knew that he also wrote the occasional poem. He loved Corwall, the place where he wrote many of his papers and books. This special issue of EIBAzine, devoted to the memory and intellectual legacy of John Dunning, concludes by including John’s ‘Ode to Cornwall’, which we might read as an ‘Ode to John Dunning’.
 

To be published:
New Challenges for International Business Research: Back to the Future
By John H. Dunning

Part 1 - Learning from Early Scholars

1. The contribution of Edith Penrose to international business scholarship.
2. If Hymer were writing now.
3. Some antecedents of internalization theory.

Part 2 - An Institutional Perspective on International Business Scholarship

4. A new Zeitgeist for international business activity and scholarship.
5. The changing locational determinants of MNE activity: 1960-2006.
6. Institutions and the OLI paradigm of the multinational enterprise.
7. Towards a new paradigm of development: implications for the determinants of international business activity.
8. Institutional reform, FDI and the European transitional economies.

Part 3 - FDI and the competitiveness of firms and countries

  9. FDI, globalisation and development: some implications for the Korean economy and Korean firms.
10. FDI and the competitive advantage of countries.
11. The role of FDI in the regionalisation/globalisation debate.

Part 4 - Some Ethical Challenges of Global Capitalism

12. In search of a global moral architecture.
13. Corporate social responsibility: An institutional approach.

Part 5 - Some Personal Reflections

14. Perspectives on international business scholarship. Fifty five years of researching and teaching international business.
15. The United Nations and transnational corporations: some personal reminiscences.
 

by Danny Van Den Bulcke, EIBA Chairman

During the Spring Board meeting in Valencia at the end of April, several Board members made suggestions as to how EIBA could best commemorate John Dunning. Although the creation of a new special Award was proposed no concrete proposals were formulated as to how such a Prize should be financed. Neither was the renaming of an existing award a realistic option because it could not be guaranteed for a sufficient long period.

Because, I thought that EIBA could not wait another year before deciding what to do about the lasting memory of John Dunning, I proposed to establish the 'J.H. Dunning Best Doctoral Thesis Proposal' defended during EIBA’s Doctoral Tutorial. I submited this proposal to the Board members and argued that:

- the risk of setting up a special Prize that has to be discontinued after one or even a few years is limited as normally the Tutorial will remain a permanent feature of the EIBA conference;

- John was an active member of the Tutorial for about 15 years. It is well known by all of us and especially by the the younger scholars that he was extremely helpful for doctoral students, even after he no longer was an active member of the Faculty of the Tutorial;

- because I started the Doctoral Tutorial in 1987 and ran it for 17 years, I felt entitled to link its future successful continuation with the name of John H. Dunning. My successors and co-chairs of the Doctoral Consortium John Cantwell and Udo Zander fully supported the proposal.

After having obtained the agreement of EIBA’s Executive Committee to associate the memory of John Dunning with EIBA’s Doctoral Tutorial, the EIBA Board also unanimously subscribed to the proposal.
 

Professor John Dunning – Academic whose study of globalisation embraced the impact, effectiveness
 and moral implications of cross-border investment
The Times, (London, England) - Monday, February 9, 2009

John Dunning, Emeritus Professor at the University of Reading, was a leading authority on globalisation who conducted wide-ranging research into the methods and effectiveness of cross-border investment. Globalisation is controversial because while it often helps to spur economic growth it leads some to fear for the dilution of national sovereignty over trade, employment, welfare and the environment. Thanks to Dunning, many more of the practical implications of globalisation were examined. International investment divides into two parts: on one hand there is portfolio investment, the buying and selling of minority stakes in companies. On another, multinational companies based in one country expand their physical presence overseas through the process commonly known as "foreign direct investment", or FDI.

Both forms of international investment are integral to globalisation, but it is the latter which, in the eyes of many development-minded politicians and economists, is preferable. It is sometimes said that factories, unlike flighty pure financial investors, cannot get up and walk away.

As Esmee Fairbairn Chair of International Investment and Business Studies at the University of Reading from 1975-87, Dunning marked out the difference between financial investment and FDI. He also furthered understanding of the effectiveness of FDI and the problems it can bring. Dunning published on the subject as early as 1958. His American Investment in British Manufacturing Industry reported on the contribution to the UK economy by subsidiaries of US multinationals.

Dunning found that foreign subsidiaries improved UK employment, productivity, competitiveness and research and development. The expertise in this area was later to help shape the findings of the Reddaway Report that addressed the question of outward FDI by UK firms and its effect on the home economy. The book was made possible through careful data gathering: Dunning interviewed managers in each of the 160 US subsidiaries operating in the UK. It also comprised empirical analysis and theoretical development.

It was in the last of these skills that Dunning was most influential, giving academia the so-called "eclectic" theory of international business. Dunning developed and tested his eclectic paradigm in a series of influential articles and books, making it encompass all mainstream research in the field. In this, the study of ownership, location and internalisation advantages are combined to explain outgoing FDI by multinational enterprises. The most prominent are International Production and the Multinational Enterprise (1981), The Globalisation of Business: The Challenge of the 1990s (1993) and Alliance Capitalism and Global Business (1997). This work, along with that of colleagues, formed the bedrock of the "Reading School" approach to international business.

Dunning remained at the forefront of teaching and research in international business for more than 40 years and remains one of the most cited academic experts in the field today.

He also applied his academic knowledge and insights to public policy. He served with the United Nations in the late 1960s, on a body that became the United Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations, now the Division on Investment Enterprise at Unctad. He was a senior economic adviser to Unctad until his death. He also travelled to dozens of countries in Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe to lecture on the role of multinational enterprises in fostering economic development.

One of Dunning’s later areas of interest was the so-called "moral ecology" of global capitalism. He researched the requirement by international institutions, governments, companies, and individuals to embrace a moral code if global capitalism could hope to be considered as a force for good rather than just being effective or profitable.

John Harry Dunning attended school in Harrow, and after serving as a sub-lieutenant in the RNVR from 1945-1948, was awarded a first class degree in economics from University College London in 1951. He gained his doctorate from Southampton University in 1957. He was appointed the Foundation Chair of Economics at the University of Reading in 1964 and served as department chair for the next 23 years. He was a research professor at Rutgers University, in the US, from 1989-2002, where he developed an influential doctoral programme in international business studies.

He was chairman of the Economists Advisory Group, a London-based consulting firm, in the 1970s. He served as president of the Academy of International Business from 1987-1989 and subsequently as Dean of the Fellows of the AIB. Dunning’s contribution to international business scholarship was recognised by the award of the OBE in 2008. His work was recognised by the award of several honorary degrees from universities in Europe and Asia.
The John H Dunning Centre for International Business within the Henley Business School at the University of Reading was renamed in his honour.

