Headquarters Location Research Project

The location of headquarters (HQ) and their management responsibilities are important for businesses and societies alike. Headquarters employ high-skilled employees, bring tax revenues and are important in attracting further investments into a location.

Where firms locate and relocate their headquarters depends on the interplay between physical and social aspects of a place. Both the organizational arrangements and firm’s engagement with stakeholders and society are important. In our research, we argue that the social aspects of a place constitute a key consideration in the firm’s location choice.

There is a global transformation of management activities. These activities are increasingly becoming disaggregated both geographically and organizationally within multinational corporations and their value chains. This disaggregation of management activities is gaining relevance as digital solutions are becoming more common due to Covid-19 pandemic.

The traditional headquarters building – the home of the whole executive team – might thus become a relic of the past.

What does location mean?

Both large and small firms today are more capable of spreading their management activities across various geographic locations.  For us, location denotes not only the physical, geographical aspects of location and its material elements, but also the perceptual “sense of place”. Emotional connections, feelings of belonging as well as perceived rights and responsibilities are projected on the multiple spaces that businesses occupy. A firm's choice to relocate its headquarters thus depends on the interplay between physical and social aspects of a place and we argue that the social aspects, including political and emotional factors, constitute a key consideration in strategic decisions.  

In this research project, we examine the geographical and organizational arrangements of international firms’ headquarters and management activities as well as their locations. We define physical aspects of location as the availability of physical resources including labor and infrastructure. Social aspects, in turn, refer to the social, political and emotional factors associated with a location. In addition, we examine how internal and external stakeholders of international firms such as employees, customers, suppliers and owners perceive a location and how this then impacts the location choice.

Work packages

The project is run in four work packages (WP) in 2019-23. We explore and define the physical and social aspects of firm location, and conceptualize the meaning of location in international business activities. We have received funding from the Marcus Wallenberg Foundation and from the Academy of Finland.

WP1 This sub-project focuses on foreign-owned corporations in Finland. The objective is to identify what kinds of headquarters and managerial responsibilities do foreign-owned corporations have in Finland, and why, as well as how they have evolved over time.

WP2 The disaggregation of management activities geographically and organizationally is at the heart of this sub-project. The objective is to conduct in-depth analyses within multinational corporations to understand how they perceive locations, and make sense of their perceptual and physical aspects.

WP3 This sub-project explores how headquarters have been moving in Europe in the last twenty years. We focus on the external perceptual aspects of location, i.e., how the headquarters relocation announcements have been portrayed, represented, articulated and interpreted in the national media, international financial press, and firm announcements. The objective is to identify headquarters relocations happened in Europe during 2000-2019 using media databases LexisNexis and Factiva, and conduct textual analysis on the most interesting cases.

WP4 The last sub-project focused on the perspective of start-ups on location issues. We are interested in how start-up entrepreneurs establishing their first operations look for a location to internationalize and whether physical and perceptual locational attributes are important for their locational decisions. The objective is to capture the locational footprint of start-ups before it becomes ‘contaminated’ by locational decisions already made by conducting a conjoint experiment at Slush annual entrepreneurship event in Helsinki.