SOCIAL SCIENTIST
was insignificant in view of the overriding significance which these companies have in industrial, commercial and even social life. Even then, in the high days of research on MNCs, the quantity of research was inversely related to the social relevance. At the end of the millennium, the interest has dwindled even further into insignificance. Some research has dealt with foreign investment, mainly in terms of financial flows and in terms of the impact on employment (Brakman and van Marewijk, 1998; Buckley and Clegg 1991, Buckley and Mucchielli, 1997; Calvo et al, 1998, Slaughter and Swagel, 1997; Watkins, 1997), but by and large, MNC have been glossed over in the debate on development. Discourse, post-modern analysis and a unequivocal attachment to the benefits of the capitalist market system have constructed a scholarly world in which the problems of development and underdevelopment are conducted as if MNCs do not exist. Whereas the public realm has come in for transparency and scrutiny, the private realm, although it has a continuously expanding influence over society, remains largely protected from investigation.
The axiom behind the advocacy of liberalism is that MNCs will run the system efficiently, and will bring about development. What hinders the fruition of this process are the encumbrances which as yet have not been removed: world-wide trade restrictions, overgrown state institutions, rent-seeking and parasitic government bureaucracies, etc. A further drive towards liberalisation, privatisation and downsizing the state will provide the parameters for wholesome development.2 What used to be the unproblematic sequence of stages in The Stages of Growth. A Non-Communist Manifesto (Rostow 1960) has graduated into the end of all alternative ideologies and paradigms in The End Of History (Fukuyama 1992). Development theory has become the prescription of one principle for the entire globe. That principle usually remains unnamed in its practical application: MNCs are to bring that principle to fruition.
On a broad canvas, I intend to draw a number of remarks and to insert question marks around this accepted wisdom. In the first place I shall argue that the transformative power of capitalism as such has lost much of its drive. In the second place, among others drawing from an earlier study on MNCs in India, I shall look at the record in some of the fields where MNCs are supposed to help bring about development. In the third place, briefly, I shall argue that the overall failure of MNCs, as established in the first and second section, has to be located in the new dominant mode of capital investment which