Search results

The acronym and neologism “VUCA” is employed by management and some scholars to denote the unpredictability of the modern world and its impact on business. The VUCA approach suggests that a rational firm’s response should be to: protect against volatility by engineering-in redundancy and slack, gather information to reduce uncertainty, develop expertise to make complexity computable, and learn heuristically to reduce ambiguity. We combine a critical perspective on the VUCA approach with the global factory model, popularly used to describe the flexibility sought by advanced economy multinational enterprises (MNEs) within the global value chain. Both VUCA and the global factory would seem to account less well for the expansion of emerging multinational enterprise (EMNEs) abroad, particularly the preference for equity-based control and inflexibility when seeking strategic assets. Also, both approaches fail to incorporate behavioral principles toward risk. Using International Business theory, we propose a research agenda that may help to make VUCA more tractable, the global factory more useful, and the internationalization of EMNEs more comprehensible.

This paper aims to seek to demonstrate that a non-scientific approach to policy design causes policymakers to persist in the development and use of conventional and inefficient “top-down” policies. This paper takes the case of the design of official pro-internationalization policy, intended to promote internationalization through outward investment, to reveal inadequacies and inefficiencies in policy design. Through an analysis of the merits of introducing a “bottom-up” approach, it also aims to show how policy redesign would better yield the desired specific and effective impacts sought by policymakers.

A framework was developed, comprising a set of real policy measures, two indexes to quantify the alignment between government policies and firms’ strategies and a regression model to test the impact of the misalignment on firm performance. This framework uses primary empirical data.

The results are obtained through an item-by-item comparison between use and revealed, or perceived, importance of each type of public support and then, through the indexes, which rank the different types of incentives according to their importance and use. Analysis of these suggests that some measures could be more efficient, and that firms with higher levels of foreign market commitment tend to be more aligned with public policy, and benefit from it most, while those firms with a lower degree of internationalization are the least well served by policy support measures.

These results identify systematic weaknesses in policy design and point to the reasons for these weaknesses. The findings suggest that governments tend to craft “top-down” policy, based on high-level presumptions about the nature of all firms’ strategies towards internationalization and international expansion. We propose that these presumptions result from flawed evaluations of policy effectiveness overly influenced by existing foreign investors, to the detriment of the true and intended strategies of the actual target group of the least internationalized firms. It is concluded that to improve both the efficiency and the effectiveness of policy actions, the traditional “top-down” intervention paradigm of policy-making should be complemented by policy designed from the “bottom-up”, making use of reliable information about all firms’ strategies, and taking care to better identify natural target groups of firms according to their existing or potential resources and capabilities.

This paper explores the impact of China’s growing prominence in global and regional foreign direct investment (FDI) fl ows on the Southeast Asian countries as investment locations. Providing internal social and economic cohesion is maintained, China is likely to exert a greater pull on regional FDI after WTO accession. To benefit from China’s success, the Southeast Asian countries will need to replace deteriorating individual locational advantages relative to China with a superior regional one. The ASEAN Free Trade Agreement or the Asian Investment Area or both are likely to be important policy solutions.

The improvement in performance of Chinese domestically owned industry in 1995 and 2001 is strongly linked to inward foreign direct investment. Rising foreign presence contributes towards the narrowing of the performance gap between foreign and locally owned enterprises in China. While investment by overseas Chinese firms benefits overall Chinese industry throughout, developed country FDI only generated a positive impact in 2001. Inward FDI by both investor groups benefits Chinese state owned enterprises, but not until 2001 for collectively owned Chinese firms. The results support the use of inward FDI as a development policy tool, in conjunction with economic liberalization.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how historical materialities might play a contemporary role in legitimation processes through the memorialization of history and its reproduction in the here-and-now of organizations and organizing.

The authors briefly review the existing management and organization studies (MOS) literature on legitimacy, space and history; engage with the work of Merleau-Ponty to explore how organizational legitimacy is managed in time and space; and use the case of two Parisian universities to illustrate the main arguments of the paper.

The paper develops a history-based phenomenological perspective on legitimation processes constitutive of four possibilities identified by means of chiasms: heterotopic spatial legacy, thin spatial legacy, institutionalized spatial legacy and organizational spatial legacy.

The authors discuss the implications of this research for the neo-institutional literature on organizational legitimacy, research on organizational space and the field of management history.

This paper takes inspiration from the work of Merleau-Ponty on chiasms to conceptualize how the temporal layers of space and place that organizations inhabit and inherit (which we call “spatial legacies”), in the process of legitimation, evoke a sensible tenor.

That life is inundated with constant push–pull between contradictory demands is indisputable. Different traditions and worldviews inform individuals’ approaches to dealing with the ensuing paradoxes. However, the literature has focused on Western and Eastern philosophies and traditions, while disregarding others such as the Afrocentric. In this chapter, the authors explore Ubuntu, an Afrocentric tradition, as an alternative philosophical underpinning that can inform the nature of paradoxes. Doing so enriches the understanding, problematizing and managing of paradoxes. Central to Ubuntu is otherness: the emphasis on the need of the other that implies focusing on the other; in doing so, the polarities of diverse needs are accommodated, striving for an ultimate goal of harmony. Moreover, the authors elaborate on the hybrid space where collapsing the East–West and the West and non-west dualism allow engagement with a multiplicity of worldviews. In so doing, the authors expand paradox theorizing beyond the orthodoxy of East and West antinomies and challenge the basic assumption in paradox management by asking the question: what if we start from others’ demands?

Any historical survey of the way in which consumers have organized themselves into associations for their own mutual benefit and protection should really begin with the role played by the consumer co‐operative movement. But, as Jeremy Mitchell (former Head of Information at Consumers' Association and now Director of the Consumer Affairs Division at the Office of Fair Trading) has pointed out, the co‐operative movement was not really a consumer association at all: ‘The fact that the consumer, in a co‐operative society, is the formal owner of the means of distribution seems to have little significance in practical terms. By analogy, it can be compared with the consumer's formal ownership of the means of production in a nationalized industry, or the individual shareholder's formal ownership of a joint‐stock company.’

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) in the agri-food sector are continuously transforming their global value chains (GVCs) to address sustainable development challenges of food security (SDG2) and climate change (SDG13). However, the central role of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in (re)creating GVCs across multilevel stakeholders through innovative approaches to solve sustainability challenges remains under investigated. This explorative study investigates how international NGOs influence the transformation of large-scale industrial animal agriculture to a more sustainable (cell-based) agri-food GVC. The authors conducted a case study on the Good Food Institute (GFI), an international NGO, that has been an active player in the transition to alternative sources of protein to solve animal-based agriculture sustainability issues. The results show that an international NGO can contribute to the transition to a more sustainable GVC and can enhance the GVC’s innovation capabilities.