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The primary purpose of this study is to explore the antecedents of interorganizational trust within an international joint venture (IJV) context. In exploring how interorganizational trust is developed during the course of managing IJVs, we will look at fair action as a key factor in building interorganizational trust. Based on the existing literature, we propose the fair joint decision‐making process, cultural adaptation and the fair distribution of bargaining power as being antecedents of interorganizational trust within the IJV context. After developing hypotheses about the relationships between these three antecedents and interorganizational trust as well as causal relations between the antecedents, an empirical study is conducted using a sample comprised of 109 IJVs located in Korea. The findings show that perceived fairness in the joint decision‐making process and the distribution of bargaining power directly affects trust‐building between IJV participants; and also reveal the indirect effects of cultural adaptation on the development of interorganizational trust.

The blue ocean strategy refers to how rebuilding the inputs that customers value in the designing of a new value curve fundamentally requires a four field of action structure: reduce, eliminate, create and raise. However, this does not propose a methodology to identify these fields of action. Hence, the purpose of this study is to present importance-performance analysis (IPA), as a support tool to identify these fields of action given their relevance and utility to managers.

The 101 ex-customers of health club answered a survey to determine the cut-off boundaries for IPA, and therefore, maximising the discriminatory power of the logistical regression model. This correspondingly incorporated the evaluation of both the area below the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) and the adoption of coefficients for concordance and correlation.

The research results demonstrate the need to concentrate efforts on the attributes of: price, responses to complaints, emergency procedures, innovative services, changing rooms, support for selecting the activities members choose to undertake and an appropriate number of members per activity. With low levels of performance and importance, are candidates for elimination, specifically, the availability of specialist appointments, member socialisation activities, maintaining memories of members, bar services and services for children.

The contribution: presenting an IPA methodology applicable to identify the fields of action recognised by the blue ocean strategy as the literature currently only covers concrete situations in which organisations achieve success through reducing, eliminating, creating and elevating and does not set out any methodology to identify those same fields of action; the definition of the cut-off points in IPA based on the ROC curve, which is a more rigorous and exact statistical method than that applied in other studies; the study population, the ex-customers, who not only represent a very important source of latent demand but also because ex-customers are likely to return more impartial.

This study examines the contribution of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice in Federal budget decision-making to Federal managers' commitment to the Federal government as an employing organization. A total of 1,358 useable surveys were received from a sample of 9,643 managers. Reliability coefficients were acceptable (> .70), and intercorrelations consistent with previous studies. Hierarchical regression analysis supported only maineffect relationships between procedural justice and interactional justice and managers' organizational commitment. No support was found for a main effect relationship between distributive justice and organizational commitment -- or for any interactive effects. Contrary to models of bureaucratic behavior based on economic theory, these findings may suggest that Federal managers may be motivated primarily by psychological outcomes of budget decisions.

This chapter seeks to advance the neglected debate on the ethical issues between formal organization and practice arising from innovation in an organization. To that end, the chapter discusses the sources of possible moral dilemmas for practitioners who belong to a practice with a shared identity, values, and standards of excellence, and who need to conform to new rules of formal organization. While formal organization ideally strives for generalized fairness principles for all organizational members when introducing an innovation, the contextualized nature of practices may lead to particular needs and goals of the practice which can only be recognized as such by practitioners and not by formal management, and to which procedural justice cannot respond. The chapter proposes how practitioners may interpret moral dilemmas, aligned with their practice-based identity and ethical values, and what options for action they may seek. The discussion is illustrated with examples of innovation in the field of information systems design.

How headquarter (HQ) and subsidiary actors end conflicts and reach agreements is an important but still under-researched question in multinational corporations (MNC) literature. This conceptual article approaches these conflict dynamics from the Convention Theory perspective. Convention Theory draws attention to justice principles (known as “order of worth”) and to the material aspects in relations between MNC actors. We offer a framework that contributes to HQ-subsidiary relations research in three ways: (1) it links conflicts to justice principles, (2) it enriches the understanding of the stability of agreements, and (3) it sheds light on the activities needed for realizing preferred arrangements.

This article takes stock of interdisciplinary research on Multinational Corporations (MNCs) by elucidating paradigmatic shifts in the world of MNCs in the new millennium and analysing more recent developments in the disciplines of International Business (IB) and Organization Theory (OT). The article also introduces the altogether 14 individual contributions of this 49th volume of the Research in the Sociology of Organizations series. It closes by looking into the questions of where interdisciplinary OT/IB research on MNCs is now and where it is likely to go in the future.

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.

Family governance is a topic of substantial practical relevance that merits much more attention in family business research (Gersick & Feliu, 2014; Suess, 2014). The purpose of this book chapter is to use the framework of a fair process to gain a better understanding of how family governance practices can help an entrepreneurial family firm flourish. Central to the analysis is the case of a 100-year-old entrepreneurial family firm that will serve as a best practice. Interviews with key members of the family and the business were held, and secondary data were gathered and analyzed. The chapter starts with a theoretical outline of the family as strategic resource and the family governance as a mechanism to manage this strategic resource. The principles of fair process are introduced as an underlying framework for the well-functioning of family governance practices. This is followed by the introduction of the case and the discussion of the key findings. This chapter ends with some concluding remarks.