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Digital technologies have fundamentally changed organizations, industries, and even the society. Although institutional theory provides rich array of perspectives to both the content and dynamics of such changes, research at the intersection of institutional scholarship and digitalization has remained scarce. In this essay, I draw on the institutional logics perspective to elaborate digitalization as involving a new set of interconnected managerial beliefs and norms, organizational practices, and diverse material and social structures that together complement and challenge the established logics in organizations and institutional fields. I draw attention to two central organizing principles in the logic of digitalization: the pursuit of digital omniscience – the efforts to represent and conceive the world through digital data – and digital omnipotence – the efforts to bring activities inside and outside organizations under the control of information systems. I conclude the essay by elaborating how the institutional logics perspective can help understand organization-level efforts to leverage digitalization by incumbent corporations and new digital-native companies.

This study aims to analyse how multinational corporations (MNCs) organise value chain activities to penetrate new market segments. It contributes by expanding traditional decisions regarding the vertical fine-slicing of value chain activities (whether performed internally or externally) and the consideration of resource-sharing decisions (integration or separation) for each value chain function.

The authors draw on primary data collected from two case study firms operating in the large emerging Chinese market: Volvo Construction Equipment AB and Epiroc AB. In-depth cases illustrate how foreign MNCs expand into new market segments and simultaneously target both the lower-priced mid-market and the premium segments in the Chinese mining and construction industry.

The results reveal that product diversification creates challenges for managers who must oversee new (vertical) value chains, often simultaneously. Beyond geography and modes of governance, managers must decide whether to integrate or separate value chain activities for the new product lines. The study identifies four main strategic choices for firms to address this complexity, focusing on the decision to internalise or externalise (i.e. within or across organisational boundaries) and integrate or separate value chain activities between different product lines.

This study builds upon the internalisation theory and recent international business contributions that focus on value chain configurations to explain MNCs’ product diversification as a growth strategy in a host emerging market. It also sheds light on the choice of conducting new activities in-house or externally and elucidates firms’ managerial decisions to operationally integrate or separate individual value chain activities. The study provides insights into the drivers explaining managerial decisions to configure value chain activities across product lines and contributes to the growing body of literature on MNC activities in emerging economies by highlighting that product diversification impacts entry mode diversity and resource sharing across units.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate pharmaceutical market access (MA) and the interaction between the pharmaceutical company and other business and non-business actors (NBAs) involved in the MA of ethical drugs, to identify the main categories of actors, their role for MA and the content of the interaction, adopting an industrial marketing approach.

A qualitative interpretivist approach is adopted, with interviews as the primary data collection method: 36 interviews have been conducted with 16 key informants from the pharmaceutical industry.

The findings of this study reveal that (i) MA can be seen as a relational-driven activity with specific features owing to the highly regulated nature of the pharmaceutical industry, (ii) there is a multiplicity of business, and NBAs involved in the MA activities with whom pharmaceutical companies interact to acquire knowledge, legitimacy and make MA timely and effective, and (iii) the interaction with each category of actors has specific content.

This paper advances the debate on the marketing and management of pharmaceutical companies by emphasizing the importance of MA and the need to conceptualize it according to an industrial marketing perspective, revealing the interdependencies among actors for MA and the content of the interaction. It also contributes to the industrial marketing literature that has recently stressed the importance of NBAs as part of the extended business network of a company by identifying different categories of actors, their role in terms of knowledge and legitimization and the features and the trade-off of the extended business network in highly regulated markets.

Enterprise systems are commonly implemented by firms through outsourcing arrangements with software vendors. However, deriving benefits from these implementations has proved to be a challenge, and a great deal of variation has been observed in the extent of value generated for client and vendor firms. This research examines the role of co-specialization as a strategy to make the most out of outsourced enterprise systems. The authors develop hypotheses relating resource co-specialization with two indicators of success for implementation of enterprise software: (1) exchange success and (2) firm growth.

The hypotheses are tested using a unique panel data set of 175 firms adopting Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) software, a type of enterprise system used for managing manufacturing and logistics. The authors identify organizational factors that support co-specialization and then examine how co-specialization is associated with enterprise software implementation success, controlling for the endogenous choice to co-specialize.

The empirical results suggest that resource co-specialization is positively associated with implementation success and that the two resource co-specialization pathways that are examined complement each other in providing performance benefits.

This paper contributes to the research literature on outsourcing. The study also provides a new empirical test using a unique data set of 175 firms adopting APS Software.

This chapter explores the disruptive potential of the Internet to transform illicit drug markets while also challenging stereotypical depictions and superficial understandings of supply and demand. It argues that the digital transformation of illicit drug markets combines, on one hand, a reconfiguration of the scope and impact of how sellers, buyers, and other actors interact within and upon digitally mediated retail drug markets and, on the other hand, continuing trends in the embeddedness of market structures in cultural, economic, political, and legal realms. We develop conceptual ideas for studying the architecture of digital drug markets by drawing on interdisciplinary approaches to digitalisation, markets, and drugs. To understand the functioning of online drug markets, we first need to understand digitalisation. Thus, we draw on scholarship on the digital transformation of society and, second, put forward an understanding of markets that considers how personal relations and social structures enhance and restrict market exchange. Thus, we draw on economic sociology. Third, we build on and extend social science research on illicit drug markets which points out that drug markets exhibit significant variations over time and across jurisdictions. The introduction aims to provide a research agenda that can help us to explore ongoing digital transformations of illicit drug markets. It expands and deepens scholarship on the technological, structural, economic, and cultural factors underlying the resilience and growth of digital drug markets. It also goes beyond a concern with just one type of digital drug market into wider forms of digital environments.