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There is consensus among scholars on how political institutional imprinting interprets the unique management and practice phenomenon of Chinese enterprises. However, little scholarly attention has been given to the different political institutional imprints that shape firms’ internationalization. Therefore, this study aims to investigate how communist and market logic political institutional imprintings influence firms’ initial ownership strategies in outward foreign direct investment.

Based on the propensity score matching difference in difference method and a sample of 464 foreign investments from 2009 to 2020 for 310 Chinese private firms.

The results show that private firms with market logic political institutional imprintings tend to adopt higher ownership and vice versa. As institutional differences increase, private firms with market logic imprintings are more risk-taking and adopt higher ownership, whereas private firms with communist imprintings are more conservative and choose lower ownership. When diplomatic relations are friendlier, private firms with market logic imprintings prefer higher ownership to grasp business opportunities and vice versa.

This study not only identifies the net effect of political institutional imprinting on private firms’ initial ownership strategy but also investigates the different moderating effects of current institutional forces to respond to the call for research on bringing history back into international business research and the fit between imprinting and the environment.

Mobilizing a theoretical framework combining institutional logics and “imprinting” lenses, this paper provides an in-depth contextualized analysis of how historical imprints affect social and environmental reporting (SER) practices in Romania, a post-communist country in Eastern Europe.

The authors conduct a qualitative field study with a diverse dataset including regulations, publicly available reports and interviews with multiple actors involved in the SER field in Romania. The authors follow a reflexive approach in constructing the narratives by mobilizing their personal experience and understanding of the field to analyze the rich empirical material.

The authors identify a blend of logics that combine local and Western conceptualizations of business responsibilities and explain how the transition from a communist ideology to the free market economy affected SER practices in Romania. The authors also highlight four major imprints and document their longitudinal development, evidencing three main patterns: persistence, transformation and decay. The authors find that the deep connections that form between logics and imprints explain the cohabitation of logics rather than their straight replacement.

The paper contributes by evidencing the role of imprints' dynamics in the institutionalization of SER logics. The authors claim that the persistence (decay) of imprints from a former regime such as communism hinders (facilitates) the institutionalization of Western SER logics. Transformation instead has more uncertain effects. The pattern that an imprint takes hinges upon its usefulness for business interests.

This study aims to advance an international political economy (IPE) perspective that geo-political events can have long-lasting imprint effects on countries and their firms. The study also aims to explore the idea that shared political history and geography combine to create specific structural conditions that shape the international competitiveness of all firms in a region. In particular, the authors consider whether the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which asserted American influence in the Western Hemisphere, contributed to the creation of institutional structures across Latin America (LA) affecting the strategies of all firms to this day. The authors also illustrate the IPE perspective using the example of the contemporary international competitiveness of LA business groups.

The authors illustrate the IPE perspective using the example of the contemporary international competitiveness of LA business groups. The exploratory framework of this study leads to a proposition about the export performance of Latin American business group affiliates. The authors use firm-level performance data for 32,000 firms across emerging economies to explore the proposition empirically while controlling for alternative explanations. To do this, the authors draw on the World Bank Economic Surveys.

The authors derive a proposition that argues the Monroe Doctrine has had a long-run imprint effect on economic policymaking in LA, resulting in a common, persistent and negative impact on the international competitiveness of firms. The authors find strong and consistent evidence that in terms of export performance, all Latin American firms export less and group affiliates do not outperform independent firms, This finding contrasts with the results for all the other emerging market regions around the world.

The main contribution of this study has been to suggest the potential importance of shared regional geopolitical history and geography in explaining firm-level outcomes. However, this study is preliminary and introductory, although the authors seek to control for alternative country-specific explanations of the results. The analysis considers the effects of one particular IPE phenomenon, the Monroe Doctrine, in one particular location: LA. Future work should seek to contrast LA with other geopolitical security and alternative IPE structures. They might also address the time dimension from a historical perspective: is imprinting in LA driven by the length of the Monroe Doctrine arrangements?

The most important managerial learning point concerns the relevance of geography and political economy factors for multinational enterprises strategy formation. There is widespread understanding that context is an important determinant of subsidiaries’ performance, and that strategies need to be constructed to take account of country-specific characteristics, most importantly, in emerging economies and institutional arrangements. This paper proposes that managers also need to take account of IPE structures, including security arrangements, and to consider the resulting regional as well as national context.

