Adherence to the Home- Country Location of Corporate Headquarters: Narratives of Cultural Identity, and Resource-Based Pragmatism of Globalising Finnish MNCs

This paper presents a theoretically emphasised research, with a minor empirical part, dealing with a tentative interpretation built on three main aspects of inquiry. These are: 1) the basic practical and psychological location factors causing MNC headquarters to cling to their traditional homelocation, 2) whether the headquarters managers and staff in the course of 30 to 40 years of internationalization have consequently locally formed a mutual informal knowledge-cluster of global managers and staff, and 3) whether this potential knowledge-cluster still further has enhanced the clinging to the traditional home-location in the metropolitan Helsinki region in Finland. The core of the proposed knowledge-cluster consists of about 23 home-country MNC corporate headquarters (CHQ) and 75-80 home country MNC divisional headquarters (DHQ). The research thus aims at finding out, firstly, why the great majority of these MNC headquarters have remained in their traditional Finnish 'peripheral' location instead of relocating abroad to large WestEuropean cities, despite some of them having been relocated; in other words, what are the relevant location factors of these HQ. The aim is, secondly, to study whether this headquarters entity has in its linguistically and culturally idiosyncratic national local context in the course of years developed into an informal, or possibly even formal, cross-industrial network of shared international management knowledge and skills, i.e. a dynamically creative knowledge cluster. Therewith the aim is in addition to find out, whether this knowledge cluster has developed into a more extensive informal and/or formal knowledge, skills and other HQ activities supporting resources network of national and local, private and public institutional actors, proposed in Figure #1. The third aim is to preliminarily understand, in case this two-tier core-cluster and cluster-network formation has taken place, how and when could these have emerged and developed, and by which ways kept up as social system processes and intentional networks, and importantly, do these two-tier networks have a feed-back effect of acting as additional location factors, effectively preventing relocation of HQ abroad. The fourth aim is, with reference to the real-life continued location of headquarters in Helsinki, to find out what the positive factors and negative factors and resource gaps of staying in