Aspiring Affiliates, Global Project Networks and Local Embeddedness – Evidence from Bangalore/India. CISC Working Paper No.7, Galway

Kurzfassung/Abstract

In the context of India’s economic transformation process, Bangalore has become a worldwide leading ICT centre and a key target region for inward investments of a multiplicity of transnational corporations. Against the background of recent theoretical contributions brought forward in regional science and neighbouring disciplines, the rationale of the paper in hand is to examine how a foreign stand-alone R&D unit and its associated indigenous software service firms are embedded in their various networks and organizational relationships across different spatial scales. Adopting the methodology of a ‘critical case’ (Flyvberg 2001), the DaimlerChrysler Research Centre India (DCRCI) serves for the purpose of providing valuable insights into the embeddedness of such a unit. Based on four months of participant observation in the Centre and in-depth interviews with selected local actors, our findings indicate that beside the distinctive involvement in the local community, the DCRCI’s organisational structure and most notably its autonomy as well as its profound integration in the global corporate network of DaimlerChrysler significantly contribute to the unit’s performance. A comprehensive examination of an affiliate’s excellence at large thus not merely require analysing the degree of local embeddedness, but also the consideration of both extra-local networks and the intra-organisational dimension of embeddedness. Reinforcing the methodological value of corporate case studies in regional science, the present examination is suggestive for further qualitative, single-focused research on transnational organizations in general and TNC’s affiliates within the corporate global production network in particular.