Organizational neuroscience—a novel scholarly domain using neuroscience to inform management and organizational research, and vice versa—is flourishing. Still missing, however, is a comprehensive coverage of organizational neuroscience as a self-standing scientific field. A foundational account of the potential that neuroscience holds to advance management and organizational research is currently a gap. The gap can be addressed with a review of the main methods, systematizing the existing scholarly literature in the field including entrepreneurship, strategic management, and organizational behavior, among others.
201-220 of 282 Results
Article
Organizational Neuroscience
Sebastiano Massaro and Dorotea Baljević
Article
Paradox Theory and Corporate Governance: A Systems Perspective
Timothy J. Hargrave
Stakeholder-shareholder contradictions experienced by managers are embedded in complex corporate governance systems that are composed of firm-level corporate governance bundles as well as higher-level institutional arrangements. This is known as the paradox perspective. This relationship is also knotted with other contradictions. To effectively manage stakeholder-shareholder contradictions, boards should seek to create and maintain a balance of power between stakeholders’ and shareholders’ interests within the totality of the corporate governance system, and not just within the governance bundle. To do so, they must design firm-level governance bundles to complement existing institutional arrangements. Because stakeholder-shareholder contradictions are highly complex, boards should govern them by establishing “learning spiral” processes in which they experiment and use trial-and-error learning to progressively adjust the governance bundle. While learning spiral processes will tend to involve learning by testing and produce incremental changes in governance bundles, exogenous shocks and changes to the distribution of power within the board can result in learning by discovery and more significant changes in governance arrangements. Firm-level mechanisms that provide managers discretion while also holding them accountable for achieving particular outcomes are more likely to stimulate learning spirals than are policies that prescribe particular structures, processes, or practices. So, too, government policies that combine discretion with accountability will be more effective than more prescriptive policies. Finally, paradox research suggests that boards under pressure to prioritize one pole of the contradiction (either stakeholders’ or shareholders’ interests) over the other rather than maintaining a continuous balance between the two poles can do so—as long as they employ deliberative spaces to engage in learning spiral processes that restore dynamic equilibrium in the long term.
Article
Pathways in Stakeholder Research
Ronald K. Mitchell, Bradley R. Agle, and J. Robert Mitchell
Stakeholder-focused research seeks to explain relationships among firms and stakeholders, using approaches that predominantly follow normative, instrumental, or descriptive pathways. Following circulation of the 1963 Stanford Memo and the 1984 publication of Freeman, the stakeholder perspective has become a sizable area of research in diverse fields, with growing influence in the business community as indicated in 2019 by the commitment of the US Business Roundtable to stakeholder principles. Still, the tendency to offer stakeholder theory as a replacement for neoclassical theories of the firm somewhat limits its adoption. An approach more likely to advance the trend toward an increasing stakeholder orientation is one of theory collaboration, in which researchers explore how self-interested action in the market system can be tempered by others-interested action. To this aim, the three stakeholder research pathways might be extended, as follows: (a) adding a moral and ethical leadership component to normative stakeholder theory research to move from a philosophy-centric literature toward one that better explains the how and why of normatively based actions toward stakeholders; (b) adopting a stakeholder-work-focused approach to instrumental stakeholder theory research to afford it the benefits of moral neutrality; and (c) returning the focus of descriptive stakeholder theory research to stakeholders as “natural persons,” as compared to corporations as “juristic persons.” With these extensions, scholars can encourage the ongoing reorientation in society toward the stakeholders of firms.
