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CALL FOR PAPERS
JOURNAL OF WORLD BUSINESS
SPECIAL ISSUE ON “INSTITUTIONS, ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND CO-EVOLUTION IN
INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS”
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: JANUARY 6, 2014
SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORS:
Sara L. McGaughey, Griffith University, Australia
Arun Kumaraswamy, Temple University, USA
Peter W. Liesch, University of Queensland, Australia.
While the strategic importance of institutions to firms’ performance is
well recognised in IB, the nexus between institutions and agency (i.e.,
purposeful action by entrepreneurial individuals, groups or organisations)
remains under-developed. The aim of this JWB special issue is to stimulate
work that promotes new theory and empirical, public policy and practitioner
insights on the relationship between institutions (residing at various
levels of analysis) and agency in international business.
Institutions – whether formal or informal, whether internal or external to
the firm – are largely taken-for-granted, culturally-embedded
understandings of appropriate social arrangements and behaviours. Early
perspectives in neo-institutional theory emphasised the power of
institutions to determine patterns of action and organisation, thereby
explaining the convergence of MNEs and managerial practices within the same
institutional environment. That is, firm and individual behaviour was
viewed as being shaped and constrained by pre-existing formal and informal
institutions that reside at the country or international levels of analysis
(e.g. laws, intellectual property rights protection regimes, financial
market institutions, national culture). Deviations from institutional
norms are counteracted by sanctions or seen as imposing significant costs
on the ‘offending’ firm or individual.
This early approach remains a strong tradition in IB research examining the
nexus of firms and institutions. Particularly prominent at present are
studies that examine country-level institutional profiles, how
institutional environments determine the most effective strategies and
structures for a diversity of firms, how institutions facilitate or impede
the diffusion of organisational practices throughout MNEs, and the
institutional transformation of transition or emerging economies and its
impact on firms. Concepts such as institutional distance, liability of
foreignness and MNE or international new venture legitimacy hold wide
appeal, but less attention is given to agency as purposeful action on the
part of individuals, groups or organisations in maintaining or shaping
existing institutions and creating new ones. Only a narrow range of
institutions are typically considered, and studies of antecedents and
consequences – rather than process, process drivers and co-evolution –
continue to dominate.
Institutions, however, do not only constrain, but also are outcomes of
human agency (i.e., purposive actions). Organisational actors
(individuals, firms, coalitions, etc.,) are not only bound by institutions,
but also enact and reconstruct them. As a corollary, the role that
organisations and individuals play in institutional creation, maintenance
and change has come to the fore in academic debates, primarily outside IB.
The recent concept of ‘institutional entrepreneurship’, whereby
institutional entrepreneurs purposefully mobilise resources to create new
institutions or change existing ones for their own interests, is
illustrative of this shift towards active agency in an institutional
context (see, for example, McGaughey, 2012). Similarly, agency is central
to co-evolutionary perspectives that connect patterns of institutional
change in wider business systems with more micro processes of variety
generation and experimentation within and across individual firms (see, for
example, Cantwell, Dunning and Lundan, 2010). As recent research
demonstrates, an approach that de-emphasises these co-evolutionary dynamics
and institutional entrepreneurship is perhaps not even applicable to the
case of small firms that internationalize, let alone large MNEs. The
substantial institutional contradictions inherent in the international
business environment bring to the fore the role of agency and a state of
continuous institutional change. This distinctiveness of the international
business context invites longitudinal process-oriented studies. It also
holds potential for stronger theory testing and building at the
intersection of institutions and agency, and eventually the export of new
or refined theories from IB scholarship to adjacent disciplines (see, for
example, Kostova, Roth and Dacin, 2008).
Through this special issue, we wish to encourage in international business
research this emerging and more nuanced view of the nexus between agency
and institutions residing at various levels of analysis. In doing so, we
join scholars who have considered institutions as constraints, enablers and
outcomes of agency, and have explored the processes of institutional
creation, maintenance and change in the IB context.
