A Twenty-First Century Assessment of Values Across the Global

This article provides current Schwartz Values Survey (SVS) data from samples of business managers and professionals across 50 societies that are culturally and socioeconomically diverse. We report the society scores for SVS values dimensions for both individual- and societallevel analyses. At the individual-level, we report on the ten circumplex values sub-dimensions and two sets of values dimensions (collectivism and individualism; openness to change, conservation, self-enhancement, and self- transcendence). At the societal-level, we report on the values dimensions of embeddedness, hierarchy, mastery, affective autonomy, intellectual autonomy, egalitarianism, and harmony. For each society, we report the Cronbach’s a statistics for each values dimension scale to assess their internal consistency (reliability) as well as report interrater agreement (IRA) analyses to assess the acceptability of using aggregated individual level values scores to represent country values. We also examined whether societal development level is related to systematic variation in the measurement and importance of values. Thus, the contributions of our evaluation of the SVS values dimensions are two-fold. First, we identify the SVS dimensions that have cross-culturally internally reliable structures and withinsociety agreement for business professionals. Second, we report the society cultural values scores developed from the twenty-first century data that can be used as macro-level predictors in multilevel and single-level international business research

Influence of Institutional Differences on Firm Innovation from International Alliances

This paper explores the contribution of the institutional perspective in understanding firm innovation returns from international alliances. It argues that formal and informal national institutions are of different nature, and give rise to explicit and tacit differences respectively between alliance partners. Partners exhibit different attitudes and abilities to negotiate and address such differences in leveraging the innovation potential of international alliances. As a result, we expect such differences to have distinct effects on partners' innovation performance: a) the effect of informal institutional differences is approximating sigmoid (S-shaped), with innovation performance slightly increasing first, then improving further and finally reaching a flattening plateau as informal institutional difference between partners increase; and b) the effect of formal institutional differences resembles an inverted U. Support is provided for both our contentions in a longitudinal sample of 110 UK biopharmaceutical firms. The paper contributes to existing understanding of firm innovation performance from international alliances, and broadly, to the management of internationalization in alliance portfolios

Managing Distributed Knowledge Systems

Both authors have contributed equally to the paper The article argues that the growth of de novo knowledge-based organization depends on managing and coordinating increasingly growing and, therefore, distributed knowledge. Moreover, the growth in knowledge is often accompanied by an increasing organizational complexity, which is a result of integrating new people, building new units and adding activities to the existing organization. It is argued that knowledge is not a stable capacity that belongs to any actor alone, but that it is rather an ongoing social accomplishment, which is created and recreated as actors engage in mutual activities. This paper contributes to the research on organizations as distributed knowledge systems by addressing two weaknesses of the social practice literature. Firstly, it downplays the importance of formal structure and organizational design and intervention efforts by key organizational members. Secondly, it does not explain how communities connect to the whole organization, but rather how they are disconnected from the governing canonical perspectives. In response to this we develop a conceptual model IKAR (denoting corporate and departmental identities, knowledge, activities and resources) and show how its dynamics shape the emerging collective practices within and between organizational departments. We present a case of a de novo knowledge intensive firm to illustrate the model, and conclude with a discussion of emerging implications. Key words: distributed knowledge, identity, practice, resources, and org. construction Suggested Track: Practice-based perspectives on knowledge and learning

International business and institutional development in Central and Eastern Europe

10.1016/j.intman.2007.05.011Journal of International Management1411-11JIMA