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To better understand the relationship between the headquarters and subsidiaries of multinational corporations, we introduce and test a theoretical framework that builds on and extends the positive agency theoretic corporate governance literature. Results indicate that there are three types of subsidiary bundles of corporate governance mechanisms that are used by multinational corporations. In addition, the following factors can help predict what type of subsidiary bundle a multinational corporation will use to align the interests of its headquarters with a particular subsidiary: the multinational corporation’s international strategy, its subsidiary’s importance, environmental uncertainty faced by its subsidiary, and its subsidiary’s age.

This study aims to explore corporate governance (CG) practices that can lead to firms’ better performance in different organizational life cycles. The authors propose a configurational approach to explore how a set of CG practices combine in bundles to achieve high performance outcomes for firms across their corporate life cycles.

Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis was used to analyze a sample of data of 21 countries and 9 industries. Data referred to the period of 9 years extending from the year 2005 to the year 2013.

This study reveals that there are multiple CG practices that exist through firms that can achieve high firm performance. Moreover, CG practices combine in different ways for firms in their growth, maturity and declining stages.

This study demonstrates the value of using a configurational analytical approach to explore both the firm and country-specific CG practices (together) that engage firms to achieve the desired level of performance across the corporate life cycles.

The current study draws attention to the policymakers’ need to assess the current level of regulatory and competitive development of their countries and form policy accordingly. The approach used in the current research study not only offers the linkages between CG and performance to managers as incentives to comply with regulation but also to view CG-related activity as a strategic move.

The approach used in the current research study not only offers the linkages between CG and performance to managers as incentives to comply with regulation but also to view CG-related activity as a strategic move.

This study broadening the focus of CG studies to include a rigorous explanation of the global CG phenomena and to provide effective solutions for the practitioners.

This study demonstrates the value of using a configurational analytical approach to explore both the firm and country-specific CG practices (together) that engage firms to achieve the desired level of performance across the corporate life cycles.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the relationship between the existence of asset specificity and the architecture of the hybrid governance structures adopted by horticultural smallholders from the Brazilian region of Serra Fluminense.

This paper uses a negative binomial regression model to analyze 567 transactions carried out by horticultural smallholders from the Brazilian region of Serra Fluminense. Starting from the insights of Oliver Williamson’s transaction cost economics, an indicator is constructed with the goal to capture the degree of intensity of coordination from the adoption of diverse bundles of coordination mechanisms in a governance structure.

The results show that higher levels of human and physical asset specificity affect the intensity of coordination of the transactions in the sample, leading to the adoption of hybrid forms with more complex bundles of coordination mechanisms.

This paper adds to a growing literature that studies the architecture of complex governance structures. However, its empirical conclusions are exploratory.

The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, quantitative empirical studies that analyze the diversity of hybrid forms in the same industry are relatively rare. This contribution also presents a theoretical discussion that might inform scholars dealing with similar research challenges.

This study aims to analyze the individual and joint effects of institutional support by government and nongovernment institutions on early internationalizing firms’ (EIFs) performance. It also investigated the moderating impact of firm age and size on the institutional support-firms’ export performance relationships.

Data were collected from 705 EIFs in the apparel industry of Bangladesh and analyzed with hierarchical regression.

The positive influence of institutional support on exporting firms’ financial performance is stronger for the joint effect of government and nongovernment assistance than the individual impact. Firms’ size positively moderates the impact of individual government and nongovernment assistance, while age positively moderates their resource-bundling effect.

The findings suggest the necessity of integrating resources from diverse but complementary sources of institutional support for superior export performance. The findings also show the presence of the liability of smallness and liability of newness in the standalone and joint influence of institutional support, respectively.

Firms need to bundle resources obtained from the government (unrequited) and nongovernment (reciprocal) institutional support to overcome the liability of smallness they might encounter while availing of support from only one source.

Distinguishing between government and nongovernment institutional support, this paper sheds light on exporting firms’ resource-bundling mechanism for these two sources of support in the backdrop of an emerging economy. It also offers fresh insights into the critical role of the liabilities of newness and smallness in early internationalization, especially with regard to the home-country institutional environment.

In this chapter, we examine the interplay between external legitimacy judgments, internal identity beliefs, and conceptions of sustainability. Based on observation at industry events and interviews with key stakeholders, we examine how organizational actors interpret the concept of sustainability in civil aviation, an industry subject to intense legitimacy threat for its environmental impact. We find that the concept of sustainability is interpreted through a process of naturalization, by which conceptual ties to past practices are forged, and the concept becomes corrupted. We describe three mechanisms (relabeling, bundling, and zooming out) through which concept naturalization occurs, and we show how this process creates resonance between sustainability and an industry ethos, which captures the aspirations, ideals and values of the industry.

The purpose of this paper is to provide comprehensive mapping of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) applications in business and management research and to examine the sub-fields of corporate governance research in this context.

Through a systematic literature review of 22 articles, the paper describes and analyses how QCA is used in the corporate governance field, what can be learned from the methodology’s implementation in corporate governance studies and why authors justify its use.

The findings highlight that QCA in corporate governance is still at an early stage of development. The paper encourages governance scholars to use this method to transform QCA from a niche into a mainstream method because it is appropriate for understanding both complex phenomena of social reality and issues of corporate governance that require an approach able to capture configurations of conditions, asymmetric patterns and equifinal explanations.