Article
Pay Transparency: Conceptualization and Implications for Employees, Employers, and Society as a Whole
Peter A. Bamberger
Pay transparency refers to the degree to which pay communication policies and practices governing employee pay knowledge facilitate or restrict the sharing of pay-related information. While relatively few enterprises have adopted transparent pay-communication practices, a variety of institutional factors, such as government regulations and social norms, are driving employers to provide their employees with greater pay knowledge. Consensus has emerged around the existence of three main dimensions or forms of pay transparency, namely pay-outcome transparency, pay-process transparency, and pay-communication transparency. Research findings indicate that pay-outcome transparency, which relates to the degree to which pay rate information is disclosed by the employer, has both beneficial and problematic consequences, depending on the outcome. For example, while pay-outcome transparency has been consistently found to be associated with enhanced individual task performance and reduced gender-based pay discrepancies, it has also been associated with higher levels of envy, diminished helping, heightened levels of counterproductive work behavior, and pay compression (which could elicit negative sorting effects). In contrast, pay-process transparency, which relates to the degree to which employees are informed about the parameters underlying reward-related decisions, has been found to have largely beneficial consequences and few unintended negative consequences. Finally, while it is least studied, pay-communication transparency, capturing the degree to which restrictions are placed on employees’ ability to share pay knowledge with others, is positively associated with employee perceptions of employer fairness and trustworthiness and can have significant implications for employee retention.
Article
Person–Environment Fit: Theoretical Perspectives, Conceptualizations, and Outcomes
Rein De Cooman and Wouter Vleugels
The idea of person–environment (PE) fit builds upon interactional psychology, which suggests that the interplay between personal and environmental attributes is the primary driver of human behavior. The “environment” in PE fit research can take many different forms, with organizational environments being one of the most important settings with which people may fit or misfit. Henceforth, PE fit is defined as the compatibility that occurs when individuals match the characteristics of the work environment they inhabit. The notion that individuals with personal needs, values, goals, abilities, and personalities and organizational environments with distinctive demands, supplies, values, and cultures are differentially compatible and that “fitting in” is an evolving process that triggers behavioral, cognitive, and affective responses has been well accepted since PE fit was introduced as an independent theory in the mid-1970s. Presently, the PE fit idea has established itself as a firm research framework and has surfaced in many different literatures, ranging from applied and vocational psychology to human resource management, resulting in a plethora of theories that cover many different views on, and various conceptualizations of, PE fit. From an individual (i.e., employee) perspective, fit theories suggest that fit is a sought-after and rewarding experience in and of itself, especially when multiple types of fit (e.g., fit with the job and with the organization) co-occur. However, from a team, organizational, and societal perspective, the advantages of high levels of fit must be weighed against its potential costs, including favoritism, conformity, and homogeneity, which may eventually result in organizational inertia and the reproduction of inequality.
Article
Perspectives on Help-Receiving in the Workplace: Review and Recommendations
Victoria S. Scotney, Cavan V. Bonner, and Louis Tay
Helping behaviors and exchanges have long been studied in organizational research. However, it has generally kept a spotlight on the helper and the promotion of helping behaviors rather than help-receiving. While giving help in the workplace is generally construed as a desirable employee behavior (e.g., organizational citizenship behaviors [OCB]), help-receiving in the workplace can be experienced positively and/or negatively. Nevertheless, receiving help is vital to the safety, performance, and well-being of employees. In conceptualizing help received, researchers should consider questions related to the form, initiator, and source of help, as well as the distinction between the behavior and outcomes of help. Careful consideration of these questions can help increase the precision and contribution of future research and lead to an understanding of the multidimensional nature of help-receiving in the workplace. Many determinants and consequences of help-receiving in the workplace have had mixed results across studies, but differences in the conceptualization and operationalization of help-received can help explain differential relationships to other variables. Understanding key determinants and consequences of help-receiving can move scholarly discussion toward a holistic view of considering both help-giving and help-receiving. Ultimately, helping in the workplace is an interactional phenomenon; to understand it, we need a deeper understanding of recipient experiences. Implications for future organizational research include the need for precise conceptualizations of the form, initiation, source, and outcomes of help, and the need for examining particular helping episodes in detail, as well as the cumulative effects of seeking and receiving help over long periods of time.