Dunning is survived by his wife, Christine, and his son, Philip, by a former marriage.

John Dunning OBE, international business academic, was born on June 26, 1927. He died on January 29, 2009, aged 81
 

In 2007, when John celebrated his 80th birthday, he had just finished the most prolific five-year period of his life. This included work on the moral imperatives of global capitalism, our joint work on the new edition of MNEs and the Global Economy, and several papers on micro and macro institutions and the determinants and effects of MNE activity. In June of that year, John celebrated his birthday with family and friends at the Phyllis Court Club in Henley-on-Thames. John was enjoying the good health that he had enjoyed for nearly all of his life, and he was accompanied by Christine, whose support and influence John acknowledged on various occasions.

His birthday year naturally included a number of other celebrations, and he seemed particularly touched by the celebrations the AIB Fellows arranged in Indianapolis, as well as those at the EIBA gala dinner in Catania. Indeed, John had a remarkable ability to gracefully acknowledge the various demonstrations and tokens of admiration and affection that he received throughout his career. At conferences, his untiring interest in the work that other people were doing, and his readiness to patiently give advice to younger scholars are remembered fondly by countless colleagues. And in all the years that I saw him either perform or prepare for an appearance, I never saw him taking an audience for granted, let alone regurgitating a talk he had given someplace else a week earlier.

On one occasion, when our conversation quite unusually diverged onto the topic of our childhoods, it was revealed that we were both only children, and while we enjoyed the company of other people tremendously, both of us also grew quite weary of it at times, and needed to retreat into isolation. In John's case, his favourite retreat was in Cornwall, where he could appreciate nature, think in peace, and enjoy the time together with Christine. (Those of you who had a chance to visit John’s home would know, that while he enjoyed working in the garden, his home office was never far away, and the volume of mail and faxes that would come in every day was nothing short of astonishing.)
In all the work that John and I did together, we hardly ever engaged in an extended debate on a particular issue. We worked separately until our views on a given topic were more or less fully formed and written down. While working in isolation only to compare notes may sound very distant, over time you actually develop a very keen sense of where the other person’s ideas are coming from, and how they might fit with the ideas you had been cultivating. Over time, you also get a little annoyed at your co-author’s verbal ticks, and I grew very accustomed to silently removing certain favourite expressions of John’s, and he did likewise to the text I sent to him.

It is difficult to believe that it has been almost a year since John passed away. I am grateful for all the memories, and whenever I now come across one of those phrases John would always correct, I smile and correct it myself.

Sarianna Lundan
November, 2009
 

The passing away of Professor John H. Dunning has remained unnoticed by the Portuguese press. And yet J. H. Dunning played an outstanding role in improving our understanding about topics which became key concepts to fully comprehend today’s world, from international investment to globalisation. His influence was also important for Portugal’s economic policy, especially during the late 1970s, when an inward investment promotion policy was re-launched. This tribute is intended to honour the Man and the Scholar who inspired so many young people to engage in international business research and careers.

Vitor Simoes flanked by John Dunning, Angela da Rocha and Danny Van Den Bulcke

At the time of his death, J. Dunning was Emeritus Professor of International Business at the Universities of Reading (United Kingdom) and Rutgers (USA). He was also Chief Economic Adviser to UNCTAD, and has played a key role in the design and development of the World Investment Reports, the yearly UNCTAD report on international investment. John Dunning has been President of the Academy of International Business (AIB), and was a member of the Fellows of the AIB as well as of the European International Business Academy (EIBA). In 2008 he had been appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

He has published more than 50 books on international investment and multinational corporations as well as a large number of articles, many of which are now regarded as classics. Last year, ‘Location and the multinational enterprise: A neglected factor?’, originally published in 1998, received recognition by JIBS, the main international business journal as the most referenced article of the decade. In 2008 he published two key books. One is his auto-biography, which shows how his career has unfolded. In the book he unveils, in a frank and open manner, the Man behind the Scholar. The second voluùme consisted of the revision and updating, together with Sarianna Lundan, of his magnum opus Multinational Enterprises and the Global Economy, originally published in 1993. This is book is a must for all international business students and researchers.

John. Dunning’s contribution to the reorientation of the Portuguese foreign investment policy was very relevant. I met him for the first time in 1979, when he worked as adviser to the Portiguese Foreign Investment Institute. This was a period of intensive learning for me. I remember of having exchanged views with him on several topics, but especially about the relationships between firms’ ownership and behaviour. His words are still strongly imprinted in my memory: “foreign-owned firms’ behaviour is not necessarily worse than the one of domestic companies”. Earlier, in 1977, he had already participated in the International Conference on the Portuguerse Economy, held at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. At this conference he presented an extremely interesting piece of work, designing a “tool box” for analysing the costs and benefits of foreign direct investment.

J.H. Dunning’s work consists of multi-faceted contribution to the study of international investment issues. His views can not be restricted to the well-known eclectic or OLI paradigm, which explains international investment by the coexistence of ownership, location and firm internalisation advantages. Other outstanding features of his work are: the notion of the international development path, relating inward and outward investment flows with countries’ economic development process; the idea that we are entering an age of “alliance capitalism”; and the relevance assigned to “relational assets” as well as to the institutional dimension. It is also worhwhile to refer to his concern about the moral imperatives of capitalism and the development of enabling conditions to “make globalisation good”, to quote the title of one his dearest books.

But John Dunning has been much more than an eminent Scholar. He has also been a great Man: a Man who has always stimulated young scholars to think in an original way and share ideas, promoting creativity and accepting heterodoxy; a Man who was extremely supportive of his students; a Man who has built bridges between people, even between Portuguese students, as he did between his former doctoral student Elisa Ferreira and myself; a Man who was always willing to comment on the papers of his colleagues, in a frank but friendly way; a Man who was eager to support promising young researchers and always took into account both academic objectives and ethical values.

John Dunning will continue to be an intellectual, moral and human benchmark for the international business academic community worldwide. We should honour his memory by deepening our knowledge about the economic and management aspects of international investment, by introducing new research perspectives, and by promoting the inter-disciplinary approach he pleaded.

[Translation of the article ‘Homenagem a John H. Dunning’, by Vitor Corado Simões, published in the Economics Supplement of the Portuguese newspaper Público, on 27 February, 2009]
 

John H. Dunning and Sarianna M. Lundan, Multinational Enterprises and the Global Economy, Second edition, 2008. (Cheltenham UK, Edward Elgar).

