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Answering to calls for further contextualizing global leadership, this study investigates power dynamics and cultural identities in global leadership in an African context. We took a grounded theory approach to investigate how a specific cultural context shapes assets and liabilities of global leaders. Drawing on our data comprising semi-structured interviews of managers of multinational enterprises operating in Ghana, we identified key assets and liabilities for being local or foreign in one’s global leadership role. Furthermore, we theorize four specific styles of leadership leveraging: identity leveraging, power leveraging, juxtapositional leveraging, and temporal leveraging. Finally, we integrated the above-mentioned elements and proposed a framework of contextualized assets and liabilities which illustrates how specific cultural context affects the assets and liabilities of localness and foreignness for global leaders, and how these assets and liabilities constitute the four styles of leveraging in such context. Implications of our findings for research and practice are discussed.

This paper aims to explore subsidiaries’ behavioural responses to volatile institutional pressures in the local context of the emerging Nigerian market.

The authors built on institutional and contingency theory to analyse previous literature on developed markets and apply it to African contexts. The authors used a context-specific volatile local context model to show how porous formal and strong informal institutions constitute international business (IB) as a contested terrain in the host country. The authors also used a qualitative methodology, involving multiple actors, to investigate this phenomenon in practice.

The findings indicated different types of institutional pressures shaping volatile local contexts, which together or separately impact subsidiaries, depending on their degree of exposure. Subsidiaries behaviourally respond to cope with these pressures through inclusive negotiations involving their home and host countries’ networks.

Previous research has imposed developed markets’ norms on emerging African markets, regardless of their volatility. As subsidiaries’ responses to local contexts in emerging African markets are poorly understood, the authors developed a volatile local context model, showing how IB becomes a contested terrain in host countries and the authors proposed a model that differentiates between informal institutions. The authors highlighted the impact of contextual pressures on subsidiaries, according to their levels of exposure to the local context. The authors concluded that committed alignment with a local context is necessary for presenting an effective contingent response to its volatilities.

Despite their economic significance, empirical evidence on the growth constraints facing micro-businesses as an important subset of small and medium enterprises remains scarce. At the same time, little consideration has hitherto been given to the context in which entrepreneurial activity occurs. The purpose of this paper is to develop an empirically informed contextual understanding of micro-business growth, beyond firm-level constraints.

The paper draws on 50 in-depth interviews with stakeholders and micro-business owner–manager entrepreneurs (OMEs henceforth) in a peripheral post-industrial place (PPIP henceforth).

The paper shows that, beyond firm-level constraints generated by their OME-centric nature, there are “additional costs” for micro-businesses operating in PPIPs, specifically limited access to higher-skilled labour, a more challenging, “closed” business environment and negative outward perceptions stemming from place stigmatisation. All of these “additional costs” can serve to stymie OMEs' growth ambition.

The paper is based on a limited number of interviews conducted in one region in England. However, the contextualisation of the findings through a focus on PPIPs provides valuable insights and enables analytical generalisation.

The article develops a context-sensitive model of micro-business growth constraints, one that goes beyond the constraints inherent in the nature of micro-businesses and is sensitive to their local (socio-institutional) operating context. The implications serve to advance both how enterprise in the periphery is theorised and how it is addressed by policymakers and business intermediaries to support the growth of micro-businesses.

The aim is to advance the conceptualisation of island entrepreneurship by investigating how the island context, for example, industry characteristics, social context and formal and informal institutions, influences the development of artisan food businesses in that context.

An applied, qualitative and participatory research approach was implemented. Data were collected during a business development process focusing on food artisans in the Åland Islands. In total, 19 business owners participated in the process. Key informants and public officers were interviewed, and the literature was reviewed. Interviews were analysed using phenomenography to identify representative categories, and the literature was analysed using content analysis.

Island characteristics and context, local institutions, the quality of social capital and gendered institutions influence business activities positively and negatively. Island entrepreneurship entails mobilising agencies to find innovative solutions that enable businesses to overcome obstacles. Most previous research treats business activities as entrepreneurship; however, as self-employment is essential in the island context, it should be highlighted in future studies.

