E. Relph (1976) claimed that, with mass communication, and increasingly ubiquitous high technology, places become more and more similar, so that locations lose a distinctive ‘sense of place’. ‘Placelessness dehumanizes the world and because dehumanized places have less or no human attachments, the people in these placeless places become even more vulnerable to more dehumanization’ (I. Vogeler 1996).

Dicken in J. Peck and H. Yeung, eds (2003) argues that ‘geography and place are profoundly important to the ways firms are produced and behave. Firms are embedded in specific places, both in the place(s) in which they operate, and more so in their place of origin.’ Dicken (2004) TIBG 29, 1 thinks the claim that TNCs are becoming ‘placeless’ is ‘a nonsense’. And Gertler in Peck and Yeung (op. cit) demonstrates the limited ability of head offices to impose uniformity across their operations overseas.