prep2-essay1-4

rainbowmanutd

The modern multinational corporation is described as having originatedwhen the owner-managers of nineteenth-century British firms carrying oninternational trade were replaced by teams of salaried managers organized intohierarchies.  Increases in the volume oftransactions in such firms are commonly believed to have necessitated thisstructural change.  Nineteenth-centuryinventions like the steamship and the telegraph, by facilitating coordinationof managerial activities, are described as key factors. Sixteenth- andseventeenth-century chartered trading companies, despite the internationalscope of their activities, are usually considered irrelevant to thisdiscussion:  the volume of theirtransactions is assumed to have been too low and the communications andtransport of their day too primitive to make comparisons with modernmultinationals interesting.

In reality, however, early trading companies successfully purchased andoutfitted ships, built and operated offices and warehouses, manufactured tradegoods for use abroad, maintained trading posts and production facilitiesoverseas, procured goods for import, and sold those goods both at home and inother countries.  The large volume oftransactions associated with these activities seems to have necessitatedhierarchical management structures well before the advent of moderncommunications and transportation.  Forexample, in the Hudson's Bay Company, each far-flung trading outpost wasmanaged by a salaried agent, who carried out the trade with the NativeAmericans, managed day-to-day operations, and oversaw the post's workers andservants.  One chief agent, answerable tothe Court of Directors in London through the correspondence committee, wasappointed with control over all of the agents on the bay.

The early trading companies did differ strikingly from modernmultinationals in many respects.  Theydepended heavily on the national governments of their home countries and thuscharacteristically acted abroad to promote national interests.  Their top managers were typically owners witha substantial minority share, whereas senior managers' holdings in modernmultinationals are usually insignificant. They operated in a preindustrial world, grafting a system of capitalistinternational trade onto a premodern system of artisan and peasantproduction.  Despite these differences,however, early trading companies organized effectively in remarkably modernways and merit further study as analogues of more modern structures.


According to the passage, early chartered trading companies are usuallydescribed as


(A) irrelevant to a discussion of the origins of the modern multinationalcorporation
(B) interesting but ultimately too unusual to be good subjects foreconomic study
(C) analogues of nineteenth-century British trading firms
(D) rudimentary and very early forms of the modern multinationalcorporation
(E) important nationalinstitutions because they existed to further the political aims of thegovernments of their home countries请问为什么不选C?文章最后一句话有对应阿。而且A，原文说的是 increase in transactions in such firms,说的是交易的增长呀，也不是 modern multinational corp的增长呀

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LZ ,貌似定位应该在第一段呢
despite the international scope of their activities, are usually consideredirrelevant to this discussion: