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Acquisitions are complex and ambiguous events fraught with information asymmetries emphasizing market failure before an acquisition or organizational failure during integration. While often treated in isolation, market and organization failure are intertwined in acquisitions as integration planning starts before a deal is closed. Effective integration begins with a deep understanding of the target to be able to share assets and knowledge. However, acquiring firms currently have limited solutions to address information asymmetries. Most remedies primarily aim at market failure using due diligence and external advisors, leaving information asymmetry due to organizational failure primarily unattended. The authors develop a typology that leverages informal and formal social ties to address information asymmetries across the acquisition process that jointly considers market and organizational failure. The typology of this study combines existing research to develop how social ties with stakeholders influence acquisitions and can increase their success.

We present a simulation designed to capture the impact of both formal authority ties and informal socialization ties on the performance of an organization adapting to a turbulent world. We present a summary of three key models that informed our approach and then outline and describe the operation of our resulting simulation. Using an experiment that manipulated both the authority network structure and the stress the organization placed on socialization, we show inefficient authority structures harm performance, and also that socialization has a strong and nonlinear impact on peak organizational performance and on the performance of top management. We also present a case study, instantiating the general model with the specific context of a real-world organization. Finally, our integrated multimodel suggests that companies should pursue different strategies in hiring key strategic actors than they do for other actors.

Within developing countries, particularly in Africa, there is an emerging literature which highlights the unique obstacles faced by women entrepreneurs who start and develop their own businesses (De Vita, Mari, & Poggesi, 2014; Jamali, 2009; Minniti & Naude, 2010; Naude & Havenga, 2005; Nziku & Struthers, 2018). A key objective of this chapter is to critically appraise some of the conceptual approaches adopted in this literature. In so doing, the authors revisit a seminal paper first developed by Granovetter (1973) which suggested that female entrepreneurs, instead of being disadvantaged by the so-called ‘weak ties’ that bind their business networks, actually enjoy compensating benefits which Granovetter referred to as the strength of weak ties (SWT). Building on the conceptual work of Nziku and Struthers (2018) which developed an innovative taxonomy for analysing the SWT concept within a Principal-Agent (P-A) paradigm, the chapter will set out new insights which challenge some of the assumptions of the extant entrepreneurship literature. In particular, that women are inherently more risk averse in their business decision making than men. The theoretical context for this will be derived from a behavioural economics methodology first developed by Kahneman and Tversky (1979). They introduced the concept of loss aversion as a more realistic approach to attitudes towards risk on the part of entrepreneurs than risk aversion. The chapter contends that the loss aversion perspective may be more appropriate to the decision-making frame adopted by female entrepreneurs, especially in the context of Africa as well as in other developing regions of the world. The chapter will therefore suggest that such an approach can yield fresh insights on the topic of female entrepreneurship which the extant literature heretofore has not addressed, though this will have to be subsequently tested empirically.

This chapter provides a comprehensive, yet, concise overview of the existing debates on policy networks. The aim of the chapter is to identify those mechanisms that encourage network collaboration among several stakeholders with different motivations, interests, and preferences throughout different stages of policy making from agenda setting to policy evaluation. A systematic review of previous studies on policy networks across various countries highlights the achievements and missing links in the literature, and at the same time, reveals three sets of causal mechanisms, which are crucial to understand Network Collaborative Capacity (NCC) along the structural, relational, and institutional dimensions. Structural and relational mechanisms explain the internal dynamics of a policy network; whereas institutional mechanisms consist of all those external factors in the broader political and economic environment within which the network is embedded. Structural, relational, and institutional mechanisms are further classified into constituting elements that serve as a blueprint for organizing and managing collaborative efforts at the network level. Ultimately this chapter contributes to the existing governance debates by offering an integrated framework for the study of NCC across country cases and policy sectors. Turkish health sector represents a case study to assess the applicability of this framework beyond the context of advanced industrialized economies and democracies with a tradition in collaborative policy making. Finally, the added value of comparative network analysis at the national and sub-national levels will be discussed.

