The Birth & Re-Birth of the Multinational Corporation: IBM and Dreams of Third World Modernities

This research project, conducted by Dr. Andre Dao, is concerned with the parallel expansion of computing technology and ‘multinational’ corporations through the Global South. Taking International Business Machines (IBM) as a central case study, the project critically interrogates the idea that the travel southwards of such such corporations was facilitated by, and carried forward, ‘modernisation’. The project does so through an examination of competing and complementary imaginaries of modernity: on the one hand, that carried by IBM as it set up operations in Chile, Indonesia and India, and on the other hand, the Third World dreams of modernity that IBM encountered as it travelled. In doing so, the project aims to understand how the encounter between these imaginaries shaped the production, movement and evolution of a legal form: the high-technology multinational corporation.