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This paper offers grounded insights on organization–government relationships, or the practice of public affairs, in Kenya.

In-depth interviews were conducted with senior Kenyan practitioners. Interviewees represent national corporations, multinational corporations with offices in Kenya, consulting agencies, parastatal intergovernmental organizations, national government and county governments.

Results suggest Kenyan public affairs is centered on relationship management, research and intelligence gathering, risk management and strategic communication. Second, while lobbying is a tactic, it is not synonymous with the broader scope of public affairs strategy. Third, the absence of educational training, a professional body to oversee the profession and the perception of public affairs as “bribery” are threats to the profession's growth.

Findings should not be interpreted to represent “Africa's public affairs industry,” rather a snapshot of the profession contextualized in Kenya.

Kenya needs a professional body to manage the public affairs profession at a national level. It also needs an established curriculum in its higher education environment. Lastly, as one of the fastest growing markets in the world, understanding the public policy environment will benefit multinational organizations looking to expand and operate in Kenya.

This study contributes diverse and inclusive insights on the practice of public affairs in a leading economic and political actor in sub-Saharan Africa. It also expands organization–public relationship theory to articulate engagement with governmental stakeholders.

This article reviews the practice of horenso (a mnemonic for hokoku/reporting, renraku/informing and sodan/consulting) – an under-documented Japanese communication methodology – at a Japanese-owned subsidiary in Thailand. It draws on a number of cultural theories to explore how horenso was influenced by the non-biculturality of individuals at a multinational corporation.

This article draws on first-hand interviews with staff of varying responsibilities at a multinational electronic components manufacturer, Spin-eTech (a pseudonym) to understand how horenso has been utilized and perceived at this Japanese-owned subsidiary in Thailand differently from its original form and traditional use at its headquarters in Japan. This was a targeted case that captured the real time communication difficulties at the workplace.

The themes of horenso's rationale, motivation, style of communication, use for problem solving, information reporting, relation to superiority and culture of communication emerged as prominent differences for how horenso was practiced at the Thai subsidiary.

Using the emic perspective of cultural understanding, insights are offered into the impact of non-biculturality within the Asia Pacific region on the practice of horenso to extant knowledge on the under-explored “eastern vs eastern” cultural differences.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the financial opaqueness established through offshore businesses and financial secrecy through the requirements of information exchanges, and their deadly combination for facilitating money-laundering activities and tax evasion. It also puts into light some key recommendations for a country like Nepal that has been struggling to put adequate efforts into understanding financial opacity and secrecy.

This paper navigates through global issues on layering through opaque corporate structures, and mechanisms required for information exchange so as to figure out solutions and challenges to address them by developing countries like Nepal, with specific actions pertaining to Nepal.

Understanding financial opacity and secrecy is a prerequisite to tackling financial crimes. While focusing on global solutions and inherent challenges regarding such issues, concerted efforts are required to capacitate a country on contextual matters.

This work is an original work with an analysis of a global issue in an interconnected world with solutions catered to the local contexts of Nepal.

This paper aims to apply a risk/uncertainty lens to corruption to explore how different types of corruption (formal vs informal) in a multinational enterprise’s (MNE) operating environment have different relationships to firm performance.

This paper uses a portfolio approach to measure the formal and informal corruption impacts of an MNE’s entire set of operating locations and test the hypotheses using both accounting- and market-based measures of performance on a sample of 648 firms.

This study hypothesizes and finds that because formal corruption represents risk, it is typically included in the a priori evaluations of trade-offs between market attractiveness and costs made by MNEs prior to market entry, higher formal corruption in the firm’s environment is positively related to its financial performance. Conversely, the uncertainty associated with the generally intangible and pervasive nature of informal corruption prevents similar, accurate cost consideration before entering the market, resulting in a negative relationship between higher levels of informal corruption and firm performance.

This study provides unique empirical support for the notion that MNEs can both gain and lose by investing in corrupt institutional environments, grounded in an understanding of the differences between risk and uncertainty, reinforcing the importance of considering the potential impacts of both the formal and informal dimensions of corruption in a firm’s operating environment.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the role and impact of state regulation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) spending on company actions and to examine whether making mandatory CSR encourages businesses to engage in social welfare projects. Additionally, the authors also investigate whether these CSR expenditures can enable India to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 2030.

CSR expenditure data from the government repository of 22,531 eligible companies in India were studied from FY2014–2015 to FY2019–2020. CSR spending is further classified according to development areas of Schedule VII of the Companies Act, 2013, and mapped with the SDGs to see which ones the corporations have prioritized.

CSR spending increased from INR 10,066 crore in 2014–2015 to INR 24,689 crore in 2019–2020. Companies have prioritized CSR expenditure on education, followed by health care and rural development. The number of companies spending more than the mandated expenditure increased by around 75% from 2014–2015 to 2019–2020. However, the “comply or explain” approach of the law has led to a major number of companies spending zero on CSR. Companies have generally concentrated on moving CSR funds to designated funds rather than using them for capacity development to instill social responsibility culture.

This study provides evidence of the impact of mandatory CSR expenditure on welfare activities and SDGs. Unlike previous research, the results of this study are based on CSR expenditures rather than voluntary CSR scores.

