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The purpose of this study is to explore some of the distinctive features of organizing and organization in France which set it apart from organization in other nations, and which are fundamental to its modus operandi. In particular, this article is concerned with elite connectivity and concerted action by elite “connectors”.

The research underpinning this article stems from a cross-national comparative project on business elites and corporate governance in France and the UK. This has three dimensions, being quantitative, qualitative and case study-based. Concerted action by the ruling elite is explored through two illustrative vignettes: the ousting from office of Jean-Marie Messier and State-sponsored expansion as pursued by EDF. Both examples shed light on the French business elite’s response to globalization and the development of international business.

The paper finds elite cohesion to be achieved quite differently in the two countries. In addition, it finds that the ties that bind French connectors tend to be strong and institutionally based.

The case of EDF suggests that the most ambitious of State-sponsored strategies can also be the most successful. It implies that elite ideologies in France have deviated relatively little from sentiments expressed by Rousseau and de Gaulle concerning the primacy of the national interest and the conviction that firms can serve as an (expansionist) instrument of the nation. The Messier case illuminates the pattern of close relationships among the French business elite. It demonstrates how a strategy of expansion may come unstuck when it is not grounded in the customary modes of business regulation.

This research confirms a slight preference on the part of the French business elite for more homogenous ties. Against this, the paper demonstrates that a significant proportion of the French elite act as boundary spanners, brokering relationships with others from more distant parts of the wider network. The integration of the French elite in the Eurozone has potentially favored bridge-building relationships and weakened national embeddedness. This may contribute to the decline of indigenous interlocks, while promoting the further internationalization of top management teams. The implications of this for organizational strategy, firm survival and economic performance form an agenda for future research.

This paper aims to explore the importance of the role of national business systems (NBS) in shaping human resource management (HRM) and organisational behaviour (OB) practices in the context of Asian countries. To this end, this paper presents a comparative overview of different NBS in selected Asian countries and how these variously impact HRM and OB at two levels and contexts, i.e. within and cross-national.

The paper presents a topical review of the literature to unravel the complexity and challenges associated with studying this rich and complex area.

The findings suggest there is significant complexity in studying the impact of NBS on HRM and OB at a holistic and multi-level unit of analysis. The multiplicity of factors and levels of analysis, even at a level of within country analysis, highlights the sophisticated, in-depth and detailed nature of scholarship needed to unbundle and get a fuller understanding of this topic.

Although recent research presents a within and cross-national analysis of NBS and its impact on HRM and OB practices from diverse Asian countries such as India, Japan, Indonesia and Malaysia, recent research offers only a focused analysis of few targeted HRM and OB practices, rather than a collective or a bundle of HRM practices.

The contributions point to several practical implications for HR managers as well as managers from other fields, covering several national and cross-national comparisons.

This paper offers a substantial contribution in the understanding of how various HRM and OB practices are embedded in a nation’s business system and through a variety of historical and cultural influences.

Purpose – This chapter provides an overview of multilevel modeling with a focus on the application of hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) in international management research.

Findings – The key topics covered include an introduction to hierarchical linear models, how to apply appropriate hierarchical linear models to address different types of international management research questions, and six methodological issues concerning international management research with a multilevel analysis.

Originality/value – The overview of HLM and its relevance for international management research facilitates researchers to apply this powerful analytical strategy in their future research.

This study aims to examine the relationships among senior managers’ reports of bribery practices, ethical awareness and firm productivity in Thailand. Bribery pervasiveness is examined as moderating the relationship between bribery practices and ethical awareness. Ethical awareness is examined as a mediating effect of bribery practices and managerial perceptions of firm productivity.

This study uses a mixed-method approach consisting of interviews with more than 20 senior managers and surveys collected from more than 200 senior managers in Thailand’s manufacturing and construction industries. Hierarchical regression is used to test the hypotheses.

Senior managers report that their firms are more likely to flout ethical principles when they perceive that their industries feature widespread bribery practices. However, the tests fail to support the hypothesis that the flouting of ethical principles leads to less productivity.

This study contributes to transaction cost economics theory by extending the concept of illegal transaction cost minimization to managerial perceptions of firm productivity. This study also integrates research on bribery rationalization by considering how managerial rationalization and justification of bribery practices impact managerial perceptions of firm productivity and ethical awareness. This research provides managers with an understanding of how attitudes toward ethical conduct and unethical actions impact perceptions of firm productivity.