In the short space allocated to a book review, it is almost impossible to cover all, or even most, subjects discussed in this remarkable volume, which contains the most comprehensive and up to date review of research performed by International Business scholars since the early 'sixties. Consequently, the following remarks address only a small number of issues discussed in the book.

Multinational Enterprises and the Global Economy is said to be the second edition of a book with the same title, written by J.H. Dunning, and published in 1993, by Addison Wesley. The present volume, co-authored with Sarianna Lundan, published by Edward Elgar, in 2008 is considerably longer, and quite different from the earlier edition. It contains a detailed review and analysis of the huge volume of academic research in international business, published during the fifteen years which had elapsed since the publication of the first volume. Of the book's twenty one chapters, three are entirely new, four have been comprehensively rewritten, and all remaining chapters have been updated. Consequently, the book should be regarded as new and not as a second edition of an older version.

The book consists of five parts which encompass a wide range of scholarly work on the phenomenon of value adding activities conducted by firms based in one country, in one or more foreign countries. Part one reviews facts, theory and history. The second focuses on the internal management of multinational enterprises. The following part deals with impact of MNEs on growth, development, and structure of the host economies, including their impact technology and innovation capacity. The last parts deal with policy questions, with contemporary developments in the global economy, and outline a research agenda for the future. For many years to come this volume, with its 763 pages of text, 61 pages of notes, 73 pages of references, and an index of 30 pages, is surely going to be the ultimate reference work on International Business.

The term “Multinational Enterprise” was used by Dunning in an early, well known paper, presented at the Nobel Symposium on “The international allocation of Economic Activity, held in Stockholm in 1976. In that paper MNEs were defined as: "…..companies which undertake productive activities outside the country in which they are incorporated. The extent to which they engage in foreign production will depend on their comparative ownership advantage vis a vis host country firms, and their comparative location endowments of home and foreign countries“

The present volume suggests interesting variations on the original one. The most comprehensive contains several new elements worth noting: "The MNE is thus best considered as a coordinator of a system of domestic and foreign activities that are controlled and managed by it. Institutions play an important part in determining the complementarity or substitutability of the different modes of coordination". The emphasis changes from international production to engagement in different kinds of value adding activities ownership or control to coordination. The latter definition implies that international business activities are not the exclusive preserve of giant integrated enterprises, and that hierarchical relations are not necessarily the dominant feature of firms engaged in international business.

The theory section includes a detailed review of international business theories developed since the 'sixties, starting with Hymer's and other models, inspired by industrial organization theory, which suggests that different kinds of market failure trigger firms' engagement in foreign direct investment.

The review moves on to discuss dynamic models such as the Product Cycle which relates the mode of firms’ cross-border operations to the characteristics of their output. These characteristics, which change over time, in a predictable pattern, affect their choice of foreign entry and operating modes. Thus, producers of mature products typically choose to export their output, while producers of products belonging to the early phases of the product cycle tend to engage in FDI.

The Uppsala model outlines another dynamic sequence of international involvement. It attributes the propensity of firms to engage in international transactions, to subjective risk minimization which is, in turn, determined by "psychic distance" between the home and foreign locations. Perceived risk, which declines over time, as a function of the experience, impels firms to increase their foreign commitments. Firms typically move from exporting from the home country to the establishment of, more risky, manufacturing subsidiaries, in increasingly distant foreign countries.

The idea of "Psychic Distance" was also taken up by scholars who sought to explain the factors which determine foreign entry and the choice of operating modes associated with FDI. The related concept of "Cultural Similarity" developed and "operationalized" by D. Hofstede enjoyed a good deal of popularity among scholars engaged in empirical work.

Dunning's best known contribution to the theory of international business is associated with the "OLI Paradigm" which attributes international production to the simultaneous realization of three types of advantages: ownership, location and internalization advantage. Ownership advantage can be viewed as one or more firm specific intangible or tangible assets, which have two major characteristics: They can be withheld from other firms and they are transferable abroad. Location advantage (or rather disadvantage) is a country characteristic, which should be viewed as unhindered access to local production factors. Access to the benefits of this advantage is available to all residents of the country, but it is not transferable abroad. Internalization advantage is a transaction characteristic which determines whether production in a foreign location will be undertaken by the firm enjoying the ownership advantage, or by an independent firm. When internalization advantage is present this implies that FDI is preferable to licensing or other market based operating modes. These advantages must, as noted above, occur simultaneously for international production to be a viable alternative.

A simple reformulation of the OLI paradigm can be shown to accommodate both international investment and international trade, which accounts for a more important share of international transactions than FDI. Exporting is preferred to international production, when location advantage resides in the home country of the firm possessing the ownership advantage. International production is preferred when location advantage resides in a foreign country. Moreover, international transactions, accounted for by traditional trade theory, can be viewed as transactions in goods and services whose producers do not possess a significant ownership advantage. This type of trade is generated purely by location advantage, which has the same meaning as "comparative advantage" familiar from trade theory.

Earlier versions of the OLI paradigm are augmented by another important component – institutions. The book adopts the view of Douglas North who defined institutions as:"…humanly devised constraints that structure human interaction. They are made up of formal constraints (rules, laws, constitutions), informal constraints (norms of behavior, conventions, and self imposed codes of conduct), and their enforcement characteristics".

While complicating the analysis, the addition of institutions to the components of the OLI Paradigm provides an important element of realism. This point is of particular relevance to the sections dealing with the historical evolution of MNEs and to the analysis of the relationship between MNEs and the economic development of their host countries, which are discussed in part III of the book. Institutional factors such as the existence and enforcement of property rights, of contracts, of legal systems, and the relative prevalence of corruption, are shown to make a significant difference to economic performance of the host countries and to the local as well as foreign enterprises, operating in them.

The evolution of the relationship between MNEs and host governments, especially in the context of economic development. is examined, in some detail. The early post World War II years were characterized by mutual suspicion and distrust, fed by the Cold War and the process of decolonization, which was punctuated by conflicts. MNEs were often vertically integrated "resource seekers" (e.g. oil companies).Their operating mode was based on the assumption, a legacy of the Colonial Era, that the host countries were unable of providing the managerial capabilities (and institutions) needed to run upstream operations efficiently.