Coopetition is ubiquitous in the economy, but managing effectively this type of relationship between firms remains a challenge for many organizations. This paper investigates the coopetition within corporate groups and focus on factors that determine the simultaneous competition and cooperation between subsidiaries therein.

Drawing on a dataset of 121 corporate groups listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange (WSE), this paper theoretically advances and empirically validates the impact of 18 factors which determine the coopetition relationship.

This study's findings confirm the importance of an organizational design among external and internal drivers of intrafirm coopetition. However, the role of an environmental uncertainty as a driver of intrafirm coopetition is not proven. Furthermore, the paper finds that internal determinants explain the phenomenon of coopetition between subsidiaries within a corporate group more than determinants related to the environment.

The paper contributes to the coopetition theory by empirical identification of drivers of intrafirm coopetition and advances the corporate groups studies by exploring internal relationships (cooperation and competition) and the determinants therein.

This study uses a multi-level framework to systematically summarize and synthesize the empirical literature on determinants of sustainability disclosure.

This review study is based on 159 empirical studies examining determinants of sustainability disclosure and published in Charted Association of Business Schools (CABS) ranked journals over the last 40 years.

Companies are experiencing multi-level pressures for sustainability disclosure. Macro-level variables include political, legal, social-cultural and international pressures. Meso-level factors include customers' concerns, shareholders’ and investors' demands, industry-level variables and media coverage. Micro-level factors include the firm-level governance mechanisms, executives' reporting attitude and role of sustainability promoting institutions. Unlike in developed markets, companies in developing markets feel minimal public pressure for sustainability disclosure but rather are influenced by international NGOs, the media and international buyers. Multi-level and multitude of pressures for sustainability disclosure explains the widely observed differences between studies.

This research presents the most extensive systematic review of the extant sustainability disclosure literature and is the first study to group determinants into micro-, meso- and macro-level components using multi-level analysis.

For many global firms and corporate oligopolies, transfer pricing is essential. The transfer pricing literature as it is currently written is succinctly summarized in this study. The authors offer a thorough analysis of transfer pricing research in this study. This review sheds light on the top researchers, approaches, conclusions, theoretical and empirical gaps, and upcoming issues of transfer pricing research over the previous nine years through a methodical analysis of 29 research publications from the Scopus database (2014–2022). To help graduate students pursue further degrees in this area, such as a master's, thesis or PhD, this study will highlight five research issues.

This essay looks at five significant areas of tax avoidance and transfer pricing research. Some of these issues include determining the impact of transfer pricing regulations on various types of multinational corporations, assessing the effectiveness of transfer pricing regulations in preventing tax evasion, examining various policy options and determining the impact of transfer pricing on other economic outcomes using a systematic literature review.

The findings of this review demonstrate the need for transfer pricing research to look more closely at transfer pricing as a tool for business in addition to compliance and tax management.

This analysis concludes with future directions for transfer pricing research.

Journal of Knowledge Management (JKM) is the foremost academic source of knowledge management research. Therefore, to understand the intellectual structure of knowledge management research, this study aims to examine the thematic patterns and evolution of research in JKM.

Using bibliographic coupling analysis, this study analyzes and maps the intellectual structure of the research published in JKM from 1977 to 2021. It also presents the trends among methodological choices of JKM authors. The study also explores the major components of JKM’s impact, wherein a negative binomial regression analysis is used to uncover the major factors influencing the journal’s citations.

The findings suggest that the intellectual structure of JKM broadly consists of four major themes: antecedents and consequences of knowledge management, innovation and knowledge management, complexities in knowledge management and firm performance, and knowledge sharing in knowledge management. The findings also reveal the drivers of citations for JKM through the universalism (article order, open access), social constructivism (European and FT100 institution affiliation, references, funding) and presentation (tables, models, appendices, article age) perspectives.

This inclusive overview of JKM will provide useful insights for its editorial board, readers and scholars to chart the ways forward for JKM and the future of knowledge management.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this study is the first of its kind to identify the factors that contribute to JKM's impact from a citation perspective.

This paper aims to outline the current and future influence of digitalization on the corporate parenting styles (CPSs) of multinational corporations (MNCs).

The authors used conceptual modeling in this study.

The authors identified five types of CPSs (Hypnos, Cronus, Rhea, Zeus and Athena). The overall impact of digitalization on CPSs is related to new, formidable opportunities for decreasing costs and increasing the efficiency of the intra-corporate transfer of knowledge and talent. Furthermore, digitalization leads to greater tightness in subsidiaries’ performance targets and greater intensity of control over subsidiaries’ activities, lower degrees of subsidiary autonomy and lower level of trust between the corporate headquarters and subsidiary managers. These effects endanger the existence of two CPSs (Hypnos and Athena) and significant changes for the other three CPSs.

Digitalization may lead to more homogeneous corporations, with the lower variety of CPSs and the greater centralization of decision-making in corporate and regional headquarters and stronger control on operations and performance of subsidiaries. Increased opportunities of a horizontal value transfer (knowledge) within the corporation will present an additional competitive advantage of subsidiaries of MNCs. The increased ability and willingness of corporate and regional headquarters of value appropriation from subsidiaries in different forms (profit, revenues, knowledge and talent) will force subsidiaries to use that additional competitive advantage to become more aggressive competitors in local and global markets.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt in the academic literature to predict the mutation of CPSs of MNCs under the impact of digitalization.