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Executive Summary The purpose of this project is to discuss and analyse the factors that result in different subsidiaries of Transnational Corporations (TNCs) playing out different roles within the organisation. This will be done by testing the completeness of the Bartlett and Ghoshal (1986) typology as it is perhaps the most well-known and prescriptive of all the typologies within this field. It will be shown, using the automobile industry with in-depth analysis of Toyota – the Japanese automobile manufacture – that Bartlett and Ghoshal’s typology, although very important in determining the roles that subsidiaries take on, is incomplete. It will be shown that it fails to take other factors into account when prescribing the subsidiary roles within the organization. We therefore advise our client to consider other factors when deciding on the degree of autonomy to grant to its subsidiaries. Introduction For the purpose of this report, the term “subsidiary” will be taken as “any operational unit controlled by the Multinational Corporation [in our case, TNC] and situated outside the home country” (Birkinshaw, 1997). The term “role” is taken to be the discrete activity or activities that the subsidiary eng