Article
Platformizing Organizations: A Synthesis of the Literature
Pankaj Setia, Franck Soh, and Kailing Deng
Organizations are widely building digital platforms to transform operations. Digital platforms represent a new way of organizing, as they leverage technology to interconnect providers and consumers. Using digital technologies, organizations are platformizing operations, as they open their rigid and closed boundaries by interconnecting providers and consumers through advanced application programming interfaces (APIs). Early research examined platformized development of technology products, with software development companies—such as Mozilla Foundation—leading the way. However, contemporary organizations are platformizing nontechnology offerings (e.g., ride-sharing or food delivery). With growing interest in platforms, the basic tenets underlying platformization are still not clear. This article synthesizes previous literature examining platforms, with the aim of examining what platformization is and how and why organizations platformize.
Article
Pride in Organizations
Yuen Lam Wu, Prisca Brosi, and Jason D. Shaw
Pride is a self-conscious emotion evoked when individuals perceive themselves attaining an outcome that is congruent with their goals and being responsible for achieving a socially valued outcome. The experience of pride can influence one’s own behaviors but the accompanying expressions can also elicit behavioral changes in observers. Although pride is a positive emotion and provides individuals with psychological rewards and pleasant feelings, accumulated empirical findings show a broad range of consequences in response to both the experience and expression of pride in organizations. In attempts to explain the various outcomes, pride researchers have conceptualized the construct in different ways. Some researchers examine pride as a unified emotion that arises from the attainment of positive outcomes; others adopt a multifaceted view to explain its divergent consequences. The multifaceted view suggests that pride can be authentic or hubristic depending on whether the achievement is assumed to arise from one’s efforts or abilities, and promotive or preventive depending on whether the achievement is assumed to result from promotion-related eagerness or prevention-related vigilance. Pride may also be differentiated into specific facets based on whether it is elicited by the achievement of performance or moral standards. Furthermore, as the individual self is embedded in social contexts, pride can arise from group belongingness. Thus, the conceptualization of pride can extend beyond the individual level to cover group and organizational pride. This article concludes that pride is an important source of motivation for both individuals who experience it and those who express it in organizations. Yet, what outcomes or behaviors result depends crucially on the source of pride because pride leads individuals to repeat behaviors attributed as the original cause of the positive feeling. Although pride is commonly engendered by achievements and socially desirable outcomes, it can also arise from immoral behaviors when those behaviors are assumed to benefit the organization. The outcomes of pride experience and expression are also contingent on individual and contextual boundary conditions.
Article
Privatization of State-Owned Enterprises
David Parker
Theoretical developments in economics, alongside evidence that state-owned enterprises were often inefficient and unresponsive to consumers, led to a substantial program of privatizations from the 1980s. Privatization can take a number of forms, from the outright sale of state-owned assets to private investors to forms of public-private partnership, such as contracting out and franchising of public services. Privatization was promoted in both developed and developing countries, and large-scale privatizations occurred in Europe, Latin America, China, and the former communist economies of Central and Eastern Europe, in particular. Privatization revenues rose substantially from the late 1980s internationally. Taking the years 1988 to 2016, revenues from sales are estimated to have been around $3,634bn. In terms of main sectors of the economy affected, privatizations have particularly occurred in telecommunications, transport and logistics (mainly railways, airlines, and airports), other utility businesses (especially energy companies), and finance. Numerous empirical studies suggest that the performance of the privatized businesses and services has been mixed. While privatization has led to some impressive economic gains, in a number of countries, wider governance issues relating to political and legal systems have led to disappointing outcomes. Privatization has not always led to the removal of state interference in the management of businesses and services. Corruption and cronyism have blighted a number of privatizations. State sell-offs have led to income and wealth redistribution with gainers and losers from the process. Some privatizations have led to spectacular capital gains for investors. The impact of privatization on employment and working conditions remains unclear.
There are a number of issues that deserve further investigation, namely the consequences of privatization for technological change and innovation, competition policy, and income and wealth distribution. A further subject for investigation is how the effective and efficient management of state-owned enterprises can be best achieved. The boundary between the private and public sectors remains fluid, with a number of enterprises returning to state ownership as political and economic conditions change.