A remarkable transformation in the relationship between host countries and the MNEs has since taken place. National governments succeeded, in many cases, in wresting control over upstream operations of the oil companies and other natural resource based producers. A major source of conflict between host countries and MNEs was thus removed. In recent years, much of incoming investments were made by firms which brought in new industries, some of them technologically advanced. Incoming FDI is consequently perceived as contributing to economic development and technological upgrading of the host countries. The recent emergence of MNEs from large developing economies such as China, India and Brazil in addition to the MNEs from the so called Asian Tigers, has further contributed to this transformation. The acquisition of advanced industrial enterprises by China based LeNovo Corporation, and India based Tata has clearly demonstrated that FDI need not be uni-directional, that it need not be confined to a small group of emerging economies and that it may be employed to serve the interests of economic development in general.

In the concluding chapter, Lundan and Dunning speculate about the future of IB research. "MNEs have both the means and motivation to engage in the development of new cross-border institutions. We believe that by analyzing their successes and failures in this process, it is possible to uncover valuable insights about the varied and diffuse interconnections that make up the global economy, and in so doing, help to provide the means for governments to develop more appropriate public policies and for firms to upgrade their corporate strategies"

These speculations take for granted the continued supremacy of nation states as the institutions embodying ultimate sovereignty. The authors should perhaps have considered the possibility that nation states may individually and collectively find it impossible to cope with the consequences of global warming, of grinding poverty, of growing health hazards, of massive migration, and of a myriad of other issues which threaten the future of the global economy. The chance of coping with these issues may well depend on finding ways of establishing credible global institutions, empowered to look after global welfare rather than merely the welfare of individual nation states with their inevitable conflicts of interest.

Designers of these institutions will, thanks to Dunning and Lundan, have at their disposal, a wealth of relevant data, as well as theoretical and empirical analyses, which will enable them to assess the capabilities, contributions and challenges posed by the multinational enterprises to the global economy.

(Originally published in the International Business Review)

END NOTES

"Trade, Location of Economic Activity and the MNE: A Search for an Eclectic Approach" in B. Ohlin P.O. Hesselborn P. M. Wijkman eds. The International Allocation of Economic Activity, Proceedings of a Nobel Symposium Held at Stockholm, 1977, New York ( Holms & Meier Publishers, Inc.). p.100

Dunning & Lundan p.143
G.Hofstede, (1980) Cultures Consequence : Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations (Thousand Oaks, California : Sage)

The use of the term "paradigm" is explained in one of the first chapters of the book which discusses the difference between paradigm and theory: "….a theory is a derivative of a paradigm, but one paradigm may be able to accommodate several theories" p.

D.C. North, Epilogue: Economic Performance Through Time in L.J. Alston, T. Eggertsson, D.C. North, The Empirical Studies in Institutional Change, (1996, Cambridge University Press). p.344

Dunning & Lundan p.763

Seev Hirsch, Emeritus Professor
Recanati School of Business, Tel Aviv University

 

John Dunning is widely recognized as the father of the field of international business. His first book, American Investment in British Manufacturing Industry, (published in 1958) illustrated John’s dedicated scholarship. Over a three-year period he drove his Morris Minor to each and every U.S. manufacturing subsidiary in the UK (over 160 firms were visited). John developed a theoretical framework in order to evaluate the contribution made by inward FDI to UK productivity and competitiveness. Today, a doctoral student would probably satisfy the requirements for a thesis by conducting a small fraction of the interviews undertaken by John back in the 1950s. And no new theoretical framework, such as the elements of the O, L, and I advantages of what was to become known as the eclectic paradigm would be expected. John started his career in international business on a high note and continued to produce papers, books, commentary, and advice over the next fifty years at an unparalleled rate. Today, John’s influence is demonstrated by a citation count on Google Scholar of over thirty thousand, many times that of any other scholar in the field of international business.

I first met John Dunning in 1975 at an AIB regional conference at INSEAD. John gave the keynote address over dinner; his talk dealt with the tensions between multinational enterprises and nation states. As he drew towards the climax of his remarks a sudden thunderstorm sprang up and doused the lights. John was unfazed by such physical matters and continued his address in the dark, but opened new windows in my mind about the relevance and beauty of international business as a subject. I know that my personal experience was reflected in the lives of hundreds of other young scholars in the field. John has served as an inspiration to many of us over the last fifty years, and we will continue to build upon his work and intellectual legacy in the future.

There are two institutions, one of which John created and one which he presided over and took to new heights. The first of these is the University of Reading where John created a rich intellectual environment, starting in the 1970s in which deep theoretical analysis and rich empirical work was fostered to explain the activities of multinational enterprise. Scholars recruited by John to the University of Reading include Mark Casson, Peter Buckley, John Cantwell, Bob Pierce, Rajneesh Narula, Klaus Meyer, Sarianna Lundan, and many others. John supervised several dozen doctoral students at Reading, prominent amongst them being Jeremy Clegg. John subsequently started a doctoral program in international business at Rutgers University, although he never referred to it as ‘Reading West’.

The second institution fostered by John Dunning is the Academy of International Business of which he served as President and also as Dean of the Fellows of AIB. John regularly presented new papers and acted as a motivator of new areas of research, such as his recent work on corporate governance and the ethics of multinationals. John was also a founder of EIBA, and I think attended all of its meetings until taken ill in 2008. At EIBA John was known to each and every member, spending time with them in private discussions at sessions and social events.

I was privileged to be a visiting research fellow at the University of Reading in 1976-77. On one occasion John invited Helen and me to dinner at his house. During that visit he took me to his library where his desk was covered with dozens of manuscripts. When I asked John why he was reading them, he said that he liked to read everything published in the field itself, and in cognate areas, such that he was well informed about all aspects of the field. Frequently he sent comments on the unpublished papers from younger scholars. He also gave necessary advice to more experienced scholars; indeed, one of his last comments on a paper of mine was that I should be kinder to others in discussing their publications. He also wrote dozens of book reviews and refereed hundreds of papers. In this way John, over a fifty year period, largely created and then sustained the basic conversation in the field of international business. For this we are forever indebted. In the future we will be able to continue to advance the field of international business based upon the solid foundation left to us by John Dunning.

February 2009
 

I welcome this opportunity to pay my tributes to Professor Dunning at his 80th birthday. I have benefited much from encouragement and inspiration received from him in my career. I have had three-four major encounters with him each leaving on me a profound impact of his personality.

Even though I had begun to correspond with him since 1984 to get his comments on my draft papers, I got to meet Professor Dunning in person at the 13th Annual EIBA Conference in Antwerp in December 1987, a truly memorable event organized by Professor Danny van den Bulcke. At the Conference banquet, I ran into Professor Dunning who enquired whether I was the one who completed a thesis on FDI in India. I replied in affirmative and wondered how he knew about it as it had not been defended by then. He told me that he was one of the examiners. Under the tradition followed by the University of Delhi, PhD examiners are chosen by the Vice-Chancellor out of a panel suggested by the supervisors and are kept confidential. Therefore, I was blissfully ignorant of the fact that I was just in front of my examiner until he told me so. I gathered the courage to ask him what he thought of it. He told me that it was competently done and suggested that I try to get it published with an international publisher in a book form. He also graciously wrote an encouraging foreword when the book was published by Routledge in 1990.

My contact with Professor Dunning became more regular during 1993-98 while I served on the faculty of the United Nations University Institute of New Technologies (UNU/INTECH) in Maastricht, the Netherlands. With some funds that were put at my disposal, I began to coordinate a project to examine the patterns of FDI and technology transfers and their impact on development in the context of globalization. I turned to Professor Dunning for his advice in shaping the project. An important highlight of the project output was a paper on changing geography of foreign direct investments that Professor Dunning contributed and presented as a keynote paper at the project roundtable organized by the UNU/INTECH in November 1996 and later published in a volume coming out of the project.

Among a number meetings with him at symposia and conferences (e.g. AIB annual meetings, meetings at the UNCTAD to discuss the drafts of World Investment Reports), those at Macau organized by the Macau Institute of European Studies in April 1998 and in April 1999 stand out in my memory. At these occasions I got to interact with John more freely and get exposed to the humorous side of his personality. One anecdote will suffice. The organizers of the conference had reimbursed to us the costs of our travel etc. in Macau dollars. Not sure whether the Macau currency will be accepted by the banks in our respective countries, John and I wanted to convert it in the US dollars. Hence accompanied by a student volunteer we went to a bank where exchange rate with US dollar was changing every minute. While we changed our currencies the rate moved slightly to my advantage. John remarked humorously that if I were you I would convert it back to book my profits!

To sum up, I have benefited much from John’s encouragement and inspiration, like many other young scholars from all over the world!

Nagesh Kumar
Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS), New Delhi, India

 

I still remember my first conversation with John, in 1987 while I was doing my MBA at Rutgers. I signed up to do an elective with this distinguished English Professor everyone was raving about. I wrote a term paper for this course, and John came up to me after he had marked it and asked whether I had thought about doing a PhD. Now my first reaction was that this otherwise intelligent man was either not the best judge of talent, or not playing with a full deck, I believe I laughed at the suggestion, and explained to him that I had barely scraped a second class degree, or that surely there was some mistake. Naturally I declined, went off to Hong Kong to work for IBM, but after a few months I realised it was I who was making the mistake. Maybe the man could see something I did not recognize in myself?

So I wrote to him offering my apologies, and asked if he might swing some kind of a scholarship or other financial support my way. He responded very kindly by offering me a position as his research fellow at Rutgers.

I also remember jumping the queue of patient students waiting for him outside his office on Tuesday mornings. I always arrived at 11 (a habit of mine John was unable to cure), and some very annoyed classmates would glare at me, because most of them had waited for a couple of hours for their turn, and now would have to wait even longer. But I had a trump card – data for whatever paper he was currently working on. I would impose on him for even longer than my allotted time – for he does not have the capacity to be anything but a gentleman – and offer him my latest half-baked opinions and ideas, most of which he had already written a seminal paper about, which he would promptly pull out of his filing cabinet and offer to me almost apologetically as I ended my monologue, suggesting I do a little further reading. And I would leave feeling crushed that I would never get a PhD at this rate, because Dr Dunning (for I did not get round to using his first name till I got my professorship) had already done it all.

Somehow things did work out, and I have no doubt that was it not for John’s confidence in my abilities, my life would have turned out very differently indeed. To paraphrase another employer of mine, I would probably still be counting ball bearings for Nigeria Airways.

A heartfelt ‘thank you’, John.
 

Rajneesh Narula
University of Reading, UK

Dunning comes to Reading
Many people have helped to make Reading University’s Department of Economics into the highly regarded seat of learning it is today. Yet John Dunning was in all respects its creator. In 1963, just before the Robbins Report on Higher Education triggered the University’s dramatic growth, Reading had little to offer in the field of the social sciences. There was no sociology teaching, and only a Political Economy department headed by a politics professor and offering a joint Politics and Economics degree course, not permitting specialisation in either subject.

A year later, when separate Economics, Politics and Sociology departments were launched, John Dunning from Southampton applied for the Economics chair. According to the smoke signals coming out from his interview, he swept the board with his comprehensive and realistic programme for building up a new department from scratch. He adopted the Southampton undergraduate curriculum of four core courses: micro, macro, quantitative, and the economics of industry, and a flexible number of options, from public finance to development economics and comparative economic systems. To strengthen the department’s teaching expertise in analytical economics, once in place he recruited academics of the calibre of Geoffrey Maynard and Peter Hart.

Research: Andrews and Penrose
To begin with, Dunning largely encouraged departmental research on the applied side. He had behind him a decade of published research, belonging as he did to a generation of mainly British scholars who had steeped themselves in empirical studies of firms and industries. Their findings sharply contrasted with the doctrines of mainline economists of the day, most notably those in Cambridge (UK) who adhered to the neo-classical or marginal and static theory of the firm, seeking to explain corporate pricing and output decisions by the equivalence of marginal values. Younger Cambridge economists ostentatiously refused to read Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics, dismissing his analysis as largely valueless because – unlike themselves – he had ‘visited factories’. They viewed all firms as identical and assumed that each had its own entrepreneur. Thus when two firms merged under one entrepreneur, that merger demonstrated that the marginal productivity of entrepreneurship was negative.

In basic terms, the difference between the marginal theory of the firm and empirically based corporate studies, such as Dunning’s, was that in the former case opportunities dictate resources, and in the latter case resources determine opportunities. To the marginalists a firm’s opportunity is driven by its motivation, whether maximising profit or sales revenue or managerial discretion, which governs the extent and nature of the derived demand for productive resources. The empirical economists’ starting point is the firm’s tangible and intangible resources, most notably in the managerial field, which actively seeks opportunities for organic growth, effective competition against rivals, and so on.

To take two examples, Philip Andrews of Oxford, a self-confessed disciple of Marshall, rejected the concept of the firm being in equilibrium while accepting the equilibrium of the industry or product market. He viewed competition as a dynamic process rather than a static structure, the size of the firm at any time being limited by its market, and regarded technology as being exogenous. Firms therefore set prices by adding a mark-up to their normal costs, but adjusted that price to forestall entry. Potential entrants, so far from being those starting up, were likely to be established firms operating in a similar line of business.

