Ghoshal and Bartlett in their book " Managing Across Borders" distinguished the two terms like this: a global company deals in standardized products across countries; the degree of global integration is very high in their case. The MNC, on the other hand, focuses on local responsiveness more than global integration. They respond to the needs of the locals in terms of designs, services, prices, components, and other needs.
I was keen to know if this distinction is still followed or are there new developments about the definitional delineations for these definitions that were given by these authors a long time ago.
Personally, I am very suspicious on classifications like that. Why do we want them? If it is just for presenting some data, or doing some graphs, they can be useful, otherwise...
For instance, I cannot imagine a manager saying that as his/her firm has to react to the local market, it should follow X-Y-Z, or as the firm's ouput is standardized the strategy should be A-B-C. The strategy will be in some middle point closer to any of the extremes and the strategy will be designed according that. I think in a 'standardized product' (let's say McDonalds, Sony) and they adapt their product to local tastes, marketing strategies. I think in Inditex-Zara (where local fashion, tastes, weather should be important) and it is a highly integrated 'global' company.
If we think in using the classficiation for academic research ... we do not need to use them at the extent that we have constructs that can measure in a more-or-less continous shape the different dimension we feel relevant.
So, my feeling is that classifications like that have a limited interest.
Hope to have been useful.
A firm that has a physical presence in more than 2 countries fall in the MNE category. I agree with the definition of ghoshal etc.. however, global is generally defined as many countries, & international is defined as few countries or just 2 countries...
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