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By the view of attention-building activities as “tools of power,” the authors investigate the impact of subsidiary involvement in attention-building activities on the strategic influence of subsidiaries within multinational corporations (MNCs).

The study is based on survey data from 110 international subsidiaries located in Sweden. Five hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling with linear structural relations.

The study shows that organizational commitment and external scouting activities, as two attention-building activities, do not directly affect the ability of subsidiaries to gain a strategic influence in MNCs. Rather, the results provide support for the importance of headquarters’ positive attention as a mediator between such activities and subsidiary strategic influence. This implies that subsidiaries do not receive any strategic influence through these activities unless they receive explicit positive attention from the corporate headquarters.

This study contributes to the micro-political view of the MNC by offering insights into the impact of attention-building activities of subsidiaries as a potential source of strategic influence for MNC subsidiaries.

We investigate the extent to which headquarters’ perceived knowledge about overseas R&D subsidiaries influences the level of control over them. We confirm that headquarters’ knowledge about its overseas R&D subsidiaries lowers the level of control over them. Surprisingly, however, granting legitimacy to R&D subsidiaries does not necessarily lead to a reduction in headquarters’ control. In addition, R&D subsidiaries’ legitimacy does not influence the effect of headquarters’ knowledge about them on the level of control. Although headquarters’ knowledge about R&D subsidiaries tends to grant them legitimacy, the effect of that legitimacy seems rather minimal. These findings imply that headquarters are reassured when it reduces its control over the subsidiaries based on updated knowledge about their current situations rather than on an already-established positive image of those subsidiaries.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

This study examines the case of an initial training, called “Dojo”, invented and implemented at a production site in the Czech Republic. It clarifies the initial training program implementation process and offers a conceptual framework for cooperative management of subsidiary activities at the site and firm.

This study conducts an in-depth analysis of qualitative data from the Czech production site over a five-year period. The theoretical base is the theorization and labeling phase of management innovation (MI), the final phase of which legitimizes a new management practice. Interview data, archival data, pictures and financial data are used for the analysis.

To legitimize the Dojo in the operational flow controlled by the site and firm, the Czech production site acquires validation of the Dojo from employees and board members of the Japanese and European headquarters, helping the site build trustful relationships with them. Training programs, process standardization and skills standardization of the workers offer benefits to the trainees, production site and firm.

The authors offer theoretical insights into MI at the subsidiary-level, which past studies have not differentiated at the firm-level. The authors also provide details of the implementation and management of initial training for newly hired blue-collar workers at the production site. The findings complement related literature on human resource management and operational management.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that multilateral knowledge transfer emerges from two lines of thinking in the international business (IB) literature – the exploitation of multinationality and the contributory role of subsidiaries – and links three levels of analysis – headquarters, knowledge-creating subsidiaries and host-country environments.

Multilateral knowledge transfer, both vertical and horizontal, is considered in this paper as a cross-level phenomenon that emerges as a result of beneficial interdependencies between headquarters, knowledge-creating subsidiaries and their host-country environments. The paper also discusses the concept of embeddedness, which both lines of thinking draw upon, and argues that the multinational enterprise (MNE) headquarters can actually moderate both internal and external embeddedness through global strategy and organizational design.

By putting forward an integrative cross-level interdependency framework that incorporates insights from the R&D internationalization literature and the subsidiary evolution literature, this paper delineates multilateral knowledge transfer as an MNE strategy to systematically transform and integrate knowledge created at the subsidiary-level for the global competitive advantage at the MNE group-level.

Such a perspective reemphasizes the multi-level nature of IB studies and provides new opportunities for theoretical and empirical development as did the internalization theory which has theorized the conventional headquarters-to-subsidiaries knowledge transfer more than 40 years ago.

Studies of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and stakeholder engagement have recently gained traction in the global strategy field. However, they have mostly developed as parallel streams, thereby limiting the cross-fertilization between global strategy research and stakeholder theory. We believe that because the CSR context in essence calls for the simultaneous participation of a large and heterogeneous set of local and global stakeholders, it requires a novel theorizing of multinational enterprises’ (MNEs’) worldwide practice implementation. Thus, we develop a series of propositions in the context of CSR to highlight the role stakeholders play in MNE subsidiaries’ implementation of initiatives, depending on the complex institutional pressures that they undergo, their distance from the parent’s home country, and their level of network embeddedness. We focus in particular on the role of stakeholder demands alignment in subsidiaries’ CSR implementation. Our conceptual propositions are enriched by the consideration of illustrative data on initiatives undertaken by Iberdrola from 2008 to 2014.

