Abstract

International Business (IB) studies is an increasingly pluralist and multidisciplinary field, with methodological awareness and explicitness being essential for understanding the dynamics of contemporary Multinational Enterprises (MNE). Consequently, this conceptual paper maps and explicates power in relation to the MNE core activity of international knowledge transfer (IKT). We classify IKT literature into six perspectives (resource-based, network, institutional, political, cultural, language) and find that these are generally limited by a lack of power-sensitivity and explicitness. Combining and adapting Clegg’s Frameworks of Power and the Burrell and Morgan matrix, we explicate the multiple power-lenses (Clegg) and power-assumptions (Burrell-Morgan) underlying IKT research. We find regulative and functionalist perspectives to be the dominating power-assumptions. The structural lens on power is most frequently employed, followed by some interpretive and even less critical studies which also consider agency and discourse. Rules of practice emerge as the most neglected power-lens. To overcome this limited conceptualization of power in IKT research, we propose a combined framework for explicating power as involving multiple power-lenses and power-assumptions, to build upon those IKT studies that have gone the furthest in considering alternative power-lenses and power-assumptions (Scandinavian institutionalist, political and linguistic), and to acknowledge rules of practice as crucial ‘switch of power’.