The analysis suggests that not only the performance of firms, including emblematic firms, but also the socially beneficial spillovers that might be generated from them, are contingent on the regional as well as national characteristics. Thus, business groups in most emerging economies are found to yield better performance and to provide higher levels of social impact, including concerning ESG goals. However, the findings of this study suggest that the former is not true for LA, which, the authors argue, is a consequence of imprinting as a result of the Monroe Doctrine. Further work is needed to establish whether the latter effect is also not true, but if that is the case, then regionally specific policies may be required to address the resulting corporate social shortfalls.

The core idea is that geo-political events can have long-lasting imprint effects on countries and their firms: that shared political history and geography create specific structural conditions that shape the international competitiveness of all firms in a region. The authors explore this concept with reference to the Monroe Doctrine, asking whether its assertion of US influence across the Americas contributed to the creation of institutional structures across LA affecting the strategies of all firms to this day.

This study aims to introduce an important temporal dimension to the research on institution and entrepreneurship in the transition period. This study develops the concept of pre-reform institutional embeddedness, and explores its impact on entrepreneurial reinvestment of private firms in China’s transition economy.

The authors used secondary data of a nationally representative sample of China’s private firms collected in the early days of the institutional transition period and applied ordinary least squares regressions and the Baron and Kenny approach to test the theoretical model.

Pre-reform institutional embeddedness has a negative impact on entrepreneurial reinvestment of private firms in the transition period. This relationship is mediated by guanxi-induced employment, such that pre-reform institutional embeddedness promotes guanxi-induced employment, which in turn discourages a private firm to reinvest. Additionally, the negative impact of guanxi-induced employment on entrepreneurial reinvestment is reduced when decentralization of decision-making is used.

First, entrepreneurs should be aware of pre-reform institutional embeddedness’ negative influence on firms’ risk-taking abilities and incentives. Private firms already constrained by this connection could alleviate the negative impacts through a widespread delegation of decision-making authority. Second, policymakers should be cautious about improper government-business relationships, which may discourage private firms from fully pursuing entrepreneurial growth opportunities.

This paper makes theoretical contributions to the literature on entrepreneurial reinvestment, embeddedness perspective of entrepreneurship and imprinting theory.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how entrepreneurship culture affects start-up and venture capital co-evolution during the early evolution of an entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) and its ability to foster the emergence of ambitious entrepreneurship as an outcome of its activity. Unlike studies that capture entrepreneurship culture at the national level, this study focusses specifically on the culture of venture capital-financed entrepreneurship and understanding its implications to the development of venture capital markets and successful firm-level outcomes within ecosystems.

Relying on EE and organisational imprinting theory, this study specifies characteristics of venture capital-financed entrepreneurship of Silicon Valley to illustrate the American way of building start-ups and examine whether they have as imprints affected to the entrepreneurship culture and start-up and venture capital co-evolution in Finland during the early evolution of its EE between 1980 and 1997.

The results illustrate venture capital-financed entrepreneurship culture as a specific example of entrepreneurship culture beneath the national level that can vary across geographies like the findings concerning Finland demonstrate. The findings show that this specific culture matters through having an impact on the structural evolution and performance of EEs and on the ways how they deliver or fail to deliver benefits to entrepreneurs.

The results show that venture capital-financed entrepreneurship and the emergence of success stories as outcomes of start-up and venture capital co-evolution within an EE are connected to a specific type of entrepreneurship culture. This paper also contributes to the literature by connecting the fundamentals of organisational imprinting to EE research.

We consider how the commercialization of social ventures may result from their founders’ personal experiences of commercial organizing. Building on theories of individual imprinting, we theorize that the commercialization of social ventures is influenced by two types of commercial experience: parental imprinting from the commercial work experience of a founder’s parents, and work imprinting from a founder’s professional experience within for-profit organizations. We find support for our theory based on analysis of a novel dataset of over 2,000 nascent social ventures and their founders. We further find that the marginal effects of additional work imprinting from a founder’s commercial experience decline with the longevity of this experience. We discuss implications of our findings for literatures on social ventures, imprinting, and hybrid organizations.

