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INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW
Stephen Herbert Hymer was born in 1934, and died in a car accident 40 years later. In his short life, he made a seminal contribution to the theory of the multinational enterprise (MNE) and FDI, and to international business (IB) scholarship.
Hymer articulated his views in his doctoral thesis and in approximately 40 articles. Of his contributions, perhaps the most influential have been his 1960 dissertation, a 1968 article published in French, a 1970 article in The American Economic Review (AER ), and a 1970 contribution to a book edited by JN Bhagwati (Hymer, 1960/1976, 1968, 1970a, 1970b).
In his dissertation, Hymer gave attention to the control or governance of value-added activities of firms - especially in relation to their international operations. By first identifying different modalities and then assessing their relative advantages and disadvantages, Hymer was the first economist to address the questions "Why MNEs?" and "Why FDI?" vis-à-vis alternative forms of foreign operations. This conceptual/methodological contribution arguably established Hymer as the founder of the modern theory of the MNE and FDI, quite independently of the strength, or otherwise, of the analysis he went on to provide. In his 1968 paper Hymer drew explicitly on Coase's (1937) seminal article on the nature of the firm, taking transaction costs analysis as extant theory. In his 1970 articles and subsequent works Hymer developed the "laws" of increasing firm size and uneven development, and explored the relationship between MNEs and nations, or the political economy of what he called "multinational corporate capital". By then, he had already made his "cathartic" commitment to Marxism (Pitelis, 2002).
Hymer's seminal achievements have been acknowledged by leading scholars in international political economy, economics and business such as Casson (1990), Dunning and Rugman (1985), Eden (1991), Kindleberger (1984, 2002) and Teece (1985), and special issues of journals have been devoted to his writings: see, for example, Contributions to Political Economy (2002) and International Business Review (2006).
Our article differs from other contributions in that it takes a more holistic and more critical approach to Hymer's contribution to IB scholarship. In particular, we:
derive and present Hymer's evolving analytical framework, his extrapolations, predictions and prescriptions;
assess the internal consistency of Hymer's analysis;
critically assess Hymer's views in terms of...