Networks, Scale, and Transnational Corporations: The Case of the South Korean Seed Industry
通过比较两家跨国公司在韩国种子产业中的并购与应对策略，研究尺度与网络视角如何帮助理解跨国公司的全球战略和权力关系重塑。
Abstract: In light of recent theoretical scholarship that has incorporated scale with networks perspectives, this article examines the potential of a scalar networks‐based approach to understanding the global strategies and activities of transnational corporations (TNCs), through a comparative case study of two TNCs that were involved in the recent transformation of the South Korean seed industry. The comparative study demonstrates that a foreign TNC's mergers and acquisitions (M&As) of major South Korean seed companies in 1998–1999 in the context of structural adjustment (TNC's material politics of scale) was an outcome of complex relations and the intermingling of various actor‐networks that were embedded in various scales. A domestic TNC's responses to the M&As, on the other hand, illustrate how the TNC's struggle to reshape power relations through a discursive politics of scale enabled it to extend and enrich its networks and power relations with farmers, politicians, the general public, and the government. Material and discursive uses of scale in the business strategies of TNCs are shaped by complex actor‐networks that are embedded in specific sociocultural and institutional contexts and influence new configurations of networks and power relations, and a scalar networks‐based approach helps one understand this complexity of TNCs' activities.