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This research explores how subsidiary embeddedness in different networks, both internal and external to the firm, contributes to the innovation of the service multinational corporation (MNC). Specifically, the authors analyze the different effects of networks on MNC’s subsidiaries performing competence-creating or competence-exploiting innovation activities, in the context of the service industry. The present study analyzes the data of 178 foreign-owned subsidiaries in the service sector performing innovation in Spain. The results of data analysis at two points in time show that external and internal embeddedness have a positive impact on the subsidiary innovation. Moreover, external embeddedness has a major positive influence on the competence-creating rather than on the competence-exploiting activities, while the internal embeddedness is equally important for both types of innovation. Therefore, this study contributes to further our understanding of how subsidiaries’ linkages affect innovation of the service MNC.

Increased global competition originating from both within the multinational corporation (MNC) and from global adversaries dictates that subsidiaries must be responsive to change, adaptable, and capable of sensing and seizing new opportunities for capability development and growth. For many subsidiaries adhering to, or being seen to adhere to, the wider organizational goals dictated by their parent represents an additional complexity. While it may be necessary to divert slack resources towards capability development, subsidiaries which do so, on their own initiative, may well run the risk of being categorized as an unruly node in the MNC’s network. Further, by failing to show compliance with organizational strategy future subsidiary-driven efforts may be curbed or prohibited.

The need to demonstrate value to the MNC through developing new and novel capabilities while complying with parent-driven strategy thus represents a key subsidiary dilemma, yet remains an underexplored phenomenon in international business research. Framing this dilemma via an ambidexterity lens, our chapter explores how five subsidiary units balance and negotiate allegiances within a modern MNC context. We find that in the subsidiary context aligning and adapting may not be competing or exclusive strategies, but in effect two sides of the same coin. The structural context can shape relative levels of alignment via controlling mechanisms and monitoring of operations while the subsidiary’s behavioral context, idiosyncratic to the subsidiary, can dictate its capacity to generate initiatives and to create new and novel capabilities for diffusion across the MNC network.

We argue that a foreign-based R&D subsidiary of a multinational enterprise (MNE) can potentially source knowledge from three diverse knowledge networks, namely (i) external knowledge network of the home country, (ii) external knowledge network of the host country, and (iii) internal (MNE) knowledge network. Drawing on the relative costs and benefits associated with the process of synergistic knowledge, this study examines whether a substitutive or a complementary relationship exists when two of the aforementioned networks collaborate in order to generate new knowledge at the subsidiary level. Our study’s sample is based on a survey questionnaire addressed to foreign-based R&D subsidiaries of Fortune 500 companies. We assess the existence of complementarity/substitutability using the “production function approach.” Our results indicate that a complementary relationship exists between external knowledge network of the host and the home country, as well as between external knowledge network of the host country and internal knowledge network. On the other hand, external knowledge network of the home country and internal knowledge network form a substitutive relationship. Our study offers a more comprehensive view of the diverse sources/knowledge networks that R&D subsidiaries are sourcing knowledge from when compared to existing research. We also specify and account for the costs/benefits involved in knowledge sourcing and thereby detect possible substitution/complementarity between different sources of knowledge. So far, there has been limited to nonexistent research into the diversity of knowledge networks of R&D subsidiaries and the examination of potential substitutabilities and complementarities. Hence our empirical study contributes to the development of this particular research stream.

The aim of this chapter is to investigate the immigrant women entrepreneurship phenomenon by analysing management academic literature on the issue. Stemming from the most current data on immigration and from the awareness that entrepreneurship is a viable instrument of immigrant (women) integration and inclusion, this chapter analyses the most updated management results on the issue. The analysis is mainly centred on works published after 2019, and some interesting insights emerge. Among them, we can refer to the awareness that research on immigrant women entrepreneurship is still in its infancy. Although, indeed, immigrant entrepreneurs and women entrepreneurs have been analysed considerably by researchers, it has been mainly in isolation. Therefore, room for investigating still exists, and this chapter uncovers some possible future research avenues. Moreover, by reviewing the selected papers, it clearly emerges that not all immigrant women entrepreneurs are alike; different targets (that is, different ethnicities) must be addressed differently by policy makers when policy measurements are identified. In other words, generic programmes aimed at increasing entrepreneurship among immigrant women cannot necessarily be successful.