This study illustrates how the island context influences the business development of small firms. Results indicate that local policies (1) benefitting female entrepreneurs, (2) supporting local businesses and (3) promoting locally produced artisan food could generate benefits for the entire artisan food businesses.

Local policies that (1) benefit female entrepreneurs, (2) support local businesses and (3) promote locally produced artisan food have the potential to generate benefits for the entire trade. Policies can benefit from an understanding of the role played by different ecosystem actors. Promoting self-employment can generate benefits for the local entrepreneurial ecosystem by providing agglomeration and helping to solve some challenges caused by the characteristics of islands.

Empirically, this research enhances the knowledge of post-productive responses in the island context. Theoretically, the study advances the conceptualisation of research on the island entrepreneurship context and the local food debate.

This study aims to identify the level of political participation of local citizen in 208 districts representing for 63 provinces and cities in Vietnam and consider the effects of candidate's attributes, local political contextual factors and other local citizen’s demographic characteristics on the elections of local leaders in Vietnam.

By using Probit model and data about provincial governance and public administration performance index and self-survey about local leaders in the districts, this paper shows the different effects of candidates’ attributes, local political context and other local citizen’s characteristics on the first and second elections of local leaders in Vietnam.

The result indicates the probability of candidates being elected in the first term depends on their characteristics, local political context and local citizen. However, the reelection of local leaders for a second term depends much on their characteristics and local political context not on demographic characteristics of local citizen. The satisfaction rate of local citizen and being an incumbent for the first term are driving forces for the local citizen to elect their leader for the second term. Meanwhile, local political context such as local transparency, local official development assistance project and citizen satisfaction will increase the likelihood of local leaders being elected for the first and second terms.

The major limitation of this study is the data of the self-survey because it only provides basic but not complete characteristics of candidates and local contexts in some typical districts in 63 provinces and cities across the country.

This paper includes policy implications for candidates who want to be elected for both terms and local governance in Vietnam. The government needs to focus on building human resources for local administration to meet the requirements of building a clean, strong, modern and anticorruption administrative system.

This paper extends the analysis on examining the characteristics of candidates and local citizen as well as local political context influencing the elections of local leaders, getting involved in the Vietnam context, still underresearched, especially with reference to political participation of local citizen.

Local marketing decisions are too often made on a dichotomous basis, either standardize or fully adapt. However, similarities are too substantial and differences go too deep to be ignored. This article aims to articulate similarities and differences in local consumer experience across multiple contexts.

Language, being used daily in local contexts, reflects local knowledge (Geertz). This paper shows how translation/back‐translation can be used as a discovery tool, along with depth interviews and checks of researcher interpretations by informants, to generate cognitive mapping of consumption and taste experiences. Local words, used as emic signals, are combined into full portraits of the local experiences as narratives linking people to products and taste. Local portraits can then be merged to derive commonalities emergent from within the contexts studied. The comparative thick description framework is applied to the bitterness and crunchiness taste experiences in ten countries (China, Croatia, El Salvador, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey) and nine languages.

Local experiences in several different languages and countries in different areas of the world can be surveyed, compared, and organized into cognitive maps (Eden), which highlight commonalities and differences between contexts. In essence, differences are qualitative, dealing with creolization patterns, local consumption experience, local preferences, perceptions, and associations.

This approach can be considered as interpretive and, although driven by a systematic approach, depends on researcher and informant expertise and rigor.

Cognitive maps help evaluate cross‐national differences and similarities in local markets. The emergent similarities and differences are highly meaningful for glocalizing marketing strategies, in terms of advertising, branding, and packaging.

Significant insights derived from this method can be tested in a more traditional and applied manner. This allows quicker insights into new local marketplaces and a progressive enrichment of cognitive maps with new languages and countries.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how for a business located in a local area that does not portray the characteristics of the “Silicon Valley” stereotype, developing a strategy that pretends to autonomously set its boundary spanning may lead to unsustainable growth.

This work suggests Dynamic Performance Management (DPM) as a method to implement an outcome-based view of sustainable development of small- and micro-sized organizations in their own context. A case study shows how collaboration between the public and the business sector may improve local area's outcomes and develop common goods in the context.

