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The modern multinational corporation is described as having originated when the owner-managers of nineteenth-century British firms carrying oninternational trade were replaced byteams of salaried managers organized into hierarchies. Increases in the volume of transactions in such firms are commonly believed tohave necessitated this structural change. Nineteenth-century inventions thesteamship and the telegraph, by facilitating coordination of managerialactivities, are described as key factors. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century chartered trading companies,despite the international scope of their activities, are usually considered irrelevant to this discussion:the volume of their transactionsis assumed to have been toolow and the communications and transport of their day too primitive to makecomparisons with modern multinationals interesting. In reality, however, earlytrading companies successfully(purchased and outfitted ships, built and operated offices and warehouses, manufacturedtrade goods for use abroad, maintained trading posts and production facilitiesoverseas, procured goods for import, and sold those goods both at home and inother countries.) Thelarge volume of transactions associated with these activities seems to have(错题点，此处不是表消极，结合上下文看是确实承认了The largevolume的作用)necessitated hierarchical management structures well before the advent ofmodern communications and transportation. For example, (in the Hudson'sBay Company, each trading outpost was managed by a salaried agent, who carriedout the trade with the Native Americans, managed day-to-day operations, andoversaw the post's workers and servants. One chief agent, answerable to theCourt of Directors in London through the correspondence committee, wasappointed with control over all of the agents on the bay.) The early trading companies did differstrikingly from modern multinationals in many respects. (1) They dependedheavily on the national governments of their home countries and thuscharacteristically acted abroad to promote national interests. (2) Their top managerswere typically owners with a substantial minority share, whereas seniormanagers’ holdings in modern multinationals are usually insignificant. (3) Theyoperated in a preindustrial world, grafting (错题点，词意：嫁接，仅指明Tcompanies，未能指出MM和capitalist system的关系)a system of capitalist international trade onto a premodern system of artisan（工匠）and peasant production. 题眼：【Despite thesedifferences, however,early trading companies organized effectively in remarkablymodern ways and merit furtherstudy（错题点，主旨） asanalogues of more modern structures.】 | 
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发表于 2017-12-8 20:55:02
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