The purpose of this paper is to address intra-organizational communication between parent firms and foreign subsidiaries and examine how such communication effectively facilitates knowledge sharing between parent firms and their subsidiaries.

This study approaches the relationship between intra-organizational communication and the effectiveness of knowledge sharing from the viewpoint of foreign subsidiaries. The data have been collected from local managers in subsidiaries operating in Japan using a questionnaire survey. The hypotheses are tested by employing a robust regression model.

This study finds that intra-organizational communication between parent firms and foreign subsidiaries is positively associated with the effectiveness of knowledge sharing. The benefits from intra-organizational communication are greater for service firms than for manufacturing firms. Subsidiaries established through acquisition are found to enjoy a greater positive effect from intra-organizational communication than those established through greenfield investment.

The results of this study suggest that multinational corporations should facilitate intensive intra-organizational communication for knowledge sharing that can lead to the effectiveness of foreign subsidiaries. In particular, service firms should appreciate the value of communication. This study also indicates that foreign subsidiaries established through acquisition should promote communication with their parent firms for successful knowledge sharing.

This study demonstrates that the effect of intra-organizational communication on knowledge sharing differs among industries and among entry modes. This is the initial step to further investigations on the industry and the entry strategy effects of intra-organizational communication.

The article aims to explain how the drivers of subsidiary evolution influence a multinational company's (MNC) research and development (R&D) subsidiary's evolution over time.

The article draws on insights from a longitudinal comparative case study of three Swedish MNCs' Indian R&D units.

The study shows that the evolution of R&D units is a triangular showdown among headquarter assignments, local market constraints, and opportunities, and that subsidiary choice is an important driver of both mandated extension and stagnation. We summarize our findings in various propositions that emphasize different drivers over time and that highlight the strong impact of a subsidiary's understanding of the corporate immune system on the evolution of that subsidiary's R&D mandate.

Drawing on the common limitations of a case study approach, further research is needed to test the suggested propositions with larger samples, ideally with subsidiaries in other emerging and developed markets.

The study illustrates the risks involved for subsidiary managers when pushing an R&D mandate-related initiative too far and provoking the corporate immune system. For headquarters management, the study highlights the importance of understanding that the development of R&D competence and capability at a subsidiary cannot be guided solely by headquarter assignments and local market characteristics; rather, the subsidiary's initiatives also need to be considered.

The study contributes to the literature on R&D internationalization by showing how the drivers of subsidiary evolution influence a subsidiary's R&D mandates over time and that subsidiary choice is an important driver of both mandated extension and stagnation.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretically informed analysis of social and environmental reporting (SER) evolution, i.e. how and why the SER evolved over time in a cooperative bank in Italy.

The paper is based on a qualitative fieldwork case study conducted from 2011 to 2015. Information and data were collected through several methods including: interviews with managers involved in the SER’s process; analysis of the SER-related documents; analysis of the website; and observations in the field. The analysis of the empirical evidence draws on the institutional logic (IL) perspective, which provides theoretical insights to interpret the role of the contrasting institutional forces in the evolution of SER.

The empirical analysis unveils three different stages in the evolution of SER: the “birth” whereby a new form of social reporting was initiated; the “development” through which SER was implemented to become a formal component of the organizational management; and the “de-structuring” when the SER was gradually de-composed. This gradual de-structuring, as well as the initiation and implementation processes, was influenced by different institutionally infused rationalities and logics. These institutionally infused rationalities and logics, along with the specific organizational and contextual events, provided the resources, and created the space and opportunity, for the SER-related changes to occur.

The analysis offers theoretical insights to understand “how” (i.e. processes) and “why” (i.e. the conditions under which) SER gradually evolved, i.e. emerged, was constructed and developed during the phases of implementation and post-implementation. Furthermore, it is shown that SER is multifunctional in nature and unveils how and why these multiple functions change over time. Finally, the analysis provides a theoretical contribution by illuminating the role that different and contrasting ILs play in driving the adoption of organizational practices.