دولت، کسب و کار، و دانشگاه: ریشه های درک ریموند ورنون از شرکت های چند ملیتی

As the senior member of the panel to honor Raymond Vernon, I was charged with “giving a retrospective on Ray's work going back as far as [I] want to go… and laying the territory for the other commentaries.” Ray's work on multinational enterprises was shaped by his careers in government, business, and academia. One can, of course, only speculate about some of the exact links between his interests and ideas and his several careers. I will, however, indulge in such speculation by reviewing Ray's experience and some of his early publications to search for the origins of basic ideas that made his work on multinational enterprises so creative. Raymond Vernon (no middle name or initial) was born as Raymond Visotsky on September 1, 1913, in New York City. He completed his bachelor's degree at the City College of New York in 1933, in the worst of the Depression, when jobs were extremely scarce. His first job was with an advertising agency. In describing his job search decades later, he told his students that he had convinced the agency to hire him on a short-term basis to let him try his hand in the rather new field of statistics. His task was to solve one particular problem the company was facing. He solved the problem, and the company kept him on.

In 1998, Roger Porter summed up Ray's varied careers as follows: “…Ray's career in government, business, and academia draws our attention to the virtues of breadth and versatility. During an age that seems to prize specialization, he is truly a renaissance person and renaissance scholar.”43 Ray's wide-ranging experiences tremendously enriched his research. Combined with his love of learning, his devotion to his students throughout their careers, and his genuine kindness, Ray's varied background made him a superb teacher, as well. Ray attracted many doctoral candidates, as well as many “near-students,” young researchers who viewed him as their teacher even though they might have been enrolled elsewhere or have finished their degree programs. I and Ray's other former students appreciate the insights that he brought from his careers in government and business. But, we are most grateful that his longest career was in academia. He taught us a great deal, but the most important lessons were by example: