Ireland's emergence as a centre for internationally traded services

Although researchers examining the internationalization of service activity emphasize the need to see it as a holistic process because of the interdependency between production and services, conceptualization of the internationalization process to date has been constrained by the common tendency to focus on specialist service corporations. The most fruitful theoretical developments to date have focused on the evolution of subsidiaries within the organizational dynamics of transnational corporations as they seek to construct complex integrated value chains for their global production networks. This paper examines these developments in the context of Ireland's emerging internationally traded services sector associated with the significant presence of foreign-owned technology corporation subsidiaries. Based on a number of case studies, the paper examines the evolution of these subsidiaries from an initial focus on manufacturing to an increasing involvement in the servicing of their European and global markets.