Article
Product and Innovation Portfolio Management
Vinícius Chagas Brasil and J.P. Eggers
In competitive strategy, firms manage two primary (non-financial) portfolios—the product portfolio and the innovation portfolio. Portfolio management involves resource allocation to balance the important tradeoff of risk reduction and upside maximization, with important decisions around the evaluation, prioritization and selection of products and innovation projects. These two portfolios are interdependent in ways that create reinforcing dynamics—the innovation portfolio is the array of potential future products, while the product portfolio both informs innovation strategy and provides inputs to future innovation efforts. Additionally, portfolio management processes operate at two levels, which is reflected in the literature's structure. The first is a micro lens which focuses on management frameworks to boost portfolio performance and success through project-level selection tools. This research has its roots in financial portfolio management, relates closely to research on new product development and marketing product management, and explores the effects of portfolio management decisions on other organizational functions (e.g., operations). The second lens is a macro lens on portfolio management research, which considers the portfolio as a whole and integrates key organizational and competitive concepts such as entry timing, portfolio management resource allocation regimes (e.g., real options reasoning), organizational experience, and the culling of products and projects. This literature aims to set portfolio management as higher level organizational decision-making capability that embodies the growth strategy of the organization. The organizational ability to manage both the product and innovation portfolios connects portfolio management to key strategic organizational capabilities, including ambidexterity and dynamic capabilities, and operationalizes strategic flexibility. We therefore view portfolio management as a source of competitive advantage that supports organizational renewal.
Article
Professions from a Gendered Perspective
Isabel Boni-Le Goff and Nicky Le Feuvre
Professions or professional occupations have been studied through a large number of empirical and theoretical lenses over the last decades: as potential substitutes for organizations and markets, as protected labor markets, and as the site of the subjective experiences and socialization processes of their members. Combining a sociological and a gender perspective, a growing number of studies have shed new light on the growth and dynamics of professional occupations since the mid-20th century. They show how the massive entry of women into the upper reaches of Western labor markets has played a major role in the expansion and reconfiguration of the professions. However, by studying the barriers to women’s access to once exclusively masculine environments, scholars tend to show that the feminization processes coexist with persistent inequalities in income, promotion opportunities, career patterns, and access to leadership positions, popularized by the metaphor of the “glass ceiling” effect.
These contradicting trends—numerical feminization and the persistence of gender inequalities—have inspired a large range of empirical research projects and conceptual innovations. This article distinguishes three ways of framing the gendered dynamics of professional and managerial occupations.
A first way of framing the issue adopts a resolutely structural perspective, presenting feminization as a process that ultimately leads to the crystallization of traditional gender inequalities, thus confronting women with the risk of deprofessionalization or dequalification. Some of these studies observe variations in the rhythms and patterns of feminization across occupations. They reveal complex processes whereby the overall increase in women’s education levels comes with the persistence of gender-differentiated choices of study and occupation. Rhythms and patterns of feminization may also differ within a given occupation, from one specialty to another and from one type of organization to another, depending on the internal hierarchy of the occupation. Very significant gaps may also be observed according to employment status: wage labor or self-employment, for example.
A second way of framing the question adopts an organizational-level perspective; showing, for example, that a “glass ceiling” systematically hampers women’s career progression in all sectors of the labor market. These studies explore the combination of direct and indirect discriminatory processes—from the persistence of “old boys’ networks” to the legitimation of certain gendered body images of professionalism—within different organizational and professional contexts. In the face of such resistance, women’s career progression is particularly slow and arduous, both due to the prevailing symbolic norms of leadership models and due to the collective strategies of closure by male professionals at the organizational level.
Finally, a third way of framing the issue adopts a more holistic perspective, with a stronger focus on the agency of women within the occupational context and on the societal implications of changes to the gender composition of the professions. These studies insist on the potential or real changes that women may bring to the professional ethos and to the occupation-specific “rules of the game” in previously male-dominated bastions. Interested in the undoing of conventional norms of masculinity and fathering as well as of femininity and mothering, this third perspective explores a potential shift to more egalitarian gender arrangements at the organizational, interpersonal, and societal levels.
