Search results

This chapter is about how leaders attempt to move from traditional to shared leadership and why they often cannot. We develop a new theoretical framework to examine whether leaders are willing to shift control from themselves to their followers and thus promote shared leadership in their teams. We argue that control shifts, while necessary for shared leadership, are particularly difficult for leaders to enact. This is because leadership is often closely bound with power and status in the organization, a reality of organizational life that is often overlooked in the quest for new forms of leadership, such as shared leadership. Our contribution lies in examining leaders’ ability to enact shared leadership through the lenses of primary and secondary control, and situating control shift in the context of global leadership including selected cultural dimensions, complexity, and paradoxes.

Despite its central role in the influence process, power has largely been overlooked by scholars seeking to understand global leaders' influence over their constituents. As a consequence, we currently have limited understanding of the varieties of power that global leaders hold, how power is exercised in global contexts, and what impact exercising power has in global organizations. The intended purpose of this chapter is to mobilize research on this important topic through systematic review. The review is organized around the following guiding questions: (i) how is power defined in global leadership research? (ii) what power bases do global leaders possess? (iii) how do global leaders exercise power? (iv) what factors influence global leaders' exercise of power? and (v) what are the outcomes of global leaders' exercise of power? Based on a synthesis of extant insights, this chapter develops a foundation for future research on power in global leadership by mapping critical knowledge gaps and outlining paths for further inquiry.

Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies and Autonomous Unmanned Vehicles are shaping our daily lives, society, and will continue to transform how we will fight future wars. Advances in AI technologies have fueled an explosion of interest in the military and political domain. As AI technologies evolve, there will be increased reliance on these systems to maintain global security. For the individual and society, AI presents challenges related to surveillance, personal freedom, and privacy. For the military, we will need to exploit advances in AI technologies to support the warfighter and ensure global security. The integration of AI technologies in the battlespace presents advantages, costs, and risks in the future battlespace. This chapter will examine the issues related to advances in AI technologies, as we examine the benefits, costs, and risks associated with integrating AI and autonomous systems in society and in the future battlespace.

This chapter provides a critical exploration of the European Union’s impact on the 2016 United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) proceedings and Outcome document. It demonstrates that the ability to produce a European ‘common position’ ahead of the UNGASS debates represents a significant step forward in the ability to ‘speak with one voice’ in the global illicit drug policy arena, and has played an important role in ensuring key issues such as human rights and public health remain on the agenda. In highlights, however, a European failure to engage with issues such as the continuing suitability of the international drug conventions to preside over the current climate of drug policy innovation and experimentation, and the unintended consequences of a ‘war on drugs’ approach. Ultimately, therefore, it argues that these failures will hamper the development of a more progressive and effective global drug policy.

This chapter discusses the global factory paradigm. We show how mainstream international business (IB) thinking, namely, internalization theory, can guide multinational enterprise (MNE) strategic decision-making in the context of a global factory network.

We identify the key assumptions made in the global factory paradigm about the fine slicing of economic activities and the related implications for the ownership status and location of each activity. In order to overcome the global factory paradigm’s relative lack of predictive capacity, as compared to internalization theory, we propose an asset-bundling approach. This approach uses a clear and unambiguous criterion, namely, the tradability of resources (and resource combinations) to determine which sets of activities can best be left to external market contracting or should on the contrary be internalized on the basis of efficiency considerations.

We describe the enhanced role of developing/transition countries in the functioning of the global economy and show that these countries represent an increasing share of worldwide economic activities. Given this macrolevel development, the global factory, as a complex organizational form governing both internal activities and contracts with external parties, is rapidly gaining in importance. We describe, at the conceptual level, the strengths and weaknesses of the global factory and propose a “decision dynamics” matrix to support global factory, senior managers’ strategies in the realm of ownership status and location.

Future research on the MNE should focus on in-depth analysis of firms that embody “global factory”-type characteristics in order to understand better the evolution of this type of company and to capture the close requisite links among the focal firm, external contracting parties, and the broader environment. Such research should also lead to a better understanding of innovative resource combination processes and the transferability of non-location-bound firm-specific advantages (FSAs) across the global factory network.

In the global factory, the MNE head office assumes the role of resource orchestrator and is responsible for key strategic decisions on ownership status and location. Here, the head office must assess critically the operations that are part of the MNE’s value chain and reflect on the firm’s international dispersion of economic activities on an ongoing basis, given a myriad of broad environmental changes and changes in external competitive pressures. Our “decision dynamics” matrix provides a simple but effective managerial tool supporting MNE ownership status and location decisions, but the head office’s capability to make these decisions should not be overestimated.

