Global Economics and Management Review最新文献

A social impact bond is a type of pay-for-success initiative that shifts the financial risks associated with pursuing public purposes to private investors. Governments throughout the world are hopeful that they can be relied on as a politically feasible policy tool for tackling difficult social problems. Despite the excitement surrounding them, there is very little empirical scholarship on social impact bonds. This article takes stock of this new phenomenon, noting the many reasons for their widespread appeal while also raising some concerns that researchers and practitioners would do well to consider before adopting them. We do so by appraising them through the lens of three dimensions: accountability, measurement, and cost-effectiveness. Throughout, we draw comparisons to conventional government contracting.

Merger and acquisitions (M&As) strategies have been growingly deployed by firms for their domestic and international expansion, in order to redefine their business scope or take advantage of emerging opportunities. In this paper we conduct a bibliometric study of the extant strategy research on M&As, assessed by the articles published in the main journal for strategic management studies over the period 1984–2010. Results reveal the highest impact works (articles and books), the intellectual ties among authors and theories that form five main clusters of research, and the topics delved into. Performance effects, M&As as diversification strategies, and resource- and capabilities-based topics have dominated the extant research. The study contributes to the existing knowledge on M&As by taking stock of the accumulated knowledge and research direction, complementing other literature reviews with a strategic management perspective. Thus, we provide a rear view of the field, which facilitates detecting untapped gaps that may provide generous avenues for future research.

This paper analyses the career aspirations of Austrian flexpatriates and expatriates. Conceptually, the article applies a framework using career anchors and internal career orientations. Empirically, we build on a variant of content analysis of 40 semi-structured interviews with 40 Austrian internationally mobile employees working in Eastern and Western European countries. The results show the existence of both traditional and new career aspirations. Most important to our sample are aspirations revolving around Management and Hierarchy, Internationalism and Entrepreneurial Creativity; for flexpatriates we find specifics regarding Freedom, Getting High and a new aspiration referred to as Celebrity; for expatriates particularities concern Balance, Pure Challenge and Skills and Knowledge. Generalizability of our findings is limited due to the interpretative nature of the study, the sample structure, and cross-sectional design.

The cooperation of companies in networks is a strategy used by managers to act in their business sector, aiming to add more value to their companies and create competitive advantage. The literature on this topic exposes many benefits of acting collaboratively in networks, but little is known about the factors that lead companies to withdraw from horizontal networks. This paper aims to investigate which factors drive companies to leave interorganizational networks. In order to do this, we conducted a qualitative research with seven interorganizational networks from which companies were withdrawing. Data was collected by interviewing the presidents of these seven networks and the owners of 11 companies that withdrew from them. The results outline a set of factors that lead companies to leave networks. Among the most cited are: lack of criteria for member selection, lack of trust, lack of commitment, and opportunism and individualism of some of the members. We concluded that most of these factors are intrinsically related and result in limiting the potential of the network to add value and obtain higher possibilities of competitive advantage for its members.

Behavioural strategy deals with strategic management from a psychologically informed perspective, integrating emotional aspects in strategic management. Strategic situations can be characterised by a high level of uncertainty, based on the unforeseeable nature of the future and the paradoxical nature of underlying seemingly conflicting choices. Both entail human emotional reactions such as fear and anxiety. Therefore, the micro-foundations of dynamic capabilities theory should pay more attention on the study of fear in the strategic decision-making process. Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy have long-term experience in researching these emotions, such that psychodynamic theory can help with understanding their influences on the thoughts and feelings of the manager, the management team, and the organisation in the process of strategy making.

Using the psychodynamic lens in the field of behavioural strategy presents a new and fairly neglected avenue for exploring the more unconscious, ‘deep foundations’ of dynamic capabilities resting on the strategizing manager, the top decision-making team, and the implementing organisation. The three generic dynamic capabilities developed by Teece et al. (1997) and Teece (2007), sensing, seizing and reconfiguring, provide a framework for developing a process-oriented perspective for creating corporate strategy, so that the foundations of dynamic capabilities can be reworked and complemented within this framework. This will also enable the operationalisation of success factors for dynamic capabilities from a psychodynamic perspective and creates opportunities for future research.

This research informs management theory and practice concerning the efficacy of utilizing relative metrics to link consumer perceptions and attitudes and to share of wallet. The article starts with a brief discussion of the theoretical foundations for a shift from absolute to relative metrics. We then compare and contrast absolute satisfaction and relative “ranked” satisfaction data from 1714 consumers from nine countries in a banking context and report preliminary insights from a small-scale qualitative study. The results conclusively demonstrate the superiority of relative ranked satisfaction to absolute satisfaction measures in this context and, for the first time, point to statistically significant country-specific effects when linking relative satisfaction to share of wallet. We also discuss how researchers and managers might use perceptual and attitudinal metrics if the goal is linkage to customers’ buying behaviors.