good and bad outcomes have resulted from multinational corporation activity in developing countries. The examples of the actions of American multinational corporations in developing countries, such as those of Union Carbide in Bhopal, India, lead to a conclusion that, overall, the impact has been negative.
Union Carbide owns production plants and mills in almost 40 different countries (Moskowitz, Katz, and Levering, 1985). The company has managed to be a bad corporate citizen in almost all of these countries. Even The Wall Street Journal, a strong friend of business, described Union Carbide as a giant running amok. In the United States, Union Carbide has long been regarded as environmental enemy number one. In the 1970s, the company refused to even attend a federal government conference to discuss how best to clean up the environment. The company has continually resisted efforts to clean up its production processes, often threatening to close factories first. Fortune described the company as being widely perceived as a reactionary ogre obsessed with profits. Significantly, none of this information was even alluded to in the case study presented by James Weber (Text, pp. 574 583).
Union Carbide grew from a carbon company which was founded in 1886 (Moskowitz, Katz, and Levering, 1985). The original company produced the first dry cell battery, and it developed the Eveready trademark. Just prior to the entry of the United States into the First World War, the company was merged with four other companies to form the Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation (Moskowitz, Katz, and Levering, 1985). Soon thereafter, the company moved into chemicals, and, during the Second World War, participated in the atomic energy development program. In the post war Second World War period, Union Carbide entered the consumer (chemical) goods market, in an attempt to escape to relatively
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