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The strategic management literature emphasizes the concept of business intelligence (BI) as an essential competitive tool. Yet the sustainability of the firms’ competitive advantage provided by BI capability is not well researched. To fill this gap, this study attempts to develop a model for successful BI deployment and empirically examines the association between BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage. Taking the telecommunications industry in Malaysia as a case example, the research particularly focuses on the influencing perceptions held by telecommunications decision makers and executives on factors that impact successful BI deployment. The research further investigates the relationship between successful BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage of the telecommunications organizations. Another important aim of this study is to determine the effect of moderating factors such as organization culture, business strategy, and use of BI tools on BI deployment and the sustainability of firm’s competitive advantage.

This research uses combination of resource-based theory and diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory to examine BI success and its relationship with firm’s sustainability. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and a two-phase sequential mixed method consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed. A tentative research model is developed first based on extensive literature review. The chapter presents a qualitative field study to fine tune the initial research model. Findings from the qualitative method are also used to develop measures and instruments for the next phase of quantitative method. The study includes a survey study with sample of business analysts and decision makers in telecommunications firms and is analyzed by partial least square-based structural equation modeling.

The findings reveal that some internal resources of the organizations such as BI governance and the perceptions of BI’s characteristics influence the successful deployment of BI. Organizations that practice good BI governance with strong moral and financial support from upper management have an opportunity to realize the dream of having successful BI initiatives in place. The scope of BI governance includes providing sufficient support and commitment in BI funding and implementation, laying out proper BI infrastructure and staffing and establishing a corporate-wide policy and procedures regarding BI. The perceptions about the characteristics of BI such as its relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, and observability are also significant in ensuring BI success. The most important results of this study indicated that with BI successfully deployed, executives would use the knowledge provided for their necessary actions in sustaining the organizations’ competitive advantage in terms of economics, social, and environmental issues.

This study contributes significantly to the existing literature that will assist future BI researchers especially in achieving sustainable competitive advantage. In particular, the model will help practitioners to consider the resources that they are likely to consider when deploying BI. Finally, the applications of this study can be extended through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.

This study addresses foreign markets selection decisions by Russian mobile telecommunications operators and the impact of top management team composition on the degree of firms’ internationalization.

The qualitative exploratory study analyzed 24 foreign market entry decisions and the composition of the top management team of the two leading Russian mobile telecommunications operators, VimpelCom and Mobile Telesystems (MTS/AFK Sistema).

Russian mobile telecommunications operators adopted a gradual approach to foreign market selection, as the study revealed the positive impact of the target market’s geographic proximity to Russia on the investment decision. The international background of the top management team was positively related to the increasing distance of the selected foreign markets.

Further studies may include quantitative evaluation of investment decisions by mobile telecommunications operators from other emerging-market firms, as well as a longer observation period and investment decisions by firms operating in other industries.

Russian and other emerging-market firms should evaluate the importance of the top management team composition and international experience prior to initiation of the internationalization process.

Russian multinationals represent a relatively understudied phenomenon, despite the importance of outward foreign direct investments from Russia among other emerging-market firms.

The present study focuses on the timeliness of financial reporting, which is an element of transparency. Specifically, it looks at the telecommunications industry in Russia and computes the number of days it takes companies to receive an audit opinion, then compares the time lag to the number of days it takes non-Russian companies in the telecommunications industry to receive an audit opinion. The study concludes that Russian companies take longer to report financial results than do non-Russian companies. Larger Russian companies take less time to report their financial condition than do small Russian firms, but the difference is not significant. The same was true for the non-Russian companies included in the sample. Companies using Russian Accounting Standards took significantly less time to report financial results than did companies using either International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) or US generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). Companies using IFRS took significantly longer to report financial results than did companies using US GAAP. The dominant auditor in the Russian telecommunications industry did not complete audits in significantly less time than did nondominant auditors. Although Russian companies take far less time to issue financial statements now than they did a few years ago, it is premature to definitively conclude that the improvement is significant due to the limited data set.

The study this chapter reports focuses on how network theory contributes to the understanding of the internationalization process of SMEs and measures the effect of network capability on performance in international trade and has three research objectives.

The first objective of the study relates to providing new insights into the international market development activities through the application of a network perspective. The chapter reviews the international business literature to ascertain the development of thought, the research gaps, and the shortcomings. This review shows that the network perspective is a useful and popular theoretical domain that researchers can use to understand international activities, particularly of small, high technology, resource-constrained firms.

The second research objective is to gain a deeper understanding of network capability. This chapter presents a model for the impact of network capability on international performance by building on the emerging literature on the dynamic capabilities view of the firm. The model conceptualizes network capability in terms of network characteristics, network operation, and network resources. Network characteristics comprise strong and weak ties (operationalized as foreign-market entry modes), relational capability, and the level of trust between partners. Network operation focuses on network initiation, network coordination, and network learning capabilities. Network resources comprise network human-capital resources, synergy-sensitive resources (resource combinations within the network), and information sharing within the network.

The third research objective is to determine the impact of networking capability on the international performance of SMEs. The study analyzes 11 hypotheses through structural equations modeling using LISREL. The hypotheses relate to strong and weak ties, the relative strength of strong ties over weak ties, and each of the eight remaining constructs of networking capability in the study. The research conducts a cross-sectional study by using a sample of SMEs drawn from the telecommunications industry in Ireland.

The study supports the hypothesis that strong ties are more influential on international performance than weak ties. Similarly, network coordination and human-capital resources have a positive and significant association with international performance. Strong ties, weak ties, trust, network initiation, synergy-sensitive resources, relational capability, network learning, and information sharing do not have a significant association with international performance. The results of this study are strong (R2=0.63 for performance as the outcome) and provide a number of interesting insights into the relations between collaboration or networking capability and performance.

This study provides managers and policy makers with an improved understanding of the contingent effects of networks to highlight situations where networks might have limited, zero, or even negative effects on business outcomes. The study cautions against the tendency to interpret networks as universally beneficial to business development and performance outcomes.

This article explores the trade-offs between market concentration and multi-market participation in evaluating proposed mergers. For complementary demands, the price-decreasing effect of multi-market participation provides a countervailing influence on the price-increasing effect of higher concentration. The larger the footprint of the multi-market provider, the greater the likelihood the price-decreasing effect dominates. Higher concentration may be consistent with non-increasing prices despite the absence of merger economies. In the case of substitutes, multi-market participation compounds the price-increasing effect of higher concentration. Merger guidelines that place undue emphasis on market concentration can lead policymakers to block mergers that enhance consumer welfare and vice versa.

Online CSR communication of top Hungarian companies has been analysed, aiming at the exploration of the internal and external consistency of corporate communication practices.

Critical discourse analysis was implemented in the research of selected corporate web pages and social media presence of the companies in the sample. Then a comparison of online disclosure and the unethical/illegal activities of selected industries – telecommunication, construction and retail – was made.

No positive correlation between the culpability and the intensity of online CSR communication was detected. Therefore, it is not confirmed that disclosure of socially responsible activities and principles on the web is a mere corporate lip service. However, in certain highly controversial industries companies intensively communicate about their CSR actions on the one hand, and commit different forms of misconduct on the other.

Our methodology certainly has limitations since we registered only a few forms of unethical behaviour. Additionally, our focus was on large Hungarian companies, therefore the opportunity for generalization is limited.

Our findings show remarkable dissonances in CSR communication and point to a rhetoric-reality gap that needs more attention from practitioners as well.

Applications of critical discourse analysis of online CSR communication is relatively rare, only few studies have been conducted so far to explore potential dissonances and contradictions within online communication and between communication and real activities.