Article
The Progress and Promise of Management Education Research
George Hrivnak
Management education (ME) is a research field in which scholars employ a plurality of theoretical and methodological approaches to critically examine the people, practices, processes and institutions engaged in facilitating and improving learning and development of current and aspiring managers in a variety of contexts. Although research in the field has grown considerably in terms of both quantity and quality, ME scholars have yet to establish consensus regarding a strong theoretical foundation for their work. This foundation is important to both enable progress through cumulative scholarship and to provide directions for future research.
This future research should focus on how students learn, as well as effective approaches to facilitating and assessing student learning. Strengthening the theoretical basis and research methods used in this research will enable evidence-based practice and enhance the legitimacy of this important field.
Article
Psychic Distance
Lars Håkanson
The term “psychic distance” has its origin in analyses of international trade patterns. However, it came to have major impact primarily in international business research, denoting the intangible costs associated with the collection, analysis, and interpretation of information about foreign markets, influencing geographical patterns and entry modes in the internationalization process of the firm. “Psychic distance” initially designated individual perceptions, but later operationalizations typically defined it as a country-level characteristic, most frequently in form of the so-called Kogut–Singh index of cultural distance based on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. The concept’s origin and subsequent evolution created ambiguities and conundrums that survive to this day. These include the question whether to conceive and measure psychic distance at an individual-level or a country-level construct, the intriguing possibility that individuals may, perhaps systematically, under- or overestimate psychic distances, and how to determine empirically the existence and source of such misperceptions. Others emanate from the use of the metaphor of “distance,” which misleadingly suggests that psychic distances have the same characteristics as geographic distances, such as, for example, symmetry and stability. Recent research has resolved some of these issues; others are in need of further study.
Article
Qualitative Comparative Analysis in Business and Management Research
Johannes Meuer and Peer C. Fiss
During the last decade, qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) has become an increasingly popular research approach in the management and business literature. As an approach, QCA consists of both a set of analytical techniques and a conceptual perspective, and the origins of QCA as an analytical technique lie outside the management and business literature. In the 1980s, Charles Ragin, a sociologist and political scientist, developed a systematic, comparative methodology as an alternative to qualitative, case-oriented approaches and to quantitative, variable-oriented approaches. Whereas the analytical technique of QCA was developed outside the management literature, the conceptual perspective underlying QCA has a long history in the management literature, in particular in the form of contingency and configurational theory that have played an important role in management theories since the late 1960s.
Until the 2000s, management researchers only sporadically used QCA as an analytical technique. Between 2007 and 2008, a series of seminal articles in leading management journals laid the conceptual, methodological, and empirical foundations for QCA as a promising research approach in business and management. These articles led to a “first” wave of QCA research in management. During the first wave—occurring between approximately 2008 and 2014—researchers successfully published QCA-based studies in leading management journals and triggered important methodological debates, ultimately leading to a revival of the configurational perspective in the management literature.
Following the first wave, a “second” wave—between 2014 and 2018—saw a rapid increase in QCA publications across several subfields in management research, the development of methodological applications of QCA, and an expansion of scholarly debates around the nature, opportunities, and future of QCA as a research approach. The second wave of QCA research in business and management concluded with researchers’ taking stock of the plethora of empirical studies using QCA for identifying best practice guidelines and advocating for the rise of a “neo-configurational” perspective, a perspective drawing on set-theoretic logic, causal complexity, and counterfactual analysis.
Nowadays, QCA is an established approach in some research areas (e.g., organization theory, strategic management) and is diffusing into several adjacent areas (e.g., entrepreneurship, marketing, and accounting), a situation that promises new opportunities for advancing the analytical technique of QCA as well as configurational thinking and theorizing in the business and management literature. To advance the analytical foundations of QCA, researchers may, for example, advance robustness tests for QCA or focus on issues of endogeneity and omitted variables in QCA. To advance the conceptual foundations of QCA, researchers may, for example, clarify the links between configurational theory and related theoretical perspectives, such as systems theory or complexity theory, or develop theories on the temporal dynamics of configurations and configurational change. Ultimately, after a decade of growing use and interest in QCA and given the unique strengths of this approach for addressing questions relevant to management research, QCA will continue to influence research in business and management.