The sorts of questions contributors to this special issue might ask
include, but are by no means limited to, the following:
** How are new structures, practices and identities created, diffused and
institutionalised within MNEs, and how are old ones changed or discarded?
What role might individuals, subsidiaries and headquarters play in such
institutional entrepreneurship?
** How does competition among institutional entrepreneurs with different
interests unfold within MNEs and across organisational fields, and what
does such ‘institutional work’ look like?
** Under what conditions are firms able to act as institutional
entrepreneurs across borders, mobilising resources to transform existing
local or global institutions or create new ones for their own interests?
** To what extent may smaller firms and entrepreneurs, often with minimal
market power and facing severe resource constraints, act as agents of
institutional change across borders?
** Do MNEs have particular advantages in bringing about innovations in
institutions? For example, does multinationality help overcome
the ‘paradox of embedded agency’, i.e., the inherent contradiction in the
notion that agents conditioned by an institution can act to change it?
** How does institutional duality, i.e., the need for MNE subsidiaries to
conform to both host-country and home-country institutions for legitimacy,
manifest in international business, and how are tensions and opportunities
creatively managed as seemingly incommensurable institutions collide? To
what extent do the challenges of institutional duality affect the
management of smaller firms internationalising?
** How do institutions at various levels – supranational, regional,
national, industry, within firms – and firm strategies interact and co-
evolve? How do the (not necessarily coordinated) actions of various actors
(e.g., trade blocs, governments, NGOs, interest groups, SMEs, MNEs and
managers or employees) influence and, in turn, are influenced by the
evolution of these institutions?
** How do institutions at the sub-national and national levels interact to
influence MNE decisions and strategies (e.g., location within a host-
country)? Over time, how do these institutions and MNE strategies co-
evolve?
** How do institutional entrepreneurship and co-evolutionary processes
affect the home and host countries of the international firm? How should
the ensuing transformations be evaluated, and with what consequences for
public policy?
Submission Process:
Papers that respond to this call should be forwarded to JWB-
group@griffith.edu.au by 6 January, 2014. Authors should follow the JWB
author and style requirements, available at
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/620401/authorin
structions. The anticipated publication date is 2015.
All submissions will be expected to develop strong theoretical foundations
and implement rigorous methodologies within their chosen tradition or
perspective, and are subject to JWB review procedures. The special issue
welcomes a broad range of methodologies in enhancing our understanding of
the aforementioned processes. We expect contributions from a diversity of
disciplines that inform international business, including sociology,
political science, anthropology, psychology, economics, socio-linguistics,
and technology studies, among others. We also seek to explore a diversity
of geographic and organisational contexts. Both conceptual and empirical
papers are welcome.
Inquiries about the special issue may be made to any of the special issue
co-editors: Sara L. McGaughey (
s.mcgaughey@griffith.edu.au); Arun
Kumaraswamy (
akumaras@temple.edu); Peter W. Liesch (
p.liesch@uq.edu.au).
References:
Cantwell, J., Dunning, J.H. and Lundan, S.M. (2010). An evolutionary
approach to understanding international business activity: The co-evolution
of MNEs and the institutional environment. Journal of International
Business Studies, 41(4): 567-586.
Kostova, T., Roth, K. and Dacin, M.T. (2008). Institutional theory in the
study of multinational corporations: A critique and new directions. Academy
of Management Review, 33(4): 994-1006.
McGaughey, S.L. (2012) Institutional entrepreneurship in North American
lightning protection standards: Rhetorical history and unintended
consequences of failure. Business History, DOI:
10.1080/00076791.2012.687537.
__________________________________
Arun Kumaraswamy
Assistant Professor
Temple University, The Fox School
Dept. of Strategic Management
A532 Alter Hall (006-14)
1801 Liacouras Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19122
Tel: (215) 204-6876; Fax: (215) 204-8029
e-mail:
akumaras@temple.edu
Google Scholar profile: Arun Kumaraswamy