Strategies of International Companies as a Research Problem of Geography of Enterprise

The main goal of the article is to analyse strategies of international enterprises, undertaken in the processes of internationalisation and expansion into foreign markets. Due to the spatial dimension of these processes, the issues related to the strategies of large foreign investors also appear in the research of geography of enterprise. It is since the functioning of international enterprises can be understood as a result of processes arising from a combination of mutual relations between their management strategy and local conditions in their environment, which in turn affects the diverse range of spatial impacts. The presented study focuses on the analysis of strategies adopted at the highest organisational level, i.e. on comprehensive internationalisation strategies, which most synthetically reflect how enterprises operate on foreign markets. Subsequently, the paper presents the model concept of strategic orientations of C.A. Bartlett and S. Ghoshal, which due to the extended spectrum of identification criteria is more operational. Moreover, in the presented concept, the basic dimensions of internationalisation, i.e. the configuration of the organisational structure and the coordination of activities on international markets, indicate a significant geographical dimension of internationalisation processes. The presented conceptual model also points to new possibilities of interpreting the strategy of international enterprises using the I-R paradigm, which may be particularly useful for the research goals realised in the field of the geography of enterprise