Article
Qualitative Designs and Methodologies for Business, Management, and Organizational Research
Robert P. Gephart and Rohny Saylors
Qualitative research designs provide future-oriented plans for undertaking research. Designs should describe how to effectively address and answer a specific research question using qualitative data and qualitative analysis techniques. Designs connect research objectives to observations, data, methods, interpretations, and research outcomes. Qualitative research designs focus initially on collecting data to provide a naturalistic view of social phenomena and understand the meaning the social world holds from the point of view of social actors in real settings. The outcomes of qualitative research designs are situated narratives of peoples’ activities in real settings, reasoned explanations of behavior, discoveries of new phenomena, and creating and testing of theories.
A three-level framework can be used to describe the layers of qualitative research design and conceptualize its multifaceted nature. Note, however, that qualitative research is a flexible and not fixed process, unlike conventional positivist research designs that are unchanged after data collection commences. Flexibility provides qualitative research with the capacity to alter foci during the research process and make new and emerging discoveries.
The first or methods layer of the research design process uses social science methods to rigorously describe organizational phenomena and provide evidence that is useful for explaining phenomena and developing theory. Description is done using empirical research methods for data collection including case studies, interviews, participant observation, ethnography, and collection of texts, records, and documents.
The second or methodological layer of research design offers three formal logical strategies to analyze data and address research questions: (a) induction to answer descriptive “what” questions; (b) deduction and hypothesis testing to address theory oriented “why” questions; and (c) abduction to understand questions about what, how, and why phenomena occur.
The third or social science paradigm layer of research design is formed by broad social science traditions and approaches that reflect distinct theoretical epistemologies—theories of knowledge—and diverse empirical research practices. These perspectives include positivism, interpretive induction, and interpretive abduction (interpretive science). There are also scholarly research perspectives that reflect on and challenge or seek to change management thinking and practice, rather than producing rigorous empirical research or evidence based findings. These perspectives include critical research, postmodern research, and organization development.
Three additional issues are important to future qualitative research designs. First, there is renewed interest in the value of covert research undertaken without the informed consent of participants. Second, there is an ongoing discussion of the best style to use for reporting qualitative research. Third, there are new ways to integrate qualitative and quantitative data. These are needed to better address the interplay of qualitative and quantitative phenomena that are both found in everyday discourse, a phenomenon that has been overlooked.
Article
Qualitative Research: Foundations, Approaches, and Practices
Thomas Greckhamer and Sebnem Cilesiz
Qualitative research is an umbrella term that is typically used in contrast to quantitative research and captures research approaches that predominantly rely on collecting and analyzing qualitative data (i.e., data in the form of words, still or moving images, and artifacts). Qualitative research encompasses a wide range of research approaches with different philosophical and theoretical foundations and empirical procedures. Different assumptions about reality and knowledge underlying these diverse approaches guide researchers with respect to epistemological and methodological questions and inform their choices regarding research questions, data collection, data analysis, and the writing of research accounts. While at present a few dominant approaches are commonly used by researchers, a rich repertoire of qualitative approaches is available to management researchers that has the potential to facilitate deeper and broader insights into management phenomena.
Article
Recontextualization in International Business
Mary Yoko Brannen
Recontextualization in international business (IB) refers to the transformation of meaning of firm offerings (technologies, work practices, products, etc.) as they are uprooted from one context and transplanted into another. The question of whether transferred firm assets will fit into receiving contexts abroad is one of the biggest concerns of multinational enterprises in the internationalization process. Whether a firm internationalizes by means of an international joint- venture, merger or acquisition, or a wholly owned subsidiary, this potential lack of strategic fit of firm assets is considered a major contributor to a firm’s liability of foreignness and ultimate lack of success abroad. As such, much research has been conducted in the field of IB to shed light on understanding the causes, implications, and recommendations for managing strategic fit in the internationalization process.
