海外子会社の企業者活動 : インタビュー調査に基づいて <論説>

The number of subsidiaries of Japanese multinational enterprises (JMNEs) is increasing in the past two decades. In this situation, in order to be competitive in a global market, JMNEs need to deploy resources and capabilities of their foreign subsidiaries, not solely dependent on parent companies' capabilities with which we are quite familiar and they also need to encourage entrepreneurship of them. In this paper, we made interviews with senior executives of Japanese automobile subsidiary and its first-tier Japanese parts makers in Canada to examine how an automobile transplant is encouraging or discouraging its parts suppliers' initiative to make full use of their resources and capabilities. Through the study, we found that entrepreneurship in the Japanese parts maker is impacted by automobile maker, especially automobile parent as well as parts parent both in Japan. Under the Keiretsu system, the entrepreneurial discretionary power of first-tier parts subsidiary is constrained. Whether or not the finding of the limited entrepreneurship is applicable also to the relationship between other Japanese automobile transplant and its captured parts subsidiary or to the relationship between other Japanese industrial MNEs and their supplier is still to be seen.