Thesis (Ph. D.)--Arizona State University, 1991. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [259]-265).

The development of adequate performance evaluation techniques for appraising foreign subsidiaries and their managers in an environment different from their domestic ones has been suggested as an area where management accounting should be extended. This study concerned the performance evaluation of foreign subsidiary managers with the following objectives: (1) to examine the relationships among environmental factors and foreign subsidiary performance, (2) to develop a multinational enterprise (MNE) environmental model to evaluate the performance of subsidiary managers on the basis of controllable factors only, and (3) to test the model in American multinational enterprises for the existence of association among environmental factors and measured performance of foreign subsidiaries. The research method employed in this study was to test for association between noncontrollable environmental factors of a particular foreign country and measured performance of the foreign subsidiary (in terms of ROI) in that particular country. Major noncontrollable factor groups used were economic, political-legal, educational, and social environmental constraints.