Align or perish: social enterprise network orchestration in Sub-Saharan Africa

Exploring how social ventures build and orchestrate beneficial social network arrangements over time as the social venture grows, and what drives these changes, is essential, especially in societies where collectivism prevails and networks serve as a substitute for weak formal institutions, often creating social obligations. In their research in Kenya, Christian Busch and Harry Barkema collected longitudinal data for over a decade and identified four novel mechanisms that allowed successful ventures to adjust their networks as they scaled

How incubators can facilitate serendipity for nascent entrepreneurs

Serendipity is not just random chance, it's about providing the conditions to catalyse 'coincidence' into opportunity, creating 'planned luck', write Christian Busch and Harry Barkem

Top Management Pay: Impact of Overt and Covert Power

This paper examines variations in executive pay as a function of CEO power. We assume that CEOs optimize their pay conditional upon their ability to shape decisions that favour their interests. Power is inferred from overt manifestations such as share holdings, but also from covert sources such as a CEOs\u27 social capital. Two components of compensation are considered: base pay and bonus. While financial performance, firm size, and other factors are held constant, the results show overt power as measured by CEO, and CEO-family equity holdings, to have a curvilinear relationship with executive compensation. Proxies of covert power include tenure, being (one of) the founder(s), and firm diversification. These variables magnify or moderate the effect of equity holdings on compensation. The power effects are most pronounced for the size of CEO bonus

West Meets East: New Concepts and Theories

Management scholarship has grown tremendously over the past 60 years. Most of our paradigms originated from North America in the 1950s to the 1980s, inspired by the empirical phenomena and cultural, philosophical, and research traditions of the time. Here following, we highlight the contextual differences between the East and the West in terms of institutions, philosophies, and cultural values and how they are manifest in contemporary management practices. Inspired by theory development in management studies over time, we offer insights into the conditions facilitating new theories, and how these might apply to emergent theories from the East. We discuss the contributions of the six papers included in this special research forum as exemplars of integrating Eastern concepts and contexts to enrich existing management theories. We highlight the difficulty with testing Eastern constructs as distinct from Western ones by discussing the properties of equivalence, salience, and infusion in constructs. We provide directions for future research and encourage an agentic view to creating new theories and paradigms

Planned Marketing Adaptation and Multinationals' Choices Between Acquisitions and Greenfields

International marketing studies have extensively examined the antecedents of firms' marketing standardization/ adaptation decisions. However, it is unclear whether such decisions, once planned, codetermine the choice between buying and building foreign subsidiaries. Analyzing a sample of 150 foreign entries by Dutch firms, the authors find that the level of marketing adaptation planned for a wholly owned subsidiary is positively related to the likelihood that the subsidiary will be established through an acquisition rather than through a greenfield investment. Moreover, the authors find substantial evidence that this positive relationship is stronger for firms that (1) are establishing relatively larger subsidiaries, (2) have less experience with the industry entered, or (3) are entering less developed countries. The findings show that firms pursuing higher levels of marketing adaptation assign more value to the marketing adaptation advantages of acquisitions over greenfields, especially if the risks associated with implementing the planned adaptation level are high. In addition, firms typically strive for a fit between their international marketing strategy and their mode of foreign establishment. (authors' abstract

From necessity to opportunity: scaling bricolage across resource-constrained environments

Research summary: Enterprises in low-resource contexts often rely on bricolage (i.e., making do by applying resources at hand to new problems). However, bricolage has traditionally been regarded as a way to temporarily get by, potentially constraining growth if continued over time. This has been explained by factors such as limited development of learning competencies. Surprisingly, we encountered a social organization appearing to use bricolage to scale extensively into a variety of locations. This puzzling observation prompted our research question: Can bricolage be scaled, and if so, how and why? We embarked on a process study of this organization, leading to a novel conceptual model of scaling bricolage: as a low-cost replication process of heuristics, enabling fit with a diversity of local environments, as well as cross-unit learning.  Managerial summary: How do organizations emerge, survive, and scale in resource-scarce environments? Traditional scaling models tend to rely on considerable financial resources and companies often struggle to adjust to diverse contexts. In contrast, we identified and studied an organization in Sub-Saharan Africa that we argue used simple rules to scale bricolage—making the best out of what is at hand—successfully in diverse low-resource contexts. Our paper provides a novel conceptual model of scaling bricolage: a low-cost replication process of heuristics, enabling fit with a diversity of local environments, as well as cross-unit innovation and learning