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This paper explores organizational restructuring in corporate law firms. We review recent changes in law firms’ business models and structures, specifically as they relate to the externalization of work – or the unbundling of work and its placement with outside entities, which redefines the division of labor and the nature of the employment relationship. We draw from the extensive scholarship on the legal profession to raise empirical and theoretical implications of market-driven change to the careers of lawyers as well as the shifting patterns of stratification within corporate firms and the profession at large.

The aim of the chapter is to evaluate the concept of corporate parenting styles, identify missing elements in the theoretical constructs, and develop new theoretical constructs.

The chapter provides a summary of the existing literature on corporate parenting styles and uncovers the missing elements in the theoretical constructs. New theoretical constructs fill the gaps.

The chapter presents a new typology of corporate parenting style by combining corporate parents’ processes of adding value to and extracting value from subsidiaries. The five-type typology of corporate styles outlines the different levels of value addition and value extraction and various degrees of reciprocity in both processes. This chapter determines the most important factors that affect the selection of corporate parenting style. It postulates that the multinational corporation should exhibit different parenting styles toward its subsidiaries simultaneously and should be ready to amend its parenting styles to reflect changes in a subsidiary’s strategy and its motives for corporate ownership.

A new agenda for empirical studies oriented toward variability of parenting styles is proposed. Empirical tests of our propositions are needed. I encourage researchers to extend our research by considering the regional (supra-national), industry, and individual levels of analyses.

The chapter provides a more realistic view of corporate parenting styles than that found in the previous literature and outlines promising directions for further theoretical and empirical research.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new research construct to depict more accurately organisational structure and the direction of organisational changes in large multinational corporations (MNCs).

The paper presents an overview of the existing literature on the phenomenon of anisotropy in natural sciences and the organisation of large corporations, and transforms an identified phenomenon into a research construct of organisational theory.

This paper demonstrates that anisotropy, that is, the differences in the speed and conductivity of the movement of capital (money), products (goods and services), ideas (knowledge) and talent (people) in different directions within the corporation (from the centre to the subsidiaries, from the subsidiaries to the corporate centre and between subsidiaries) is the normal state of the internal space of the MNC. Anisotropy is increasing with the on-going restructuring of the global economic order. This leads to the divergence of business units in MNCs into the core and the periphery.

The paper outlines a series of promising research avenues in organisational studies.

The paper provides a novel treatment of the composition of MNCs.

The extant literature distinguishes sharply between corporate and community models of destination governance. In contrast, the case of Naturns/Naturno illustrates how a specific mixture of corporate and community approaches in governance can yield positive results. In particular, it shows how the existence of a network core characterized by integrative entrepreneurial leadership, an element that would in the first instance be associated with a corporate-driven destination, turns out to be a potential driver of a successful community-oriented destination development. In Naturns/Naturno, through its integrative entrepreneurial behavior, a hotel consortium has been influential in leading the transformation of the whole destination toward increased quality, strategic coherence, and innovativeness, while maintaining its community orientation.

We compare the aggregated international assets and liabilities of banks that report to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) to establish their gross and net international exposures during recent episodes of financial crisis. Initially we consider these positions worldwide and then focus on the cross-border flows within Europe, considered in terms of core and peripheral countries. These gross and net asset–liability positions are both time-varying and respond to crisis periods, through better matching of international assets and liabilities as well as the realignment of asset positions to reduce balance sheet risks. These conclusions are consistent with other studies that utilise international banking flow data, while the European experience highlights the diversity of international position taking. This is due to the complexity of managing risks within the eurozone (EZ) and peripheral countries, and those emerging European countries that retain legacy currencies.

In this chapter, the authors describe and explain how executive management enacts strategizing routines to strengthen their entrepreneurial agility, as a precondition to make new strategic moves possible. The authors contribute to the routine dynamics research program, by showing how the dynamics of routines, in a strategy context, shape strategic outcomes: the authors describe four strategizing routines – distancing, evaluating, experimenting, and re-assembling – as a particular promising focus for routine and strategy research. The authors discuss executive management’s enactment of such routines as part of their strategy work. The authors show how routine enactment makes entrepreneurial agility and new strategic moves possible. By exploring the dynamics of strategizing routines and their impact on strategic outcomes, the authors at the same time benefit from and contribute to the strategy-as-practice research program. Empirically, the authors study how the executive management of Hoechst AG successfully made unthinkable new strategic moves possible, discussable, and realizable in the context of the corporation’s strategic transformation between 1994 and 1996.

This paper aims to outline the current and future influence of digitalization on the corporate parenting styles (CPSs) of multinational corporations (MNCs).

The authors used conceptual modeling in this study.