This is the first complete overview of the existing literature concerning QCA’s application in corporate governance research and reveals implications for its future use. In this way, it extends the previous work on QCA’s benefits to management researchers and other critical reviews of applications in QCA. This study encourages scholars to renew their understanding of corporate governance issues through a new analysis method that can help to discover conceptual and empirical relations among case-oriented and variable-oriented analyses in terms of interrelations to examine corporate governance practices holistically.

This article explores recent developments in the production and delivery of scholarly journal articles in digital form. It identifies the key stakeholders as authors, publishers, librarians and end users. It explores their concerns with regard to the digital journal production and delivery chain. It also explores the interrelationships of different stakeholder groups and considers how their concerns accord or conflict. The paper goes on to review cost and pricing developments. There appears to be no relationship between production costs and subscription prices of scholarly journals. Journals are priced according to what the market will bear, but, at the same time, the market is inelastic. As a result, prices have consistently increased annually at a rate well above the general inflation rate for the last two decades. Digital publishing by publishers has done nothing to relieve this problem. The ‘serials crisis’ has been the impetus for a number of developments that aim to use digital technology to reduce costs for the HE sector. These include alternative models of journal production such as that proposed by Harnad, and initiatives that aim to influence the structure of the market for scholarly journals with a view to driving prices down such as SPARC and HighWire Press. These developments are reviewed.

This paper aims to explore how the integrated thinking of a chief executive officer (CEO) impacts the management’s orchestration of the six capitals to create value in an organization.

Following a case study approach, data was gathered on two business organizations in Sri Lanka through interviews, focus group discussions and documentary analyzes. Thematic and cross-case analyzes were used in analyzing the data based on an analytical framework that was developed using systems and resource orchestration theories.

The study finds that the integrated thinking perspective of the CEO determines which capitals to embrace in the pursuit of value creation by an organization. A broader perspective on the integrated thinking of the CEO can lead to a sustainable perspective for value creation focusing on integrated corporate responsibility. On the contrary, a constrained perspective of integrated thinking can lead to a business case perspective for value creation that focuses mainly on the key areas of responsibility extended for operational efficiency. These different perspectives result in differences in value creation in organizations over time.

The capitals embraced in the integrated thinking perspective of a CEO should be translated into objectives, strategies and performance measurement and implemented at every level of the company to create value. This perspective of a CEO can be institutionalized through the adoption of accredited management systems. To foster value creation, managers should use a variety of information technology platforms and internal networks.

This is one of the first studies that explore how the perception of integrated thinking of the CEO impacts value creation in an organization through a combination of resource orchestration and systems thinking theory lenses.

Extant work in international business (IB) involves a partial contingency-theoretic perspective: a holistic view of the impact of bundles of contingencies on an outcome variable is missing. The purpose of this paper is to adopt a contingency approach to study multinational enterprise (MNE) subsidiary performance in the appropriate context of European transition economies at the beginning of the current millennium.

Methodologically, the authors introduce abduction as a line of inquiry into IB and management to develop new theoretical insights, and apply the novel empirical general interaction method to estimate bundle effects. In so doing, the authors contribute to the further development of a theoretical and empirical toolkit to revitalize holistic, or configurational, quantitative research in IB and management.

The authors find that capability fit is a necessary condition for high MNE subsidiary marketing performance, whilst environment fit is particularly critical for high MNE subsidiary financial performance.

A key limitation is that this is a cross-section study.

This study offers insights as to subsidiary fit into Eastern Europe, indicating fitting entry and establishment modes.

This paper offers a novel holistic approach to IB, both in terms of theoretical and empirical methodology.

Purpose – This chapter examines the impact of technology on sustainable effectiveness by focusing on the dynamic synchronization between the technical and the social subsystems at the Villa Beretta Rehabilitation Hospital (VBRH) and illustrates that technology can trigger and enable sustainable health care organizations.

Design/methodology/approach – The case study of VBRH relies on several data sources. They include interviews with key informants (VBRH executives, health care professionals, and technology suppliers), follow-up e-mails and phone conversations, direct observations of actors’ behavior, and notes of processes in action and archival data, such as patient pathway protocols, technical information systems documentation, performance and managerial reports, and administrative guidelines.

Findings – VBRH was capable to dynamically synchronize the social subsystem with the continuous innovation of the technical subsystem. This capability enabled sustainable effectiveness in three main areas. First, the correct alignment between technology and professionals’ practices and behaviors improved triple-bottom-line performance by promoting a more conscious use of the environmental, social, and financial resources. Second, technology-based initiatives promoted research-oriented plans of action that nurtured a culture of change and continuous improvement. Third, technology facilitated the extension of the research and operation networks that generated new ideas and initiatives for achieving sustainable effectiveness. Additionally, evidence from VBRH demonstrated that organization design, change management, and learning mechanisms are essential when institutionalizing new technology that requires the disruption of current professional practices and individuals’ behavior.

Originality/value – Previous contributions about sustainable effectiveness in health care failed to unveil and frame the complexity of dynamic synchronization between the technical and the social subsystems that is at the core of the sustainability of health care delivery. This chapter provides new insights that pave the way for a deeper-level understanding of the role that technology plays in sustainable effectiveness dynamics and outcomes in health care delivery. The chapter illustrates how different groups of technology contribute to sustainable effectiveness and the mechanisms that make them work.