Escape FDI and the dynamics of a cumulative process of institutional misalignment and contestation: stress, strain and failure

We argue that escape foreign direct investment (FDI) happens when unknown future “rules of the game” cause concern about the continued productive capacity of the economy. Adapting the stress-strain-fail model of materials failure, we argue that escape FDI is a process with three cumulative phases. Conditions for escape FDI (stress) are created by institutional deterioration and contained contestation. Limited escape FDI (strain) results from periods of societal instability and/or inadequate institutional reforms. Extensive escape FDI (failure) results from pervasive societal instability and/or fundamental changes in institutions. Using a historical approach, we develop these propositions for South Africa, 1956 to 2012

On the value of foreign PhDs in the developing world: Training versus selection effects

This paper compares the career effects of overseas and domestic PhD training for scientists working in an emerging economy, South Africa. Variations in scientific achievements of South African academics may arise because those who attend \better" PhD programmes receive better training, but it may also be because good students select into good universities. We examine selection and training effects for four tiers of South African and two tiers of foreign universities. Those who received PhDs from universities in industrialized countries tend to be more productive than those whose PhDs were locally granted, but universities from industrialized countries do not necessarily provide better training than local universities. Pure selection effects contribute to career outcomes nearly as much as training effects. When looking at training in isolation, PhDs from top South African universities produce a similar quantity and quality research output to those from leading universities in the developed world

Africa business research as a laboratory for theory-building: extreme conditions, new phenomena and alternative paradigms of social relationships

Africa is an increasingly important business context, yet we still know very little about it. We review the challenges and opportunities that firms in Africa face and propose that these can serve as the basis for extending current theories and models of the firm. We do so by challenging some of the implicit assumptions and stereotypes on firms in Africa and proposing three avenues for extending theories. One is taking the extreme conditions of some Africa countries and using them as a laboratory for modifying current theories and models of the firm, as we illustrate in the case of institutional theory and the resource-based view. A second one is identifying new themes that arise from analyzing firms in Africa and their contexts of operation, and we discuss four themes: migrating multinationals and the meaning of home country, diaspora networks within and across countries, a recasting of cultural and institutional distance, and new hybrid organizational forms. A third one is developing new theories based on alternative paradigms of social relationships that have emerged in Africa that differ from those underpinning existing theories of the firm, such as kgotla and its view of community-based relationships or ubuntu and its humanizing view of relationships

Stepping stones across a fast-flowing river : supporting emerging scholars from emerging markets

PURPOSE : International business as a field values perspectives from various contexts, but scholars from emerging markets face a number of often-unseen challenges preventing them from fully contributing to the field. This study aims to explain those challenges and what the author has done to manage them. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH : This is a Reflexive piece in which the author makes sense of her own experience as a scholar not only of but also in an emerging market, as well as the experiences at her school in seeking to develop a high-quality doctoral program. FINDINGS : When leading scholars interact, whether in writing or in person, they tend to be in academically and otherwise well-resourced locations. This is true even for the leading international business scholars of emerging markets, and it imposes time and financial costs on scholars located in emerging markets wanting to participate in such conversations. Having experienced such challenges, the author worked with colleagues to design a doctoral program that could nurture rich scholarly conversations at the school. However, there remains a clear and pervasive tension between the inclusive aspirations of the field and the tendency for cutting-edge academic conversations to be concentrated in the developed world. ORIGINALITY/VALUE : The experiences of emerging market scholars remain underrepresented in the field. By drawing on her own experience, both as a scholar and the head of the doctoral program at her school, the author provides suggestions for how to think about and develop a more inclusive scholarly conversation.https://www.emerald.com/insight/publication/issn/1742-2043hj2024Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS)SDG-04:Quality Educatio

The 4 As: Response strategy to stressors that negatively influence employees’ positive work behaviour

Workplace stressors are understood to be the result of a misfit between employees and their teams, supervisors, job or the organisation. However, in speaking to C-level executives in large companies in Africa, GIBS found that stressors from the wider environment outside the company are also an important factor that may negatively influence employees’ positive work behaviour. Some of the identified stressors include challenges in the macro-economic environment and responsibilities over family and intrapersonal issues that result from a collectivist cultural orientation. Considering all these stressors, the question is: how do managers employ strategies to minimise the negative influence of environmental stressors on employees’ positive work behaviour? Managers use four response strategies to deal with employees’ stressors that originate in the wider environment. The 4 As of the strategy include awareness of issues in the environment, assessment of the costs and benefits of addressing stressors, allocation of resources to minimise the stress, and adaptation of the strategies according to the changing environmental factors. Implementing these strategies can help managers understand and minimise employees’ stress

