Rediscovering the multinational enterprise: the rise and fall of ‘corporate escape’ studies

Abstract

Recent scholarship has revealed the rapid post-1980s growth, dramatic scope, and socio-economic consequences of multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) corporate tax avoidance and tax haven use. But why did social scientists only start systematically studying these dynamics in the 2010s? This is especially puzzling for International Political Economy (IPE) given that early IPE, in the 1970s, centered analyses of MNEs and their tax affairs under a rubric that Charles Kindleberger called ‘corporate escape’. Drawing on a collective oral history from pioneer interviews, historical documents, and bibliometric analysis, we identify two factors that explain the 1970s origins, the late-century fall, and the recent rise, of corporate escape studies: engagement with transdisciplinary technical knowledge of MNEs, and interaction with the politicization of MNEs. We explain how researchers abandoned the corporate escape agenda in the 1980s–1990s, losing technical insights from cognate disciplines and institutions, and refocusing around economistic and macro-structural analyses. These factors also elucidate why corporate escape studies only fully reinvigorated in the 2010s with political tailwinds and renewed investments in transdisciplinarity. These insights contribute to debates on IPE history and research, reintroduce MNEs as key meso-level institutions, and underscore the importance of historical awareness for studying corporate (mis)conduct and global inequalities.