Having carried out extensive surveys of the rayon and footwear industries, Andrews could have usefully linked his theories in Manufacturing Business (1949) with those sources; his knowledge of industrial organisation in Britain was far greater than any of his contemporaries then had. However, as he declined, on grounds of confidentiality, to relate that knowledge to his findings, critics were able to dismiss that and later work as heretical and unrigorous. Only in more recent years have they found their place in the genealogy of evolutionary economics.

A second scholar is Edith Penrose, remembered for her influential Theory of the Growth of the Firm (1959), and having gained greater recognition than Andrews did for much preparatory field work in that area. She defined the firm as both an administrative organisation and a collection of physical and human resources, for the production of goods and services. The management in charge would be strongly motivated towards growth, either of its main products or through diversification, and would be constantly undergoing a learning process to that end. There the initiatives of unused managerial resources would be crucial. The overall objective would be long-term profits, and the marginalists’ concept of restricting production to maintain profit levels would be quite unthinkable. At the same time, the so-called Penrose effect high-lighted the managerial constraints which could well hold back the rate of a firm’s growth.

John Dunning’s early research
Dunning likewise began to develop his analytical models after completing the sequence of empirical research projects mentioned above. Those projects contained something not found in the work of either Andrews or Penrose, namely an international dimension. Andrews’ portrayal of competition, which really meant oligopoly, could have been usefully broadened by discussing oligopolistic rivalry overseas. Penrose’s analysis of corporate growth and diversification did not consider how both those routes to expansion could have included venturing abroad. By contrast, Dunning had early begun to explore the concept of location. While studying relative manufacturing costs in the radio and light engineering industries, he uncovered the key role of locational factors in influencing those costs. For him, it was only one small step from interregional to international comparisons of performance.

Having noted the number of US subsidiaries in those industries, many being located in Scotland, Dunning was given the opportunity to undertake a full-scale project which would track down all American manufacturing branches in Britain. Given the absence of any official or other surveys, it was a noteworthy feat for him to secure information from some 95 per cent of those UK branches. In 1958 he published American Investment in British Manufacturing Industry, at once recognised as a significant contribution to knowledge. He revealed not only the numbers and industrial distribution of those branches, but also their structure and organisation, as well as the contribution they made to industrial productivity and consumer welfare in the UK.

Dunning, in his early thirties, had established himself as a sound and energetically-minded academic. However, what would in due course gain him the status of a world-class scholar was a realisation that his American Investment book raised some crucial analytical questions that formed potential building-blocks in his future work on foreign direct investment (FDI) and the multinational enterprise (MNE). He had found that American firms’ labour productivity in their own country was 2½ to 4 times higher than in comparable British-owned firms. When operating in Britain, those American branches enjoyed greater productivity than the UK firms they were working alongside, but not to the level achieved at home. He thus distinguished locational, or country-specific, effects from ownership-specific effects; he chose the term ownership as reflecting a firm’s possession of advantages gained from factor endowments, economies of scale, and so on.

Towards the eclectic paradigm
Not until 1969 did Dunning see Stephen Hymer’s thesis of 1960 on the international operations of national firms, which drew the significant distinction between direct investment, to gain profit, and portfolio investment -- in company shares and the like -- which would yield interest. That distinction allowed Dunning to explain trade and FDI as alternative forms of international involvement. However, while industrial organisation theory could help to address the question ‘Why?’, location theory was needed to explain ‘Where?’: two theories which could not be easily reconciled. He therefore adopted the viewpoint of the host or recipient country rather than the home country and asked, ‘Why do branches of a foreign company serve a given market rather than an indigenous firm or imports?’ That approach posed the ‘How?’ question, of how foreign-owned businesses were able to outperform native competitors, for example by conveying across frontiers not only financial capital, but also intangibles such as managerial and technological knowledge.

In 1976 for the first time he combined these elements into what he called an eclectic theory of international production, not dependent on any doctrinal school. His OLI model, which he later more appropriately renamed a paradigm, included his two earlier terms of ownership and location advantages, and also internalisation advantages. MNEs would determine the extent of their foreign assets according to how best they could internalise their ownership and location advantages rather than marketing them through exports or licensing. Those advantages could then be subdivided according to their country-, industry- and firm-specific characteristics.

Internalisation theory
Once scholars in this field saw the core of economic enquiry to be the transaction rather than resources, and the issue became how to minimise transaction costs, the debate over international involvement shifted from studying the FDI process to the inherent characteristics of the MNE. The crucial question seemed to be how to internalise the governance of its intermediate products, such as skills specific to itself, across different countries. That development in thought put Dunning’s eclectic framework under close scrutiny.

For example, the ownership term in his paradigm, to him its central plank could be claimed to be redundant, since the extent and direction of multinational activity could be fully explained by location and internalisation advantages alone. While rejecting even more extreme criticisms that his framework was simply a subset of general internalisation theory, he was moved to subdivide ownership advantages into the asset and transaction elements O and O. The former covered advantages arising from an MNE’s ownership of specific assets, while the latter measured its ability to capture the transactional benefits, or alternatively cost economies, which sprang from the common governance of its assets in the countries involved.

To meet the criticism about the static nature of the OLI model, he offered an investment development cycle, or path, to link the volume of countries’ international investment with the stage of economic growth they had reached. Dunning also made clear that his eclectic model resembled trade and location theory in being a macroeconomic one. In line with his investment development path, he included in the analysis the home country’s physical endowments and intangible assets, to explain in a comprehensive manner why and how firms in that country ventured overseas. Alfred Marshall’s representative firm took care of differing abilities of management. He made clear that variables that were exogenous to the conduct of individual MNEs, such as market structure, would become endogenous when applied to groups of firms.

Once the topic of strategic management took off in the late 1980s, Dunning added a strategy term, a residual independent of existing OLI variables. Firms might be strategy-initiating ones, and enhance their competitive advantages by appointing new senior management for that purpose. Strategy-led firms, by contrast, might be run by risk-averse managers unwilling to exploit their advantages to the full.

The onset of globalisation
A stand-off then seemed to occur between the eclectic and internalisation approaches to the subject. Dunning was prepared to admit that too many types of and motives for FDI existed to yield a single, predictive and testable theory of that kind. On the opposite side, after some years of intensive study one of Dunning’s former pupils was moved to explain that internalisation was a concept in search of a theory and, at its most general, no more than tautological. While remaining keen to discuss his eclectic paradigm at all times, as Dunning entered his riper years from the 1990s onwards the looming issue of globalisation appears to have broadened and not narrowed his interest in the theory and practice of international business.