Among the “abnormally-grown” small-and-micro businesses, this paper identifies “dwarf” and “small giant” firms as examples of context-based organizations, where an outside-in perspective may support sustainable development. To enable such firms to build up a capability to survive and grow in their contexts, local area common goods can be leveraged to pursue collaborative strategies and generate value. To this end, education may play a crucial role. Results from a fieldwork focused on the design and use of an educational package are illustrated.

A change in decision-makers mental models is a prerequisite to introduce the use of “lean” DPM systems as a method to implement an “outside-in” perspective to pursue sustainable development in such organizations.

This work has a multidisciplinary track; it uses a simulation-based methodology to understand performance dynamics, to assess policy's sustainability, and to foster a learning-oriented perspective to planning.

This paper seeks to examine how foreign subsidiaries of MNCs can acquire new local knowledge by focusing on two intra-organizational factors of learning mechanisms and formative organizational context.

A mail survey was carried out with top managers among manufacturing subsidiaries of multinational corporations (MNCs) located in Hanoi, Vietnam and Guangdong province of China. In total 123 completed questionnaires from MNCs in Hanoi and China were received.

The results suggested that training and mentoring and formative organizational context has positive association with knowledge acquisition. However, three interaction terms between learning mechanisms (experimentation, socialization, training and mentoring) with formative organizational context are significantly related to knowledge acquisition. Besides, the authors also found a positive and significant association between knowledge acquisition and subsidiary performance.

Building a formative organizational context directly promotes knowledge acquisition and increases the effectiveness of more informal learning mechanisms. Besides, a learning mechanism may work differently in different contexts, and foreign managers need to be aware of when to apply what mechanisms.

The paper argues that the alignment between organizational context and organizational learning mechanisms can help the foreign subsidiaries acquire new knowledge and improve subsequent performance. Local knowledge acquisition in MNCs should be conceived as a deliberate and managed act, requiring a careful selection of both formal and informal mechanisms supported by appropriate contextual conditions in foreign subsidiaries.

Anchored in institutional theory and sense-making theory, the purpose of this paper is to explore the implementation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) at the multinational corporations (MNC) subsidiary level in a developing country context.

This paper follows a qualitative methodology and adopts the interview technique to investigate the CSR practices of eight MNCs.

The results suggest that the CSR diffusion process goes well beyond simple imitation (i.e. adopting CSR myths or best practices intact), involving complex processes of interpretation and translation at the subsidiary level to reconcile the multiple and contradictory expectations for CSR.

The paper illustrates the dynamics of the sense-making process at the level of the subsidiary and the numerous institutional factors that are accounted for while implementing CSR activities in the host community. This paper argues that the integration of the two theories helps bridge macro and micro levels of analysis, thus providing a much richer account of how organizational actors at the subsidiary level make “sense” of a multitude of institutional pressures in the process of CSR implementation stemming from within the MNC itself on one hand (and the respective home country) and from the host community on the other hand.

This study aims to discuss how an online community interacts with a local community during the entrepreneurial process. By having a contextualized view of entrepreneurship, this study acknowledges the social and spatial dynamics of the process.

The inductive approach used in this study is empirically anchored in the case “the library revolt”. This paper analysed interviews conducted in a selected region in Sweden and followed a netnographic method to capture the social interactions online. By using qualitative modes of inquiry, this study attempts to illuminate the social aspects of the entrepreneurial process.

This study shows how social media works as a contextual element in entrepreneurship. By presenting interactions between an online community and a rural community, it is shown how entrepreneurial processes in rural areas can be shaped not only through local community relations but also by online interaction. It illustrates how an online context, where actors are located with their own unique set of resources, contributes to rural development. By being a part of an ongoing process of structuration, we can view the actors are gaining access to the resources online, which contributes to the change happening in a local community.

This study adds to the conversation of the role of context in entrepreneurship studies. Rural entrepreneurship largely discusses the local social bonds and actions, while this study includes the online social bonds as a part of the reality in which entrepreneurship is developed.