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10th anniversary issue
1. Introduction
I first became aware of the significance of transnational corporations (TNCs) - more usually then called multinational corporations (MNCs) - as an economics student in the 1960s, when social scientists began to study the causes and consequences of the rapid growth of foreign direct investment (FDI). Apart from a relative slowdown in the late 1970s and 1980s, the story thereafter has been one of continued growth, with TNCs becoming the dominant form of capitalist enterprise in most economic sectors and in most regions of the world; in the 1990s, they became seen as an important element in the broader theme of the globalisation of capitalism. Throughout these decades the activities of TNCs have posed significant challenges for the social sciences and for policy-makers. While this has been most apparent in relation to less developed countries (LDCs), best summed up by critical scholars in the concept of dependency, it has also been a persistent theme in developed countries (DCs) in relation to both outward and inward investments. TNCs have also strongly influenced developments in regional integration and global governance which have engaged the interest of geographers, sociologists and political scientists, while business and management studies have exhaustively researched their structure and behaviour.
In this paper I review the role TNCs have played in the transformation of global capitalism during this period, and in changing the views of political economists, myself included. I began studying the new scholarship on TNCs in the early 1970s, when I was also exploring the Marxist tradition of critical political economy, and focusing my early career on teaching and research in the field of industrial economics. I established an informal research network among socialist researchers on TNCs, and edited a collection of their papers ([42] Radice, 1975). By that time I had begun researching the relations between Soviet-bloc state enterprises and Western firms, which led me to three decades of work on and in Eastern Europe, particularly Hungary. As a lecturer in industrial economics from 1976 to 1999, I developed courses on TNCs, at both MA and BA levels, and supervised PhD theses in the field. In the mid-1990s, however, I found myself increasingly drawn towards work on TNCs in international and comparative political economy (located...