Yves Doz and International Managment

My first exposure to Yves Doz’s work was his book Strategic Management in Multinational Companies (Doz, 1986). In 1988, I was in the first year of my Ph.D. program and was deep inside research methods, statistics, and special fields courses. I received an unsolicited copy of Yves’ book from the publisher. I was not familiar with his work and compared with much of the “normal science/positivist” research I was reading, this book was significantly different. In the introduction, Yves wrote that he “tried to avoid theoretical abstractions and the complex language that provides only the trappings of objectivity and not the essence of it” (Doz, 1986, p. 10). He also said that for students of the MNC, his objective was to “integrate several theories into a managerial understanding of the multinational company.”