Foreign / domestic plant profiles - preliminary results of an international survey

A wide literature analyzes motivations, forms and evolutionary paths of foreign investments in manufacturing. A research stream deals with the configurations of (foreign) manufacturing subsidiaries, identifying their distinct “specialties”. The theoretical perspectives of these contributions are various, anyway many of them assume that the configuration choices of international and domestic manufacturing bases are different or, in other words, that the distinction between domestic and foreign plants’ profiles may be significant. This paper aims at testing this assumption through data of the international research project High Performance Manufacturing. The study identifies some profiles in the two sub samples (domestic and foreign plants) and compares them in a number of (infra)structural characteristics. The analysis shows that the current debate tends to overstate this distinction, even if some interesting diversities emerge.