Emerging Markets, Global Challenges, and Multinational Enterprises

Track Chair:

Andrei Panibratov

GSOM SPbU

panibratov@gsom.spbu.ru

 

Many types of macroeconomic risk affect strategies of multinational enterprises (MNEs). There is a growing need to investigate how particular economic and political changes and challenges shape the environment where businesses operate, and how firms respond to it. The track suggests examining both business strategies and non-market approaches that firms deploy towards geopolitical and social turbulences. Emerging market MNEs are politically involved with their home governments in an iterative way to obtain favorable business outcomes. Many of these firms elude direct engagement with the government but actively adapt to institutional pressures by implementing partnership strategies to build political capital and investing in social projects that benefit the country’s social image to gain legitimacy. By deploying social investments as part of their non-market strategies, MNEs have better chances of mitigating institutional volatility and adapting and influencing the host country’s new business projects. In unstable institutional contexts, cultivation of the new political connections between MNEs and home government can serve as a useful tool in mitigating political risk for both sides. Investing in the projects on pair with the government seems to be a tool that helps firms mitigate institutional volatility, reduce transaction costs, and gain a closer relationship between the private and public sectors.

The track particularly welcomes contributions that extend the understanding of the multi-level interplay between political processes, governance and policies and the internationalization of emerging market MNEs and the implications it holds for firms, governments, and international regimes. This theme spans a range of specific topics and can be approached with different disciplinary, theoretical, and empirical lenses. Hence, both theoretical and empirical papers are welcome, applying qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods, and contributions from a range of disciplines are encouraged, such as international business, strategy and organization, political science, economic geography, economic sociology, economic history, as well as cross-disciplinary contributions.

 

Illustrative but by no means exhaustive questions pertaining to the track theme include the following:

• How does environmental uncertainty shape international strategy and reconfigures GVCs?
• Under institutional pressures, why and how foreign investment or divestment decisions are made?
• How institutional changes at home and host markets affect the location choice or re-location decision of a firm?
• What firm-specific and location-specific advantages condition firms’ competitiveness? What can be the role of political activity for firms’ success?
• How and with which effects do host governments seek to capture the opportunities and mitigate the risks from the increasing presence and strengths of EMNEs?
• What are the roles of diplomacy and soft power in EMNE internationalization?
• Which nonmarket strategies do EMNEs deploy to mobilize the support of or to mitigate the adverse effects of governments in home and host countries?
• What enables firms’ resilience in the sanctioned country? How do firms adjust their strategies to different types of sanctions?
• How do sanctions affect the legitimacy of firms directly and indirectly targeted by the sanctions?
• How do firms deal with the political capital accumulated before sanctions? Is it still useful under sanctions?