Employee Social Network Strategies: Implications for Firm Strategies and Performance in Future Organizations

Employee social network strategies play a key role in firm strategies and organizational performance. Currently, scholars underestimate the contributions of employee social strategies in firm strategies. Little is known how informal employee social networks, group entitativity and competition could shape and direct firm strategies and organizational performance. The article examines social network theory and strategic management’s content, process and open schools of thought to propose a new interpretation for managing firm strategies. More specifically, the author examines alternate causal paths, underlying processes and structures as mechanisms in employee social network strategies within a theoretical framework. The article proposes 4 theoretically driven propositions and makes two contributions. First, the article contributes to organizational behavior literature by focusing on the literature gap in network dynamics and competitive actions through employee social networks. Second, although there is immense literature on positive and negative employee competition in business, the article makes a contribution to the strategic management literature by moving beyond formalized structures and roles within an organization to focus on the multilevel informal workplace social interactions and processes that impact strategizing activities. Overall, the article extends strategy research in relation to how employee social networks operate through competition and group entitativity in firm strategies.

China’s Digital Economy

China has one of the most advanced digital economies in the world. This chapter analyses the rise of China’s digital economy and the transformational effect of digital innovation on consumers and throughout China’s economy and society. The ‘platform of platforms’ created by leading firms is critical in China’s digital infrastructure, and the user data generated on these platforms is a new factor in Chinese productivity. The ability of the digital economy to build and address demand in China’s highly differentiated markets is shown in cases such as Xiaomi. The chapter reveals the zigzag pattern of iterative interactions between technology entrepreneurs and policymakers. It presents a detailed case study of mobile payments, explaining the dynamic interactions between firm strategies, user endorsements, and government policies. The rise of the ‘platform of platforms’ has raised concerns about user data safety and fair market competition. The chapter discusses the social and political implications arising from powerful platform firms in the digital economy. It concludes with discussion of the importance of future technologies, including artificial intelligence and the internet of things, especially their applications in the industry internet.

The Shifting Relationship between Post-War Capitalism and Democracy (The Government and Opposition/Leonard Schapiro Lecture, 2021)

This article argues that the relationship between capitalism and democracy is not immutable but subject to changes over time best understood as movements across distinctive growth and representation regimes. Growth regimes are the institutionalized practices central to how a country secures economic prosperity based on complementary sets of firm strategies and government policies. Representation regimes reflect conditions in the arenas of electoral and producer group politics that confer influence on specific segments of the population. The emphasis is on how economic experiences and changes in the structure of electoral cleavages alter the terms of political contestation, thereby giving voice to specific sets of interests and altering the balance of influence between capitalism and democracy. The analysis examines how the growth and representation regimes of the developed democracies have changed through three post-war eras to yield distinctive distributive outcomes in each era.

Leveraging Plastics Linkages for Diversification

The chapter considers the role of linkages, lead firm strategies, industrial policies, and value chain governance in the performance of the South African plastic products industry. The extent to which the linkages of the plastic products sub-sector backwards with the polymers industry, and forwards to plastic automotive components, have influenced the performance of the industry is assessed. The forward linkages to the automotive industry are assessed through a comparative assessment of technological capability accumulation in South Africa with its relatively more successful upper-middle-income counterpart, Thailand. The analysis shows that vertical integration and horizontal collaborations through clusters, as well as the different roles played by multinational corporations and the state, have exerted a stronger influence on the accumulation of capabilities in Thailand, compared with South Africa. The assessment of backward linkages to polymers shows how the linkage development in South Africa has been undermined by market power in the upstream polymers industry. This is coupled with a failure of industrial policy to support diversified industries such as plastic products, including through addressing the challenges related to input prices and supporting the accumulation of capabilities.

Antecedents to firm performance during re-internationalization

There is a paucity of research on re-internationalization, where firms re-enter international operations after complete withdrawal from previous international operations. The extant literature is largely silent on what drives firm performance during re-internationalization. We conducted an empirical investigation of re-internationalized enterprises from India to identify key antecedents to firm performance during the re-internationalization phase. Data analysis using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) indicates that initial internationalization experiences, presence of dynamic capabilities, and organizational commitment to internationalization positively contribute to re-internationalization performance. The findings have implications for firm strategies, organization systems, managerial attention to knowledge management, policies supporting subventions, and for future research into de-internationalization and re-internationalization. JEL Classification: F23

“Protein” Industry Convergence and Its Implications for Resilient and Equitable Food Systems

Recent years have seen the convergence of industries that focus on higher protein foods, such as meat processing firms expanding into plant-based substitutes and/or cellular meat production, and fisheries firms expanding into aquaculture. A driving force behind these changes is dominant firms seeking to increase their power relative to close competitors, including by extending beyond boundaries that pose constraints to growth. The broad banner of “protein” offers a promising space to achieve this goal, despite its nutritionally reductionist focus on a single macronutrient. Protein firm strategies to increase their dominance are likely to further diminish equity in food systems by exacerbating power asymmetries. In addition, the resilience of food systems has the potential to be weakened as these strategies tend to reduce organizational diversity, as well as the genetic diversity of livestock and crops. To better understand these changes, we visually characterize firms that are most dominant in higher protein food industries globally and their recent strategic moves. We discuss the likelihood for these trends to further jeopardize food system resilience and equity, and we make recommendations for avoiding these impacts.

Firm strategies and distributional dynamics: labour share in Italian medium-large firms

Using an original database on medium and large Italian firms built by merging the Rilevazione Imprese e Lavoro run by INAPP in 2010 and 2015 with the AIDA archive by Bureau Van Dijk, we show that the trend of the labour share differs along the labour share distribution. We carry out Unconditional Quantile Regression decompositions to explore the main drivers behind this heterogeneity. Thus, we contribute to the literature on the dynamics of the labour share since we investigate phenomena which cannot be observed through a macro perspective or by looking at a single parameter of the labour share distribution. After including in our specifications several firm-level characteristics and considering composition effects, we find that outsourcing is the main factor which plays a role in reducing the labour share along the distribution. Further different mechanisms act in the various parts of the distribution: unionization contributes to increase the labour share at the top of the labour share distribution, while the introduction of some forms of product (process) innovations is associated with a negative (positive) change in the labour share for those firms at the bottom of the labour share distribution.