Institutional Transition and Organizational Diversity: Differentiated Internationalization Strategies of Emerging Market State-owned Enterprises
Year: 2014
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The rise of globalization over the past several decades has witnessed a surge of cross-border\nactivities by emerging market firms. To a large extent, such acceleration in their overseas venturing has\nbeen precipitated by the liberalization of domestic and foreign trade regimes governing foreign direct\ninvestment. In order to compete with advanced country multinationals, emerging economy firms have\nincreasingly leveraged a broad array of resources and organizational strategies to springboard abroad.\nSimultaneously, such firms are subject to dynamic shifts in their institutional terrains triggered by a\nplethora of heterogeneous reform treatments as their governments endeavor to modernize their\neconomies.\nThe initiation of these potent large-scale reforms associated with transition such as economic\ndecentralization, market liberalization, industrial restructuring and corporate ownership reform\nundoubtedly exert cross-cutting and transformational impacts on the resource endowments, adaptive\ncapabilities and strategic behaviors of emerging market firms. Given this critical phenomenon, this\ndissertation is motivated by the primary research question – how does institutional transition and its\nrelated change processes operate to reconfigure and alter firm resources and capabilities for\ninternationalization? Since a significant proportion of emerging market firms are owned by\ngovernments, this thesis investigates how reforms have transformed state-owned firms’ strategic\ncharacteristics for internationalization.\nThe dissertation comprises of three research papers utilizing extensive primary fieldwork and\na manually compiled panel dataset of Chinese firms to examine emerging market state-owned firms’\noverseas activities. The first paper is a conceptual piece which develops an overarching framework to\ndelineate the reconfigured orchestration of multiple institutional reforms in the emerging economy\ncontext can spawn organizational diversity among state-owned firms leading to their differing outward\nFDI strategies. The second paper builds on this notion of organizational diversity and investigates how\ncorporate ownership reform confers varying levels of institutional competitive advantages to\nmarketized and non-marketized state owned firms to support their overseas venturing. It further\nexamines how the relationship between firm ownership and outward FDI propensity is moderated by\nstate-owned business group affiliation. The final paper studies how hybrid organizational forms arising\nfrom institutional transition such as university-run firms can evolve novel organizational features\nincluding ‘incubating platforms’ to launch overseas entrepreneurial spin-offs.
Source: Econstor (Econstor)
Author: Ming Hua Li
Institution: Copenhagen Business School
Language: English
Subfield: Strategy and Management
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2953681300