Dunning early chronicled the economic motives for globalisation, such as a renaissance of the market economy and technological advances, most notably the increasing availability and rapidly declining costs of transport and communications, which offered MNEs unprecedented locational opportunities to harness, create and organise its knowledge-related assets in as many locations as they chose. The world’s three great trading blocs, of North America, Western Europe and Japan, already held nearly 70 per cent of the global inward stocks of FDI and more than 80 per cent of the world’s research and development. Cross-border amalgamations and mergers were increasing in number, as were strategic alliances and networks. National and regional governments were under greater pressure than ever before to safeguard and promote strategies for both attracting in appropriate inward investment and encouraging outward investment. Such developments were helping to fashion what he called the orientation of international business literature.

Making globalisation ‘good’
Then came the most astonishing shift in the whole trajectory of Dunning’s thought. Already past the age of three score and ten, he single-handedly took the initiative in what had become one of the most contentious issues in international business, namely how to face up to the moral challenges of globalisation. In May 2003 he assembled at Chatham House in London a distinguished panel of experts, chaired by Shirley (Lady) Williams and including the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, to debate the issue. The resulting published volume, Making Globalization Good, comprised articles by no fewer than fourteen academics, publicists and political and religious leaders, such as the theologian Hans Küng and the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, and a Foreword by Charles, Prince of Wales.

Dunning himself wrote an Introduction, an Overview of the problem and a concluding chapter, ‘In search of a global moral architecture’. As the contributors seem to have been believers of one kind or another, they could be said to have reached a moderate degree of consensus; there was no minority report. In summing up, Dunning admitted that global capitalism, under which some four-fifths of the world’s population currently lived, was arguably the most efficient wealth-creating system known to man. However, as it stood that system was both economically inefficient and socially unacceptable. Its respective components, of markets, governments, supra-national agencies and civil society, were all in their different ways sub-standard.

How, then, to take action? The mind-sets of both institutions and prominent individuals would need to be altered. Dunning did not shrink from saying ‘Morality does matter’. He discerned moral virtues and ethical standards which were near-universal and could be interpreted in their own way by different cultures. Global capitalism’s ills were curable only as were those of any addiction, by those responsible becoming fully aware of both its problems and the wider world’s unease and dissatisfaction with its current state.

However, to combat moral apathy or appeasement, strong leadership was needed, especially to clean up the international monetary and trading systems and to stamp out disreputable business practices. Action would have to combine top-down and bottom-up approaches and be planned in an integrated way. He ended by maintaining that the teaching of religions and the best of non-religious traditions had not only a vital role to play in reforming global conditions, but also a responsibility to re-energise their own values and institutions to that end. Hence a regular meeting should take place of the world’s religious and spiritual leaders, much as the Group of 8 monitors economic problems.

Dunning’s resolve to introduce a moral dimension into his hard-hitting critique of globalisation is no surprise to those who are aware of his background. He comes of highly influential nonconformist stock, his uncle having held the highest office in the Baptist Union. He himself has been a lay preacher and was elected president of the Baptist Union’s regional association for the south of England: a post he had to relinquish when diverted to Reading and the incessant chore of departmental administration and original research.

Baptists tend to rank experience and expression of their faith above precise theological formulation, being as eclectic in their religious beliefs as Dunning was in constructing his OLI paradigm, and value intellectual and personal freedom. Judging by his massive output of books, articles and conference papers, Dunning possesses to an unusually high degree a sense of purpose, sometimes – like Andrews before him – indicating in his countenance that he had been working far into the night. His easy manners, kindness to others in their hours of need, and freedom from stress, even under considerable pressure, show the many-sidedness of his character.

My happiest memories of Dunning, over many decades, have been to discover from others how widespread his fame has been over so many branches of the academic community. At economics and business history conferences, in Britain and overseas, to announce myself as being from Reading at once aroused great interest. ‘Do you know Dunning?’ was the next question, and I have invariably been honoured to claim him as my boss.

Tony Corley
Department of Management, University of Reading
 

Although I met John Dunning for the first time in 2002 I regard that meeting as an extremely fortunate one. For someone who had pioneered and published the most in the field of multinational corporations I found that the person himself had more to offer. As a discussant to my paper later in 2003 he literally roasted me constructively, opening my mind in the process to so many possibilities that I simply wished I had been his student much earlier.

Interestingly in the John Neville Keynes mould John Dunning’s original 1958 book was very much based on inductive research. At a time when transactions cost economics had yet to gain currency –though Coase and Penrose (the social whole) had already published their works on the firm in 1937 and 1959 respectively – the neoclassical tendency was to look at large size from the lenses of unproductive oligopolistic conduct. Hymer took this route in his 1960 thesis to explain the internationalization tendencies of multinationals, though the hostility he faced seem to have driven him subsequently into a more radical camp. John had in his 1958 book tried to explain the efficiency-oriented benefits that American multinationals could generate in Britain. Instead of falling into the web of particular ideologies John was to later formulate his now famous eclectic theory that he anchored with three pillars - ownership, location and internalization (OLI) – to explain the expansion of multinationals. Interestingly, I was to discover later that OLI to large extent offered the basis for also explaining the conduct of multinationals at home and host sites.

John Dunning has subsequently written much more to transcend several fields but given my own focus on multinationals I believe he has been the path creator a la the Schumpeterian Mark II innovation system of creative accumulation. I have now driven through the roads that he built with the confident feeling that he has given me the direction to my destination.

John, you will forever remain a beacon in my world of scholarship.

Rajah Rasiah
University of Malaya, Malaysia
 

What can I say about John H. Dunning? Since my master studies in the U.S. at Iowa State University I have been reading his work on foreign direct investment and multinational enterprises. And then coming back to Greece at Athens University of Economics and Business for my PhD, his work has been the material on which I developed my dissertation. And guess what! I was so honored when John Dunning gladly accepted to be in my PhD committee in 2004. But then I freaked out! John Dunning in my committee??? How would I stand before this ‘giant’ to defend my dissertation?

