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Multinational enterprises (MNEs) attempting to create social value in base of the pyramid (BoP) economies are encumbered by unique market and institutional barriers. To overcome these challenges, BoP scholars have advocated the strategy of using embeddedness as a replacement for inefficient formal institutions. Reliance on informal social ties for coordinating market exchange, however, leads to costly investments, exposure to opportunism and the creation of nontransferable capabilities. This paper aims to investigate these issues.

The authors argue that embeddedness should be used as an intermediate step toward developing more enduring formal institutions rather than as a replacement for them.

The authors put forward the notion of proto-institutions as a useful concept for exploring how MNEs can engage in co-designing efficient and inclusive institutional forms aimed at engendering long-term social value creation.

The authors identify three institutional fields wherein MNEs can leverage social embeddedness to develop proto-institutions that are potentially transferable to become formal institutions. First, MNEs can build governance institutions that can enhance coordination among local actors. Second, MNEs can experiment with small-scale change and adaptation of market institutions that reduce transaction costs and facilitate market exchanges. For example, improved institutional practices in value chain governance can boost business performance while also improving the livelihoods of supply chain partners. Finally, the authors discuss the potential for developing favorable socio-cultural institutions by introducing new principles of organizing or educational practices.

Using a political economy framework, this paper examines the financing trend, by investigating three systematic spikes occurring between 2004 and 2016. The study aims to provide a useful review of the interaction of politics, financial decisions and educational outcomes. Additionally it provides a useful guide, especially to academics, to identify political and economic conceptualizations that will predict expenditure decision-making of political actors and to be able to provide policy advice on the future effect of such decisions on availability and accessibility of public goods.

The paper adopts a secondary data analysis approach, drawing upon secondary data sources such as from the Ministry of Education, budget statements from the Ministry of Finance, as well as relevant policy documents. Additional information for the study was also extracted from the manifestos of the two leading political parties in Ghana – the New Patriotic Party and the National Democratic Congress and their viewpoints on financing of education in Ghana.

Using two epochal years when financing of education peaked (2008 and 2012), which coincided with election years, the trend lends itself to being interpreted as opportunistic spending. It appears to give credence to a conclusion that the increases in spending are more politically directed and nonneutral.

This paper fulfills an identified need to study the trend of basic education financing in Ghana, which will help policy actors make better-informed decisions with the introduction of the novel “adaptive opportunism” framework analysis tool.

This paper aims to investigate whether the amount of local governments’ debt can be predicted by the level of political competition.

The study uses the artificial neural network (ANN) to test whether ANN can “learn” from the observed data and make reliable out-of-sample predictions of the target variable value (i.e. a local government’s debt level) for given values of the predictor variables. An ANN is a non-parametric prediction tool, that is, not susceptible to the common limitations of regression-based parametric forecasting models, e.g. multi-collinearity and latent non-linear relations.

The study finds that “political competition” is a useful predictor of a local government’s debt level. Moreover, a positive relationship between political competition and debt level is indicated, i.e. increases in political competition typically leads to increases in a local government’s level of debt.

The study contributes to public sector reporting literature by investigating whether public debt levels can be predicted on the basis of political competition while discounting factors such as “political ideology” and “fragmentation”. The findings of the study are consistent with the expectations posited by public choice theory and have implications for public sector auditing, policy and reporting standards, particularly in terms of minimising potential political opportunism.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the type of resources that firms draw on to expand internationally within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) context. The authors seek to understand the impact of technological, political and knowledge resources on ASEAN firms’ multinationality, moderated by labor intensity, the type of ownership and the stage of economic development.

The hypotheses are tested on a sample that comprises 4,056 manufacturing firms in five ASEAN countries: Indonesia, Lao PDR, Philippines, Vietnam and Timor-Leste.

The authors found that technology resource is not positively associated with multinationality. However, this relationship is moderated by labor intensity and type of firm ownership. Political resources, such as lobbying activities and informal payment to government, are important for ASEAN firms for foreign expansion. However, excessive informal payment may prove to be counterproductive. The authors also found that local firms tend to exploit more political resources than foreign counterparts and firms operating in the lower stage of economic development tend to spend more on lobbying activities, but pay less informal contribution. Finally, for the manager industry experience, they found an inverted U-shaped relationship with respect to multinationality, but for manager education, the association was unexpectedly negative.