The purpose of this study is to examine how business group (BG) affiliation influences the export propensity of new ventures (NVs). To help address the inconsistency of past research on the value of BG affiliation for firms seeking to expand their business abroad, the authors provide a contingency perspective by exploring how organizational characteristics and BG characteristics condition the value of BG affiliation. The authors analyze the impact of BG affiliation on the export propensity of NVs, including the factors that condition this impact, by using a sample of 2,874 European NVs. The primary contribution of this study is to determine the impact of BG affiliation on the export propensity of NVs, including the moderating effects of firm size on the BG affiliation–export propensity relationship. The findings show that the export propensity of NVs affiliated with BGs is significantly higher than for stand-alone NVs. However, the findings demonstrate that the impact of BG affiliation on export propensity depends on the network characteristics of the BG in terms of the geographical dispersion of network ties. Consequently, the findings suggest that BG affiliation provides advantages for NV exporting only if it provides access to international inter-firm networks thus acting as a compensatory mechanism for liability of outsidership and liability of newness in foreign markets. In such cases, BG affiliation is a major resource capital that equipoises the somewhat limited financial resource provision for NV internationalization.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, disability rights found a place on the U.S. policy agenda. However, it did not do so because social movement groups pressured political elites or because politicians were responding to changes in public preferences. Drawing from recent work in neo-institutionalism and social movements, namely the theory of strategic action fields, I posit that exogenous shocks in the 1960s caused a disability policy monopoly to collapse giving way to a new policy community. Using original longitudinal data on congressional committees, hearings, bills, and laws, as well as data from the Policy Agendas Project, I demonstrate the ways in which entrepreneurs pursued a new policy image of rights within a context of increasing committee involvement, issue complexity, and space on the policy agenda, and the consequences this had on policy.

While earlier acquisition research often focused on either the acquirer or the target side of analysis, recent work has increasingly emphasized the need to understand the dyadic interrelationship between the target and the acquirer. This review aims at synthesizing research progress in the area of target–acquirer interrelationships and understanding what questions remain unanswered. The author organizes this review into three dimensions of target–acquirer interrelationship: (a) their relative attributes (what both parties are relative to each other), (b) their connections (what both parties have with each other), and (c) their interactions (what both parties do to each other). Based on the review, the author then identifies critical research gaps and opportunities for developing a more comprehensive understanding of the interrelationship between the target and the acquirer in acquisitions.

This chapter focuses on business and industry networks. All six facets of knowledge networks are described. Three of the six facets have particular importance for these networks, specifically domain, relationships, and how messages are managed and controlled. The authors provide six network profiles, including health care industry networks, fashion industry networks, technology industry networks, food production industry networks, building industry networks, and transportation industry networks.

The world consists of diverse and distinctive economic systems. Due to the unique historical, cultural and location-specific contexts embedded in each economy, a comparison of strategic behaviors across economies is unlikely to provide a causal estimate of the influence of these contextual factors on strategy–performance relationships. In this paper, I outline three approaches to researching multinational firms that address this dilemma. They include the multilevel, historical and variance-centered perspectives, all of which can help international-business (IB) researchers develop stronger theoretical foundations from which to explain why country-specific contexts matter in designing IB action and research.

The chapter provides an economic explanation and perspectivation of strategic asset seeking of multinational enterprises from emerging economies (EMNEs) as a prominent feature of today’s global economy.

The authors apply and extend the “springboard perspective.” This perspective submits that EMNEs acquire strategic assets in developed markets primarily for use in their home markets.

The authors succumb that the springboard perspective is alluring theoretically as well as empirically as it suggests that when EMNEs acquire strategic assets, they experience liabilities of foreignness (LOF) that are low relative to those of MNEs from developed markets. The authors concede to this LOF asymmetry but also point out that liabilities of outsidership (LOO) can offset or weaken the home-market advantage of some EMNEs when competing with MNEs.

LOO appears as the more relevant concept to use when explaining strategic asset seeking of EMNEs. A set of propositions are formulated to guide empirical testing.

The insights gained from using the springboard perspective and the LOO concept are non-trivial: They basically predict future dominance of ‘insider’ EMNEs at the expense of MNEs from developed markets.