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The management of international business activities today necessarily includes the market communication of socio-political activity in emerging markets. Critique of market communication of socio-political activity in emerging markets varies from seeing it as something organisations say rather than do to suggesting existing market communication as embracing a simplistic view of communication and socio-political activity in emerging markets. In this chapter, communication and language as social practice is introduced as a possible way to explore market communication and socio-political activity in emerging markets as part of a more complex activity. Various perspectives from philosophical and sociological traditions are used in combination with marketing and management views on and empirical examples of communication and socio-political activity in emerging markets. This chapter illustrates how market communication may be seen as socio-political activity in emerging markets rather than the audit and report of it.

The question under the focus is how an MNC manages the increasing demands for corporate social responsibility when entering and expanding in a market. Based on business network, the study develops a view highlighting the four concepts of learning, commitment, legitimacy and trust for studying of socio-political relationships. The view is employed for analysis of the experiences of a Korean MNC's entry into the Chinese market. The case illustrates that the Korean MNC, Samsung Electronics, has behaved proactively by large commitment in several long- and short-term projects towards the society. Besides the theoretical view, the study contributes new knowledge on how the MNC's activities have enabled the firm to transfer learning, commitment, legitimacy and trust from socio-political relationships to business relationships. Further, it adds new knowledge on how corporate social responsibility plays a critical role in a successful entry, thereby building up a stable market position.

This paper aims to discuss the constitution of the Memorial of Resistance of São Paulo (MRSP) by adopting the ANTi-History approach, thereby providing greater transparency to the socio-political relations of multiple actors involved in the constitution of this place as a site of memory.

By adopting the principles of ANTi-History, the researchers focused on the socio-politics of different human and nonhuman actors to examine how this site of memory was constituted. The researchers sought to turn the process of constituting the MRSP more transparent, putting together one of the possible historical versions of this phenomenon. The data collected included oral and documental sources (interviews, videos, books, newspapers and websites).

The findings support the notion of history as a socially constructed narrative that emerges through associations of heterogeneous actors in a dynamic and continuous process of (re)configuration. Additionally, by exposing the power relations and negotiations manoeuvres used by multiple actors, it allowed the researchers to highlight the complexity of the Memorial’s history as a black box, contextualizing them in a period of intense social upheaval, re-democratization and transitional justice within Brazilian society.

The paper outlines the process of listing the DEOPS/SP building and the social mobilization movements during the 1980s and 1990s in Brazil, illustrating some of the results obtained from a more extensive research project that dealt with the MRSP’s constitution process. It offers an in-depth example of using the ANTi-History approach in Organizational Studies, allowing the researchers to remove the organization’s veil of apparent simplicity and to bring back to life voices and actors that have been erased, disguised and silenced by the dominant version of events.

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.

This paper seeks to explore the personal motives of subsidiary CEOs in taking initiatives in multinational corporations. In essence, the paper proposes that subsidiary initiative‐taking is strongly driven by the socio‐political positioning of subsidiary CEOs, which consists of specific “social aspects” that account for the basic orientation that subsidiary CEOs maintain in initiative‐taking, as well as “political aspects” that affect the ability of subsidiary CEOs to strategize and the ways they do it in the highly politicized processes of initiative‐taking.

The paper is based on four exploratory case studies undertaken in German subsidiaries in France. Applying a matched pair approach it compares two subsidiaries run by parent country nationals (PCNs) with two subsidiaries run by host country nationals (HCNs).

The paper demonstrates that the nationality of the subsidiary CEO alone does not explain subsidiary CEOs initiative‐taking behaviour. Other factors that make up the socio‐political positioning of subsidiary CEOs, such as career aspiration, career orientation, access to resources and specific skills to form internal and local coalitions, as well as “external” coalitions with the headquarters, need to be considered as well.

Given the qualitative research design and exploratory nature of the study there are limits to how far the findings can be generalized and applied elsewhere. More in‐depth research is needed to further develop the socio‐political perspective put forward here, especially to more closely analyze the interplay of actors' (CEOs') socio‐political positioning approaches within different contexts of subsidiary initiative‐taking.

The socio‐political perspective proposed here goes beyond and extends existing IRHM approaches, which narrowly focus on the overarching impact of nationality as a predictor of differences in the behaviour of subsidiary CEOs.

This paper aims to introduce the concept of institutional CSR and explains its antecedents, key characteristics and the potential implications arising from private firms providing public goods and services in developing economies.

The paper conceptualises institutional CSR using key insights from institutional theory along with legitimacy theory. It integrates the antecedents of CSR at the state and society levels and shows how firms may respond to these antecedents within an integrated institutional CSR framework.

The paper derives six distinct characteristics of institutional CSR and presents a conceptual model to inform how institutional CSR occurs in practice.

This paper brings to the attention the need for private firms that undertake institutional CSR activities to engage more closely with the state to ensure better societal outcomes.

The paper identifies the importance of resource coordination between the state and the firm for the efficient and effective provision of public goods and services. Without such coordination, moral hazard, resource imbalances and long-term viability concerns pose a risk for institutional CSR activities. It furthermore highlights important implications for societal governance.

The paper makes an important contribution to the literature on CSR practices within developing economies by conceptualising institutional CSR in providing public goods and services.

This chapter, against studies on success history, puts its attention on the firm's behaviour facing a critical socio-political problem. The specific question is how the relationship between business and socio-political actors in an emerging market under a scandal develops and how these actors manage such a situation. To reach this aim the study concerns with the Roche Scandal in Turkey and discusses the reactions of business and socio-political actors before and after the scandal, and further, how Roche subsequently managed these relationships. The theoretical framework for analysis of the Roche Turkey Scandal is constructed on relationship elements of trust, legitimacy and learning. The analysis provides some answers to the question of how Roche Turkey in the face of reactions given by the network actors managed the aftermath of the scandal and how the legitimacy loss was recovered by learning and adaptation. Conclusions enhance our knowledge on the behaviour of firms under critical condition.

The purpose of this paper is to develop understanding of the ways in which actors may resolve the contradictions between the social and private aspects of accounting. It pursues this aim by developing theory and knowledge of the roles of belonging in the politics of budgeting.

First, the paper develops a Latourian anthropological theory of belonging as a social practice. It shows how this makes a significant departure from actor-network Latourian studies, shifting the focus onto the emotional and cognitive capacities that may enable actors to work through and gradually overcome the socio-political conflicts that budgeting can provoke. Second, to identify such a practice, it studies a Spanish cooperative involved in collective responses to socio-economic and political instability.

The study finds that the emotional and cognitive work by which the actors assembled their collective practice of belonging was influenced by their interactions with budgets, and, in turn, mediated the way they dealt with budgets, giving rise to more enabling roles and effects. It traces, for example, how planning and cost reduction supported abilities to relate the actors’ problems and anxieties to broader social problems, fostering more positive emotions including empathy, enthusiasm, and respect.

The findings offer a complementary, but alternative view of the socio-political character of budgeting techniques to prior studies, which advances understanding of how actors could shape more enabling roles and effects.

Involving budgets in discussions and meetings can increase the scope for work that leads to greater freedom, social cohesion, and wellbeing.

This is the first study to demonstrate how belonging can be actively assembled through budgeting. It has particular value for understanding how alternative organizations can use accounting to avoid fragmenting and degeneration.