From a practical perspective, the findings have three important implications for management of ASEAN multinationals. First, multinationals can systematically exploit and internalize political ties by carefully integrating political activities, through informal contribution and lobbying, into their strategic planning or corporate structure. The findings suggest that political networking will offset weak technological resources, particularly for local firms. Second, managers of multinationals operating in ASEAN should not rely excessively on political actors, as the extra costs associated with the above optimum political resources exceed its marginal benefit. Moreover, excessive reliance on political actors will expose the firm to the threat of opportunism. Even though political resources are important managers need to maintain the utilization of political resources at the optimal level. Third, besides technological and political resources, managers’ knowledge is also crucial for ASEAN firms’ internationalization. The authors provide evidence showing that the positive effect of managerial experience is limited only to a certain level, even though tmanagers’ education has positive linear relationship with multinationality. This implies that at the early stage of international activities, both manager’s experience and education will have positive impact on the firm. However, when international activities are getting more complicated, the manager’s education takes over the manager’s experience. Above its optimum point, the manager’s experience will limit the manager’s capability to create innovative solutions for international expansion, and therefore it is the manager’s education that is able to stimulate revolutionary solution.

In this paper, the authors examine the resource impact on multinationality or the extent to which business activities span across national boundaries to shed light on the antecedents of foreign expansion in ASEAN. They discuss three types of resources (i.e. technological, political and knowledge resources) and seek to understand the impact of these resources on multinationality. Political resources are highlighted in addition to technological and knowledge resources in this paper because ASEAN firms are generally situated in a weak institutional environment in which the political resource is crucial for firms’ entry, operation and exit in international markets (Boddewyn and Brewer, 1994; Hillman and Keim, 1995; Rodriguez et al., 2005).

This book chapter reflectively explores the challenges of studying provocation, satire, bad taste and offence in stand-up comedy. The author’s sociological lens on the topic is situated within the broader field of humour studies, which is a relatively small yet creative and innovative field within the human, cultural and social sciences. This lost ethnographic project contains shelved and dormant interview data with a number of stand-up comedians, including the controversial and emotive late Bernard Manning and an early career Steve Coogan. The project also explores the author’s autoethnographic journey into rant poetry, as both a hobbyist and, on further reflection, a way of keeping the project informally but theoretically alive. The issues of censorship, political correctness and informed consent are key ones in the author’s confessional type analysis. Finally, the value and richness of loss, failure and resilience as marginalised yet significant and unacknowledged learning resources in our academic adventures are frankly discussed. The call here is for more lost ethnographic projects to be recognised and appreciated in academia.

The UK Government's ‘Agenda for Discussion’ is a political tract, written by a combination of politicians, philosophers and economists without any direct input from the professions providing primary care. There was no consultation with the medical profession prior to its publication. The document is not based on carefully researched and tested ideas for developing primary care. Nevertheless, the British Medical Association's response attempts to apply logic and rationality to a debate which has thus far been heavily influenced by political opportunism.

This chapter argues that the concept of metagovernance offers an alternative to multi-level governance (MLG) for understanding how policy is delivered through complex networks. Whereas MLG portrays the state as a diminished entity, metagovernance argues for a strong, capable state that can govern through the deployment of policy tools. The chapter identifies and evaluates how policy tools are selected to realise the strategic objectives of government.

A critical case methodology is employed. Nuclear power is held to be a most difficult test for the British government’s ability to metagovern. The empirical data was collected from in-depth qualitative interviews conducted between August 2008 and July 2013.

The chapter shows that the British government’s metagovernance efforts are informed by the risks that would-be developer face. The British government is shown to have some ability to practice metagovernance but the complexities of nuclear power and the existence of a MLG structure create risks that government cannot overcome. It is also observed that in nuclear power programmes, the risks of construction cost overruns and electricity price fluctuations have the greatest impact on the calculations of would-be developers.

The findings offer insight into the limits of government capacity in the face of networks and claims of continued state power. The chapter links together the literature on risk and the emergent literature on metagovernance. It is shown that institutional risks in the form of political opportunism are ever present and cannot be easily overcome.

Government are often called upon oversee difficult projects that are delivered by commercial actors. The findings indicate how governments might approach the task and point to a need for greater sensitivity to the nature of the project itself.

The empirical results show that to moderate risk, government has tended to adopt very technocratic policies that limit wider democratic consultation in favour of working directly with commercial actors.

The chapter presents a detailed analysis of government decision-making in a highly controversial area of public policy – nuclear power.