The purpose of this paper aims to investigate the relationship between the audit firm's ethical climate and workplace bullying perceived by trainee auditors in Chinese audit firms.

An Ethical Climate Questionnaire and a Negative Acts Questionnaire are adapted from the existing organization studies and business ethics literature to fit in the audit firm context and are administered in a survey on 205 trainee auditors with a four-month long work placement in audit firms. SPSS is used in statistical analyses and tests.

This study confirms that some but not all types of organizational ethical climate significantly affect the perceived workplace bullying in audit firms. The results of testing for the relations between workplace bullying and ethical climate after breaking down workplace bullying into the work-related and person-related bullying sub-categories provide some different conclusions. Besides the impacts of the ethical climate on workplace bullying, this paper also finds out that trainee auditor's gender, the leader–subordinate gender difference, firm size and audit engagement team size are more likely to affect the perception of one or more of the bullying categories in audit firms.

This study implies some guidance for the audit firms to establish healthy ethical climates that can help them to recruit, train and retain young skilled auditing professionals.

The findings of this study imply that a healthy ethical climate can help develop the audit profession and markets by deterring workplace bullying in audit firms.

This paper extends the organizational studies on the impact of the audit firm's organizational ethical climate on workplace bullying in the auditing profession. It also extends the gender roles in organization studies by stratifying the levels of workplace harassment.

The purpose of this paper includes two interconnected objectives. The first is to provide a reconceptualisation of social value creation as social constraint alleviation. The second is to respond to the call put forward by Giuliani and Macchi (2014) to produce synergies between bodies of literature exploring the development impact of businesses. The paper focuses on ideas from the global value chain/global production networks (GVC/GPN), business and human rights, corporate social responsibility (CSR), international business (IB) and (social) entrepreneurship literatures.

The paper offers a reconceptualisation of social value creation by building on the synergies, complementarities and limitations of existing concepts identified through the literature review.

The reconceptualisation of social value creation put forward in this paper contributes to the literature in the following way. It offers a useful and clear definition of the term “social” (Devinney, 2009), and it attends to the limitations of the constraint concept as put forward by Ted London and his collaborators (London, 2011). Furthermore, it sketches out the basic ideas of a two-system approach to allow for the differentiation between symptom treatment and root cause alleviation. Finally, it offers a refinement of Wettstein’s (2012) proposed capability-based remedial action concept. The paper furthermore proposes that there are three distinct ways in which businesses generally respond to social constraints.

The paper illustrates how the redefined concept of social value creation can connect different bodies of literature and help make sense of existing empirical results, without engaging in definitional debates.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the combined roles via trust relationships of the two technology cores of the firm: information technology (IT) and R&D and their impact on new product success.

A model was tested whereby trust and the integrated IT strategy account for a significant amount of the variance in a broad range of new product development (NPD) outcomes for a survey sample of 223 manufacturing firms. Respondents said design practices and quality methods like Six Sigma accounted for a total of over 25 percent of the reports of the most helpful approaches in promoting effective NPD. At the same time their biggest challenges were having a clear strategic direction within which to operate and resolving cost and resource issues which accounted for over a third (34 percent) of barriers to success.

Respondents reported that a total of over 25 percent of the reports of the most helpful approaches in promoting effective included these quality methods. At the same time their biggest challenges were having a clear strategic direction within which to operate and resolving cost and resource issues which accounted for over a third (34 percent) of barriers to success. High-tech firms were less likely to report integrated IT strategies, but this tended to be counterbalanced by high levels of trust in the IT function and adoption of organizational innovations for execution of strategic intent. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

Survey methods produce broad results with low response rates in most studies involving R&D and NPD, and this study is no exception.

With the challenge of strategy alignment reported by many of these firms, it seems clear that the top management team cannot afford to leave NPD challenges to engineering teams and NPD programs without guidance and general vision.

NPD has become the staple of most manufacturing firms as a way of meeting and beating the competition worldwide. However, trust between functional areas often starts before people are even employed and should begin in training and educational programs.

Designing NPD programs is at the heart of many firms’ competitive strategies and the fast learning companies are the winners. Very little is known about the trust relationship between IT and R&D and their combined effects on new product success which we have found to be significant and unexpected in their impacts.