Most IB research has focused on the tangible, explicit, and codifiable aspects of lack of fit, such as differences in technology, metrics, and labor regulations, which are relatively easy to discern. Often overlooked are the more subtle, less visible, tacit differences between sending and receiving contexts that affect how firm offerings are understood in the new organizational environments. Organizational contexts are embedded in multiple and intersecting cultural environments, including the organizational culture internal to the firm and the larger, societal culture external to the firm, as well as the smaller, more particular work group environments within a firm characterized by disparate functional or expert practices. Every cultural environment is embedded with its own meaning system involving distinct work-related assumptions, behaviors, and norms. Given this, unforeseen misalignments easily occur between the sender and receiver contexts stemming from disparities or divergences in meaning systems attributed to the transferred firm offerings, which can significantly affect a firm’s global strategic success. Such are the misalignments that stem from recontextualization. Firm offerings go through a preliminary round of recipient cultural sense-making in which they are assimilated into pre-existing meanings. Then, as they are implemented, acted on, and interacted with, they continue to undergo recontextualization. Language is the vehicle by which firm offerings are transferred (with the rare exception of digital code or numerical formulas), and through which sense-making is processed by individuals in the receiving contexts, thus making semantic fit a necessary complement to strategic fit in elucidating the process of recontextualization.
Research in a variety of industries—from highly culturally sensitive ones such as entertainment, to seemingly culture-free, automated industrial contexts such as automotive—has shown that recontextualization will always happen no matter what the industry. This is because sending and receiving contexts can never be the same, so firm offerings will always undergo a certain amount of recontextualization to adjust to the new operating environment. Recontextualization can have positive or negative effects on a firm’s internationalization. Positive recontextualization, if the process is properly understood, can become a source of ongoing organizational learning and, in turn, become a valuable source of competitive advantage. Negative recontextualization, on the other hand, can result in lost opportunities for site-specific learning and strategic realignment, and, in the most severe cases, may seriously hinder transnational transfer and global integration efforts. Yet planning for and monitoring recontextualization are not simple matters. In most cases, managers are initially unaware of all but the most obvious sources of recontextualization, such as differences in language, metrics, organizational structure, or shop-floor layout. However, much of recontextualization happens in situ and cannot be planned for. At best, managers can opine where recontextualization might occur by utilizing industry-specific, cross-cultural consultants or internal boundary-spanners such as bilingual or bicultural employees. In some fortunate cases, managers may become aware of recontextualization early on in transfer efforts as they are confronted with organizational barriers to implementation such as significant differences in industrial and supplier relations. But, for the most part, recontextualization goes unrecognized until productivity plummets and financial goals go unmet without readily identifiable economic or other such quantifiable causes.
Article
Reflection and Intercultural Competence Development
Luciara Nardon
Increasing levels of cultural diversity requires a system of higher education structured to facilitate intercultural learning and develop individuals who are prepared to work in a culturally diverse environment, and can make decisions and manage people cognizant of cultural differences. Three main approaches to facilitate intercultural learning in the classroom have emerged: transfer of cultural knowledge, cultural experiences, and reflection on experience. Each of these approaches has a role to play at different stages of intercultural development. Three stages of intercultural development are proposed: (1) Monocultural stage, referring to a stage in which individuals are unaware of cultural differences; (2) Cross-cultural stage, in which individuals recognize and understand cultural differences but lack behavioral skills to deal with them; and (3) Intercultural stage, in which individuals can draw on a repertoire of behaviors to influence and shape intercultural interactions in ways that facilitate understanding and create opportunities for cooperation. Reflection on experience is proposed to be particularly useful to support the development of intercultural competence. Reflection is a thinking process focusing on examining a thought, event, or situation to make it more comprehensible and to learn from it. A four-step reflection process is proposed: (1) Describe experience; (2) Reflect on experience; (3) Learn from experience; and (4) Apply learning. Suggestions on using reflection in the classroom are proposed.
