Le Défi belge: Bringing politics in

Jean Boddewyn has pioneered research on the political dimensions of corporate strategy. Beginning his academic career during a time when research indicated that most firms gave little organizational priority to government relations (Schollhammer 1975), Boddewyn found a rich context for his investigations of market and political strategies in the study of international business and the multinational corporation. We explicate three main positions that Boddewyn has advocated and sought to empirically support in this work: (1) The state can behave as an actor in business affairs; (2) all of a firm's behavior has political dimensions; and (3) effective organization for political action requires legitimacy and internal value infusion. We consider how Boddewyn's scholarly perspectives may have been conditioned by a personal, integrative framing of European social democracy, continental political discourse, and U. S.- style democratic pluralism.