And there we are: June the 28th of 2004. The committee in front of me ready to judge my work! John Dunning took the first seat. I said to myself: “OK, now stay calm, besides he is a nice and polite person, he won’t embarrass you!” And I started defending my thesis. I was looking at him from time to time but I couldn’t understand what he was thinking. And finally I’m done. And John Dunning took the floor. In the beginning I couldn’t quite follow what he was saying as my stress had hit a limit up but suddenly I hear the word “fascinating” coming out of his mouth and it’s like I wake up! I have to listen what he says! What he said was that he found the sequence and analysis of my thesis “fascinating” and then I immediately knew: I was there! I was where I had been trying to be since I started my PhD. If John Dunning finds something fascinating, then there is no doubt! I immediately forgot my stress, my hard times during PhD, everything! I knew I was there!

Ever since, I occasionally communicate with John Dunning. He has always been very willing to help me and answer any questions that I may have regarding my research. I remember last year that I e-mailed him regarding some questions I had on IDP and he faxed me back the questions with his replies hand written!

Not only that. I have asked John Dunning to give me an interview for the scientific magazine “Open MBA” that is published weekly by the Greek newspaper “TA NEA”. Being an associate of the newspaper, I was asked to prepare a special issue and I decided to have this special issue on foreign direct investment and multinational enterprises. Each issue hosts an expert in the relevant subject and whom else could I have first thought of than John Dunning? To be honest, I wanted to host John Dunning in the magazine and that’s why I decided to have the issue on foreign direct investment. Again, John Dunning accepted my invitation gladly. The issue came out in December the 5th of 2005 and it was the first time that a “giant” on foreign direct investment talked about this topic in a Greek newspaper discussing the case of Greece.

I’m so happy that I had the honor and opportunity to have John Dunning in my committee and also have an interview of him! I’m very happy that I have met this nice and polite person who is always willing to help young researchers with his advice!

PHOTO

{Prof. A. Demos, Prof. J. Dunning, PhD student Constantina Kottaridi, her supervisor M. Papanastassiou, Prof. A. Andrikopoulos, Prof. T. Moutos, Prof. P. Buckley and R. Pearce, June ‘04}

Constantina Kottaridi
University of Peloponnese, Greece
 

“John, my first sighting of you was at your ‘retirement’ dinner at Reading in 1991 when you were presented with the book – Essays in Honour of John Dunning – contributed by your colleagues. Little did I know then that I would be writing a tribute to you many years later!

Despite the physical distance that separates New Zealand from the United Kingdom did you know that you have made a significant contribution to the changes in policy which dragged New Zealand out of the shell of fifty years of protectionism to become a highly liberalised and open economy from 1984 onwards? You may not remember this, but during a conversation we had when you visited New Zealand in 1993 you told me about Rod Deane’s thesis on Foreign Investment in New Zealand Manufacturing, written in the mid 1960s. Rod had approached you about adapting your questionnaire on the activities of US firms in the UK. Rod’s findings significantly altered his views about the continued savage protectionism in the New Zealand environment. He became a strong proponent of liberalisation in the New Zealand economy and in his highly public subsequent career he was influential in implementing these changes through his role as Chairman of privatised former SOEs such as Telecom New Zealand.

A contemporary of his, Don Brash, was also influenced by your work. His doctoral thesis at ANU on US Investment in Australian Manufacturing also found that protectionism in the Australian economy negatively influenced the development of the economy. Don Brash in his subsequent career as the Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand also became a powerful advocate for the liberalisation of the New Zealand economy. You alerted me to the existence of these two doctoral theses and it was from that time on I became interested in the interaction between government policy, economic restructuring and the MNE.

You will remember the rest of the story! How I introduced myself to you and Rajneesh at an AIB meeting in Hawaii – when I heard Rajneesh present on the work you were doing on the IDP. And how you kindly invited me to contribute a chapter on New Zealand to the book of case studies that you and Rajneesh were editing on the IDP – subsequently published in 1996 as Foreign Direct Investment and Governments: Catalysts for Economic Restructuring. This landmark event started for me a lifelong fascination with the IDP.
 

Michele Akoorie
Waikato Management School, New Zealand
 

Interview of Professor John Dunning for the Scientific Magazine ‘Open MBA’ of the Greek newspaper “Ta Nea”, December 2005

From the Tamar to the Scillies; King Arthur’s land casts its magic spell.

From the rugged wilderness of Bodmin Moor to the more gentle landscape of the Roseland; from the grandeur of the Atlantic headlands to the gentle river valleys and magnificent beaches of the southern coast; the mosaic of Cornwall’s natural beauty never fails to inspire and enchant.

THAT IS THE CORNWALL I HAVE LOVED.

Twixt Falmouth and Mevagissey lies the Roseland peninsula – the jewel in Cornwall’s crown.
With its inviting sandy coves, quaint fishing harbours and magnificent cliffside walks, Roseland is a naturalist’s paradise.

Cornwall in early Spring. The fields ablaze with the daffodil harvest: the roadside banks lovingly clothed with gorse and primroses; and the colourful display of camellias, rhododendrons and magnolias in the beautifully tended gardens of Trelissick and Caerhays.

THAT IS THE CORNWALL – AND THE ROSELAND - I HAVE LOVED.

Cornwall – the most maritime county of England, flanked on three sides by an ever-changing sea, and internally criss-crossed by a labyrinth of graceful rivers and tranquil inlets.
The fruits of the sea; the fish markets of Newlyn and Padstow; the oyster beds of Gweek; and the trawl for lobster and crab off Port Isaac and Portloe.
Then too, the waters in and around the Cornish peninsula offer a wide range of leisure pursuits.
More ambitious holiday makers embark on marine safaris, hoping for a glimpse of seals, basking sharks and dolphins.

THAT IS THE CORNWALL – AND THE ROSELAND – I HAVE LOVED.

Cornwall – a county first colonised by a galaxy of saints from Ireland and France who brought Christianity to England; the domain of many traditions and festivals such as the Floral Dance at Helston and May Day’s Obby Oss day at Padstow; the home to whimsical legends and folklore and the land called Lyonnaise, said to lie beneath the sea between Lands End and the Isles of Scilly.

THAT IS THE CORNWALL – AND THE ROSELAND – I HAVE LOVED.

So my salute to Cornwall – for its idyllic natural assets, its unique heritage, its irresistible sea-food, tasty pasties and delicious clotted cream, and its proud and likeable people.

From the Tamar to the Scillies – my senses have been awakened, my spirits uplifted and my body refreshed by the gentle therapy of King Arthur’s land.

And now, just a small part of me will rest on the lush pastures overlooking the beautiful bay near our erstwhile home in Roseland.

THAT IS THE CORNWALL – AND THE ROSELAND – I HAVE LOVED AND WILL ALWAYS LOVE.

John H. Dunning
June 2008