The ‘hollowing out’ of the national subsidiary in multinational companies: is it happening, does it matter, what are the strategic consequences?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the effects of corporate organizational structure and of subsidiary discretion within multinational companies (MNCs). It draws on a representative survey of the most senior HR practitioner in foreign- and domestic-controlled subsidiaries in Canada. Key findings point to the importance of subsidiary discretion, especially discretion over human resource management. Greater subsidiary discretion is associated with a range of positive outcomes: securing international product and service mandates; greater subsidiary influence within the MNC; the promotion and protection of subsidiary employment (increased headcounts, less offshoring, more onshoring); and enhanced engagement with domestic institutions. These results highlight the strategic importance for union, civil society and public policy actors, as well as MNC subsidiary managers themselves, to focus on the drivers of subsidiary discretion, as opposed to the ‘hollowing out’ of corporate structures, and to weave that discretion into larger policy narratives to promote local economies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".