Re-conceptualizing Bartlett and Ghoshal’s Classification of National Subsidiary Roles in the Multinational Enterprise Alan Rugman, Alain Verbeke and Wenlong Yuan University of Reading; University of Calgary; University of Lethbridge  We re-conceptualize the Bartlett and Ghoshal typology of national subsidiary roles in the multinational enterprise (MNE), using a resource bundling perspective. Our view is that national subsidiary roles can vary dramatically across value chain activities. We focus on the distinction among innovation, production, sales, and administrative support activities. For each value chain activity, the subsidiary bundles sets of internal competences with accessible, external location advantages. We also address the effects of regional integration on national subsidiary roles. Such schemes may affect substantially the extent to which location advantages of individual countries can be accessed and bundled with internal competences, thereby typically altering some national subsidiaries’ roles in specific value chain activities. However, such substantive changes in specific value chain activities performed by national subsidiaries do not necessarily lead to any move in conventional subsidiary role typologies, such as the Bartlett and Ghoshal one, since these typologies only acknowledge aggregate subsidiary role changes, supposedly valid for the entire value chain. INTRODUCTION Many multinational enterprises (MNEs) now function as differentiated networks, rather than as hierarchically run organizations with national subsidiaries that all play similar roles (Nohria and Ghoshal, 1994; Rugman and Verbeke, 2003). It has therefore been argued that an MNE national subsidiary facing a specific external environment with unique challenges, and commanding an idiosyncratic set of competences, should be managed differently from other national subsidiaries. Specifically, MNE corporate man- agement should allocate different charters, and therefore also resources, to different national subsidiary types (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1986, 1989). In addition, a number of researchers (Birkinshaw, 1997, 2000; Cantwell and Mudambi, 2005; Paterson and Brock, 2002; Rugman and Verbeke, 2001a; Taggart, 1997a, 1997b, 1998) have argued that national subsidiary management may sometimes have considerable latitude to Address for reprints: Alan Rugman, Henley Business School, University of Reading, Greenlands, Henley-on- Thames, Oxfordshire RG9 3AU, UK (a.rugman@henley.reading.ac.uk). © 2010 The Authors Journal of Management Studies © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Journal of Management Studies 48:2 March 2011 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-6486.2010.00969.x