We explicitly link internalization theory with the global factory paradigm and explore unresolved issues in the relevant literature. Internalization theory prescribes the optimal ownership status and location for each economic activity considered. The theory focuses on the bundling of firm-level resources and complementary ones held by external parties, for each fine-sliced economic activity. It also considers explicitly the nature of the linkages among these activities.

The chapter presents and discusses the development of a number of new transnational surveillance and information systems in Europe. It relates their development to the question of whether we here have an example of ‘law without a state’. Guenther Teubner's notion of a ‘lex mercatoria’, a system of global contract law developed by large law firms and international business lawyers, is paralleled by a ‘lex vigilatoria’, a system of global control in the making. The chapter provisionally concludes that the ties to the nation-state of an integrated surveillance system are increasingly diluted.

We develop a concept of the global factory, first introduced by Buckley and colleagues (2004, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2014), as a stand-alone construct associated with significant predictive capacity, discuss dynamics of success of the global factory, and identify and analyze social mechanisms deployed by the lead firm head office.

We conceptualize the global factory as a form of a flagship network and augment internalization theory with insights from interorganizational networks research to explore the dynamics of the global factory’s origination and functioning.

We clarify under what conditions a global factory-type network is more likely to emerge and describe social mechanisms generated by the lead firm head office to help the global factory sustain itself and thrive. We argue that in order to benefit from potential efficiencies of the global factory, the lead firm head office must deploy combinations of social mechanisms. We further argue that the role of the lead firm head office is that of a joint value orchestrator and a social broker, in addition to the controlling intelligence function.

Future work on the global factory should include further conceptualization of social mechanisms deployed by the lead firm, exploration of operating mode heterogeneity within the global factory, and large-scale empirical research.

Lead firm managers should embrace the role of the joint value orchestrators and implement social mechanisms described in this chapter to facilitate smooth operation of the global factory.

Global factory governance further increases multinationals’ geographic reach and market power; yet, it is not a universal recipe for market success, and therefore global factories’ power to shape the global economy should not be overestimated.

By linking the global factory to networks literature, we have suggested a novel way to view the concept and articulated more fully its underlying assumptions. Further research on the global factory will help advance our understanding of the dynamics of the global economy and the role of multinationals, their head offices, and their managers in shaping the economy.

The acronym and neologism “VUCA” is employed by management and some scholars to denote the unpredictability of the modern world and its impact on business. The VUCA approach suggests that a rational firm’s response should be to: protect against volatility by engineering-in redundancy and slack, gather information to reduce uncertainty, develop expertise to make complexity computable, and learn heuristically to reduce ambiguity. We combine a critical perspective on the VUCA approach with the global factory model, popularly used to describe the flexibility sought by advanced economy multinational enterprises (MNEs) within the global value chain. Both VUCA and the global factory would seem to account less well for the expansion of emerging multinational enterprise (EMNEs) abroad, particularly the preference for equity-based control and inflexibility when seeking strategic assets. Also, both approaches fail to incorporate behavioral principles toward risk. Using International Business theory, we propose a research agenda that may help to make VUCA more tractable, the global factory more useful, and the internationalization of EMNEs more comprehensible.

Purpose – The purpose of the chapter is to introduce an actor-centered conflict perspective into research on multinational company (MNC) coordination. We first develop a theoretical framework of conflictual processes in MNC coordination and then use an empirical study of a German MNC in Japan to illustrate how cultural coordination in MNC subsidiaries triggers conflict processes.

Methodology/approach – The chapter integrates conflict theory and models of MNC coordination. The empirical study is based on qualitative data.

Findings – Coordination programs in MNC such as cultural integration through shared values lead to substantial conflictual processes. Local actors apply micro-political tactics to resist, delay or adjust coordination instruments developed by MNC headquarters.

Originality/value of chapter – The chapter applies conflict theory to MNC coordination issues, a field of research which so far is dominated by contingency approaches.

The studies presented in this volume are examples of the manner in which globalization reshaped social relations in the agrifood sector. In this concluding chapter, two fundamental points are presented. They are offered as a synthesis of the empirical evidence characterizing the contributions contained in this book and wish to add to the on-going discussion on globalization. The first of them refers to the fact that as capital moves at accelerated speed and reconfigures time, space, and social relations, it creates new contradictions. Second, these contradictions negatively and disproportionally affect subordinate groups. Dwelling on these two points, it is concluded that these contradictions also open up possibilities for emancipatory change as dominant groups are not free from situations that limit their actions.