The authors identified five types of CPSs (Hypnos, Cronus, Rhea, Zeus and Athena). The overall impact of digitalization on CPSs is related to new, formidable opportunities for decreasing costs and increasing the efficiency of the intra-corporate transfer of knowledge and talent. Furthermore, digitalization leads to greater tightness in subsidiaries’ performance targets and greater intensity of control over subsidiaries’ activities, lower degrees of subsidiary autonomy and lower level of trust between the corporate headquarters and subsidiary managers. These effects endanger the existence of two CPSs (Hypnos and Athena) and significant changes for the other three CPSs.

Digitalization may lead to more homogeneous corporations, with the lower variety of CPSs and the greater centralization of decision-making in corporate and regional headquarters and stronger control on operations and performance of subsidiaries. Increased opportunities of a horizontal value transfer (knowledge) within the corporation will present an additional competitive advantage of subsidiaries of MNCs. The increased ability and willingness of corporate and regional headquarters of value appropriation from subsidiaries in different forms (profit, revenues, knowledge and talent) will force subsidiaries to use that additional competitive advantage to become more aggressive competitors in local and global markets.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt in the academic literature to predict the mutation of CPSs of MNCs under the impact of digitalization.

This paper aims to detail the actions of the Russian subsidiary of a multinational IT company, during the COVID–19 pandemic, aimed toward the exploration and exploitation of unexpected business opportunities. It depicts the strategic and tactical actions of the subsidiary and corporate initiatives during the pandemic, revealing tensions between the subsidiary and its corporate parent on implementation of each’s initiatives.

A case study is presented, based on action research, using internal documents from the company under consideration, participation in various working meetings, meetings with customers and interviews with subsidiary management.

The strategic actions implemented by the subsidiary during the pandemic exemplify strategic agility, i.e. a set of activities carried out by a company that create value in a turbulent and unpredictable environment which in turn require systematic variations in specific processes, products and structures. Some of those variations included the unauthorized amendment of internal corporate rules, leading to tensions between the subsidiary and parent company. This case illustrates that such parent-subsidiary tensions are an inevitable element of achieving agility at the subsidiary level, especially during rapid and unpredictable changes in the business environment.

This study presents the flow of events in one multinational corporation subsidiary. However, the authors speculate that similar situations (subsidiary actions exploiting emergent business opportunities and which have been restricted by rigid internal corporate rules and regulations and low receptivity from corporate headquarters) occurred in many multinational corporation subsidiaries, aiming to explore and exploit nascent business opportunities in local markets during the pandemic.

The study confirms the necessity for the review of the functioning of the corporate immune system of large multinational corporations to allow more subsidiary initiatives to flourish than before the pandemic.

The paper presents a case of strategic agility at subsidiary level during the pandemic. It also uncovers the black-boxing managerial decision-making processes in headquarters-subsidiary relations during the extreme turbulence of business environment.

Considers the paradoxes inherent in the phrase “corporate social responsibility”. These include procedures of corporate governance, the market’s view of organizations’ ethical stances, the lack of clear definition, acceptance or denial, the lack of formal mechanisms for taking responsibility and the placing and priority that most organizations give to social responsibility. The article concludes that until these paradoxes are properly addressed, corporate social responsibility can legitimately be branded an invention of PR. It can only have real substance if it embraces all the stakeholders of a company, if it is reinforced by changes in company law relating to governance, if it is rewarded by financial markets, if its definition relates to the goals of social and ecological sustainability, if its implementation is benchmarked and audited, if it is open to public scrutiny, if the compliance mechanisms are in place, and if it is embedded across the organization horizontally and vertically.

In this paper aims to interview Walter Kiechel III about his book, The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World, and the lessons it offers for today's managers.

In this interview, Strategy & Leadership asked Walter Kiechel III about his book, The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World (Harvard Business Press. 2010), and the lessons it offered for today's managers. First as a Fortune writer, then as its editor and finally as editorial director of Harvard Business Publishing, Kiechel has interviewed originators of the core ideas behind strategy and, to a lesser extent, strategic management and executives at the large companies where it was first practiced.

Kiechel chronicles the rise and stumbles of a number of leading consultancies – primarily Boston Consulting Group, Bain and McKinsey – as they, Professor Michael Porter and a few others “invent” the concept of strategy over the course of about six decades.

Kiechel highlights the lasting accomplishments of the pioneering consultants he calls the Lords of Strategy and the tools they developed like the experience curve and the BCG matrix. He concludes that Greater Taylorism, the application of analytics to virtually every aspect of what a company does, is as important a product of the strategy revolution as strategy itself.

Senior managers will find his combination intellectual and business history engrossing and they should learn many lessons from it. For example: the development of strategic thinking has caused a genuine revolution in the way business is done; strategy is now the dominant framework by which companies understand what they are doing and want to do; and the intellectual models of innovative consulting firms have played a key role in figuring out competitive advantage.