Diversity is becoming the context through which researchers can account for different aspects of increasingly complexifying conditions of both entrepreneurship and migration. Taking a superdiversity perspective, this chapter uncovers and conceptualises what is diversifying particularly in migrant entrepreneurship. The authors identify four different dimensions of diversity and diversification affecting the activities of migrant entrepreneurs. First, with diversifying flows of migration, the characteristics of the entrepreneurs themselves as individual (usually transnational) migrants are diversifying. Second, with changing migration contexts, resources deriving from migration experiences are diversifying, exemplified by the different forms of transnational capitals used in entrepreneurship. Third, through migrant-led processes of diversification in the larger society, the main markets are diversifying, providing further opportunities to migrant entrepreneurs. Last but not least, the entrepreneurial strategies of migrant entrepreneurs are accordingly also diversifying, whereby finding different breaking-out strategies beyond the classical notion of only serving ethnic niche markets arise.

These diversities are embedded in the context of the overall superdiversifying society in which migrant entrepreneurs emerge and struggle to establish. By disentangling the different dimensions of diversity, this chapter contextualises debates on entrepreneurship and migration, including those in the present edited book, into the larger debate on the societal turn to superdiversity. It further discusses the notions and practices of differences embodied in migrant entrepreneurship, beyond the notion of the ethnic niche and the disadvantaged striving for market integration.

This study develops our understanding of the internationalisation activities of ‘transnational entrepreneurs’ (TEs), namely, entrepreneurs that are socially embedded in two or more different countries, specifically, in the context of the growing phenomenon of ‘micro-multinationals’ involving small firms with income-generating assets in more than one country. The investigation involves TEs originating from South Asia (Indian Sub-continent), based in the UK clothing and textiles sectors. Limited statistical differences exist between the perceptions of 63 survey respondents with varying degrees of international sales regarding perceived barriers and assistance requirements towards operating in overseas markets. Subsequent interview data with 16 of those TEs owning micro-multinational businesses offer unique insights, suggesting their behaviour is distinct from certain existing literature involving internationalising entrepreneurs, but that they are not a homogeneous group as strategies vary. This study provides opportunities for further research to understand TEs’ practices, including those operating in different institutional contexts.

Studies of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and stakeholder engagement have recently gained traction in the global strategy field. However, they have mostly developed as parallel streams, thereby limiting the cross-fertilization between global strategy research and stakeholder theory. We believe that because the CSR context in essence calls for the simultaneous participation of a large and heterogeneous set of local and global stakeholders, it requires a novel theorizing of multinational enterprises’ (MNEs’) worldwide practice implementation. Thus, we develop a series of propositions in the context of CSR to highlight the role stakeholders play in MNE subsidiaries’ implementation of initiatives, depending on the complex institutional pressures that they undergo, their distance from the parent’s home country, and their level of network embeddedness. We focus in particular on the role of stakeholder demands alignment in subsidiaries’ CSR implementation. Our conceptual propositions are enriched by the consideration of illustrative data on initiatives undertaken by Iberdrola from 2008 to 2014.

The authors review the German voluntary turnover literature and examine how it reflects and extends the overall knowledge of employee turnover. First, the authors describe legal, institutional, and cultural influences specific to Germany that may affect voluntary turnover and its relationships with antecedents and outcomes. The authors then explain how research paradigms, which in German turnover research are primarily embedded in sociology and labor economics and to a lesser degree psychology and management, affect the lens by which voluntary turnover is examined. For instance, the variety of research perspectives leads to a variety of research questions, theories, data, and methodological approaches. Using these diverse perspectives, the authors explain how measurement and data quality concerns may hamper the understanding of turnover in cross-country/cross-cultural comparisons. This review further reveals many similarities with US-based turnover research, regarding the theories, methods, and results. The authors also find that turnover levels are, on average, considerably lower in Germany than in Anglo-Saxon labor markets. The authors suggest that the industry structure in Germany, coined by its strong and traditionally organized “Mittelstand” companies, may partly drive these findings. The authors close by identifying several research opportunities, available through advances in technology to improve the matching process, nonstandard work arrangements (such as in the gig economy), and a broader perspective on institutional peculiarities.