Article
Regulatory Shocks: Forms, Dynamics, and Consequences
Nydia MacGregor and Tammy L. Madsen
Regulatory shocks, either by imposing regulations or easing them (deregulation), yield abrupt and fundamental changes to the institutional rules governing competition and, in turn, the opportunity sets available to firms. Formally, a regulatory shock occurs when jurisdictions replace one regulatory system for another. General forms of regulation include economic and social regulation but recent work offers a more fine-grained classification based on the content of regulations: regulation for competition, regulation of cap and trade, regulation by information, and soft law or experimental governance. These categories shed light on the types of rules and policies that change at the moment of a regulatory shock. As a result, they advance our understanding of the nature, scope, magnitude, and consequences of transformative shifts in rules systems governing industries. In addition to differences in the content of reforms, the assorted forms of regulatory change vary in the extent to which they disrupt an industry’s state of equilibrium or semi-equilibrium. These differences contribute to diverse temporal patterns or dynamics, an area ripe for further study. For example, a regulatory shock to an industry may be followed by rapid adjustment and, in turn, a new equilibrium state. Alternatively, the effects of a regulatory shock may be more enduring, contributing to ongoing dynamics and prolonging an industry’s convergence to new equilibrium state. As such, regulatory shocks can both stimulate ongoing heterogeneity or promote coherence within and among industries, sectors, organizational fields, and nation states. It follows that examining the content, scope, and magnitude of regulatory shocks is key to understanding their impact.
Since conforming to industry regulation (deregulation) increases economic returns, firms attempt to align their policies and behaviors with the institutional rules governing an industry. Thus, regulatory shocks stimulate the evaluation of strategic choices and, in turn, impact the competitive positions of firms and the composition of industries. Following a shock, at least two generic cohorts of firms emerge: incumbents, which are firms that operated in the industry before the change, and entrants, which start up after the change. To sustain a position, entrants must build capabilities from scratch whereas incumbents must replace or modify the practices they developed in the prior regulatory era. Not surprisingly, the ensuing competitive dynamics strongly influence the distribution of profits observed in an industry and the duration of firms’ profit advantages.
Our review highlights some of the prominent areas of research inquiry regarding regulatory shocks but many areas remain underexplored. Future work may benefit by considering regulatory shocks as embedded in a self-reinforcing system rather than simply an exogenous inflection in an industry’s evolutionary trajectory. Opportunities also exist for studying how the interplay of industry actors with actors external to an industry (political, social) affects the temporal and competitive consequences of regulatory shocks.
Article
Reinsurance Function and Market
Niels Viggo Haueter
The function of reinsurance is to absorb the risks of the direct insurance industry. This has two main purposes: (i) reinsurance capital allows direct insurers to write more business, and (ii) it protects them against balance sheet fluctuations caused by large and unexpected losses. The reinsurance market is served by a relatively small group of some 200 professional reinsurers. However, throughout history a variety of alternative forms appeared that could be used to distribute risks beyond one insurer. Co-insurance, for example, was one of the main forms of secondary risk spread in the marine community for centuries. It dominated the London market and was, to a large degree, responsible for the late and restricted development of reinsurance companies in Anglo-Saxon markets. The emergence of ever-larger risks in the 20th century forced the industry to focus increasingly on dealing with large losses and capping the maximum exposures of insurers. This made the business more financial, a trend which received a new boost with the advent of insurance-linked securities (ILSs) in the 1990s. Since then, the market for alternative risk transfer (ART) has grown, not least with the advent of new investors such as different investment funds that provide alternative risk capital. However, towards the 2020s, professional reinsurers started gaining ground again after a series of large natural catastrophes and with the continuous rise of Asian economies. Since the 2010s, growth opportunities for reinsurance are sought mostly in emerging markets and by making more risks insurable. Emerging market growth, however, is challenging and the gap between insured and insurable economic losses is still widening. Since the turn of the millennium, the industry has invested in finding solutions to close this so-called protection gap. Professional reinsurers are also seeking to develop new markets by making emerging risks such as cybercrime insurable. Yet such dynamic risks are fundamentally different from older static risks. Solutions are sought in applying methods that already made natural catastrophes insurable, modelling techniques, and ART products.