The Global Platform Economy: A New Offshoring Institution Enabling Emerging-Economy Microproviders

Global online platforms match firms with service providers around the world, in services ranging from software development to copywriting and graphic design. Unlike in traditional offshore outsourcing, service providers are predominantly one-person microproviders located in emerging-economy countries not necessarily associated with offshoring and often disadvantaged by negative country images. How do these microproviders survive and thrive? We theorize global platforms through transaction cost economics (TCE), arguing that they are a new technology-enabled offshoring institution that emerges in response to cross-border information asymmetries that hitherto prevented microproviders from participating in offshoring markets. To explain how platforms achieve this, we adapt signaling theory to a TCE-based model and test our hypotheses by analyzing 6 months of transaction records from a leading platform. To help interpret the results and generalize them beyond a single platform, we introduce supplementary data from 107 face-to-face interviews with microproviders in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Individuals choose microprovidership when it provides a better return on their skills and labor than employment at a local (offshoring) firm. The platform acts as a signaling environment that allows microproviders to inform foreign clients of their quality, with platform-generated signals being the most informative signaling type. Platform signaling disproportionately benefits emerging-economy providers, allowing them to partly overcome the effects of negative country images and thus diminishing the importance of home country institutions. Global platforms in other factor and product markets likely promote cross-border microbusiness through similar mechanisms

Profit-seeking corporate social responsibility in developing countries : the risk of conflating CSR and R&D

Strategic corporate social responsibility (CSR) has drawn praise for representing the "sweet spot" between communities’ needs and firms’ resources, capabilities and efforts. But what if the concept is pushed to its limits? A firm can initiate CSR projects not just to help communities, but to directly realize profit from them. In this conceptual paper, we ask how CSR is understood and functions when the intent of CSR projects is to conduct a form of research and development (R&D). The intended innovations are not science-based, but socially oriented; they seek to determine how to profitably meet the needs of poor people in developing countries. We develop our argument from conversations with managers and teaching cases that explain how executives believe CSR helps firms (learn how) to profitably serve new potential customers – whether through developing new markets or new products and services with a social purpose. Using CSR as a form of "living R&D" allows firms to make mistakes and to avoid short-term shareholder pressures. But there are very real risks to what in essence is unregulated experimentation on poor people, and we highlight some of them. Our argument highlights the ways in which such innovation and profit-oriented CSR challenge thinking on both CSR and R&D, and we make practical recommendations for how to ensure that intended beneficiaries are not harmed, but can instead benefit.https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/JCIMhj2022Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS

Fitting in, standing out, and doing both : supporting the development of a scholarly voice

What scholars call “writing” actually involves writing, reading, talking, thinking, and engaging. Yet how academic writing develops through this recursive, social process, is imperfectly understood. Although participating in academic gatherings like colloquia and international conferences can help researchers find a scholarly voice, not all new scholars have the opportunity to participate in such gatherings and the learnings they offer. Especially for those scholars, their academic writing must be consciously developed. We examine the process by which a new South African management scholar, supported by his writing coach, developed an academic voice. Analyzing their 15-month long communication (emails and summaries of conversations), we find three interweaving processes. Coaching guides the new scholar first to learn to fit in by becoming aware of genre conventions through practical writing-to-learn and show-and-tell coaching tactics. Then the challenge is to stand out by forcing tough trade-offs and intensifying the focus on novelty. Ultimately the scholar must do both, negotiating the tension between them. Our article provides evidence of how the emergence of self-reliant scholarly writing can be supported. This process is especially salient in developing country contexts with few enculturating opportunities, but we suggest that it applies more broadly, opening avenues for future theorizing.https://journals.sagepub.com/home/jmehj2020Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS

Greater risk and a smaller opportunity : the opportunity space of SME internationalization in lower-income countries

Why do small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from lower-income countries internationalize using high-commitment modes? In this exploratory, qualitative study of 22 SMEs from South Africa (a middle-income country) and Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe (low-income countries), we document that the SMEs typically have both a greater tolerance for risk, likely due to the region from which they originate, and an appetite for opportunities smaller than what would be acceptable to multinational enterprises (MNEs) from advanced economies. This provides a very different opportunity space for the two types of enterprises. The size of the home country seems to matter: SMEs from middle-income countries often work on their own and target other emerging markets, but in poorer countries, SMEs often work synergistically with MNEs from more advanced economies, acting as their “delivery arm” into the small markets in their immediate region. This opens up a new way of understanding MNE-led development. Facilitating the development of partnerships between local SMEs and advanced MNEs is a potentially fruitful avenue that policymakers from poor countries can pursue to help their countries open to the benefits of internationalization.https://unctad.org/Topic/Investment/Transnational-Corporations-Journalhj2023Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS