Alvin W Wolfe

In the early 1960s, my studies of the problems of new central and southern African states led me to consider the role of multinational enterprises in the mining and metals industries -- not so much in their individual actions as in their systematic organization at a supranational level. This development of a supranational system I recognized as a major evolutionary saltation analogous to the shifts from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states. Both the structures and the dynamics of these transitions were better understood as flexible networks that bind individuals and groups differing both structurally and functionally, some business corporations, some states, some families, in a global supranational system that is more than just international.