Home-country measures to support outward foreign direct investment: Variation and consequences

The state, especially in emerging economies, plays a key role in influencing firm behaviour, including outward foreign direct investment (OFDI). Often literature on the state’s influence on OFDI stresses direct state ownership. However, the state can influence OFDI in several ways, including policy support and subsidies; the literature has largely overlooked these effects. We build on key insights from the comparative capitalisms literature to put forward a series of propositions on how home-country measures – in both emerging and developed economies – to boost OFDI will influence, inter alia, the volume, location and mode of firms’ investments abroad. We thus contribute to the literature by showing how government policies across a wide range of countries influence an important aspect of firm behaviour that has economic, social and environmental implications

Micropolitical dynamics of interlingual translation processes in an MNC subsidiary

An analysis of the process whereby a Polish subsidiary of a North American pharmaceutical company translated a set of corporate values into Polis

Enriching Absorptive Capacity through Social Interaction

Absorptive capacity is frequently highlighted as a key determinant of knowledge transfer within multinational enterprises. But how individual behaviour translates into absorptive capacity at the subsidiary level, and how this is contingent on subsidiaries’ social context, remains under-addressed. This not only limits our understanding of the relationship between individual- and organizational-level absorptive capacity, but also hampers further research on potentially relevant managerial and organizational antecedents, and limits the implications we can draw for practitioners who seek to increase their organization’s capacity to put new knowledge to use. To address this shortcoming we conduct an in-depth comparative case study of a headquarters-initiated knowledge transfer at two subsidiaries of the same multinational enterprise. The findings demonstrate that social interaction is a prerequisite for subsidiary absorptive capacity as it enables employees to participate in the transformation of new knowledge to the local context and the development of local applications. The findings also illustrate how organizational conditions at the subsidiary level can impact subsidiary absorptive capacity by enabling or constraining local interaction patterns. These insights contribute to the absorptive capacity literature by demonstrating the scale and scope of social interaction as a key link between individualand organizational-level absorptive capacity