Transnational Firm Power

transnational-firm-power measures structural power exercised through the transnational corporation — the capacity to move production, impose the exit threat on labour, dictate terms to host states, and control production sited in others' territory. The structural question is: who controls the mode of production across borders — who can relocate, who can dictate to hosts, and who governs production located abroad? — not how much capital a country exports. This metric serves Strange's "by whom" clause: who controls the mode of production.

Strange treats relocation, host-bargaining, and control of foreign production as one continuous lever — the power of the transnational firm — listing them in a single sentence:

• "a transnational company can move its plant, or expand elsewhere, while the worker cannot move to another country has robbed labour unions… of some of their power to win concessions… by the threat to strike" (Strange 1994, p.82); the Ford-Dagenham relocation — "as at the Ford plant in Dagenham… the management will decide to close or to contract the plant… and produce in Spain or Germany instead" (Strange 1994, p.82)
• "the power of business to move and protect markets, to generate and choose new technology, to pick the location for new plant and employment, to bargain with governments and with banks to get access to credit" (Strange 1994, p.83)
• the mode-of-production lever: "The class in a position to decide or to change the mode of production can use its structural power over production to consolidate and defend its social and political power" (Strange 1994, p.29)
• internationalization as intra-firm control: by 1985 "international production - production by transnationals outside their home base actually exceeded the volume of world trade, and in fact by then a large and growing proportion of world trade was intra-firm trade, transactions conducted between branches of the same transnational corporation but across state frontiers" (Strange 1994, p.73)

Because Strange 1994, p.83 names relocation and host-bargaining in the same breath, splitting them into separate metrics would slice one lever artificially; they are merged here.