The emerging digital context for international business along with rising deglobalization forces have accentuated multinational enterprises’ organizing challenges, particularly with regard to managing relationships with global platform and ecosystem partners. We propose that the loose coupling perspective, which suggests the coexistence of coupling (linkages) to maintain responsiveness and looseness (separateness) to retain distinctiveness, can provide valuable insights on addressing such external governance-related challenges in the context of global platforms and ecosystems. We draw on and integrate ideas from loose coupling theory and digitalization to inform on the key contingencies and mechanisms of MNEs’ external organizing. We show how these insights can be further integrated with other perspectives such as new internalization theory to inform combined internal and external governance in digital globalization.

国际业务的新兴数字环境以及日益增强的去全球化力量加剧了跨国企业的组织挑战，特别是在管理与全球平台和生态系统合作伙伴的关系方面。我们提出松散耦合的观点，即耦合（链接）并存以保持响应性和松散性（分离性）以保持独特性，可以为在全球平台和生态系统的背景下解决此类与外部治理相关的挑战提供宝贵的见解。我们借鉴并整合了松耦合理论和数字化的思想，以了解跨国公司外部组织的关键突发事件和机制。