Drawing on the notion of imprinting, we develop a framework for understanding category emergence and durability by suggesting that the durability of a category reflects its emergence conditions. We propose four ideal-typical mechanisms – consensus, proof, fiat, and truce – that arise from differences in the degree of agreement and the centralization of the authority regarding category definitions. Our framework not only relates category durability to emergence but also highlights the role of category promoters and constituencies in an ongoing process of category maintenance. We discuss implications for understanding the dynamics of the categorization process in various social and product market contexts.

Extant literature has indicated that government support is one of the main drivers of international expansion of Chinese multinational enterprises. However, research on the influence of governors on firm internationalization is still limited. Drawing upon the institution-based view, we theorize a novel concept of institutional enablement to illustrate the influence of a governor's pro-market ideology on Chinese firms' internationalization.

We analyze the relationship between a governor's pro-market ideology (consisting of a pro-market political ideology, an overseas educational background and a business background) and firm internationalization with a sample of Chinese public companies during 2014–2017.

We find a direct and positive effect of a governor's pro-market ideology on firm internationalization. We also find an indirect and positive effect of a governor's pro-market ideology through regional, inward foreign direct investment.

To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to investigate an underexplored question of the impact of governors on firm internationalization and to develop a novel concept of institutional enablement, based on discursive institutionalism.

This paper introduces a conceptual framework to assess the foreign market entry behavior of emerging market multinationals (EMMs). By introducing strategic cognition as the underlying theoretical perspective, this paper postulates that different levels of institutional voids in home markets shape the strategic cognition of EMMs, influencing their market entry behavior due to the prevalence of organizational imprinting in the early stages of internationalization. The paper aims to contribute to the strategic cognition literature by introducing emerging markets as a relevant context in which to apply and extend current thinking. Additionally, it aims to contribute to the institutional voids literature by providing a cognitive framework of behavioral patterns that is rationalized by institutional voids. Finally, the paper contributes to the entry mode literature by proposing strategic cognition as a relevant moderator for foreign entry mode choices, particularly those of EMMs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the dramatically changed role of Russia in the global economy since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, as the Soviet institutions collapsed and were either reformed or replaced in a new Russian institutional landscape. The paper presents a fact-based and balanced view of Russia’s evolving role in the global economy, as distinguished from the sometimes one-sided view presented by some Western commentators. The authors establish that the two countervailing views are fundamentally based on different cultural perspectives about institutions, primarily the roles of business and government.

This paper is developed as a perspectives article drawing upon the decades of academic and business experience of all three authors with Russian business, management and the economy. The paper focuses on the structure of Russian institutional change and places it within the historical context of the challenges of various periods of time from the late 1980s to the present. The authors posit that cultural foundations complicate that institutional evolution.

Russia will remain a major player in world markets for energy, raw materials and armaments for the near future at least. Principal institutional questions facing Russia have to do with how to reduce the country’s overall dependence on raw material exports, with its vulnerability to world market fluctuations, and how to modernize Russian economic and political institutions. The degree of success in addressing these questions will depend largely upon the ability of the new and reformed economic institutions to show the flexibility to respond to changes in the global order, on whether political considerations will continue to supersede economic issues, and how markedly cultural traditions will continue to impede positive changes.

The entire system of international trade is under question, disrupted by the growing nationalism that is threatening the globalization that became institutionalized over decades in the wake of the Second World War. Russia’s future role is partially dependent upon how new patterns of international trade develop in response to the current disruption of established trade regimes, and by how political conflicts are expressed economically. The authors observe that Russia’s historical and cultural traditions, especially acquiescence to a highly centralized government with a strong autocratic leader, limit the country’s options. The authors explore how Russia’s reactions to Western sanctions have led to a new strategic approach, moving away from full engagement in the global economy to selective economic, and sometimes political, alliances with primarily non-Western countries, most notably China. The authors contrast Russia’s situation with that of China, which has been able to make substantial economic progress while still embracing a strong, centralized political institutional structure.

Many Western analysts have viewed Russian institutional evolution very critically through the lens of Western politics and sanctions, while Russia has continued along its own path of economic and institutional development. Each view, the authors argue, is based upon differing cultural perspectives of the roles of business and government. As a result, a distinct difference exists between the Western and Russian perspectives on Russia’s role in the world. This paper presents both points of view and explores the future of Russia’s position in the world economy based upon its evolving strategy for national economic policy. The authors contrast the situations of Russia and China, highlighting how Western-centric cultural views have affected perceptions of each country, sometimes similarly and at times with decided differences.