Patrick Regnér

Scholars increasingly emphasize the impact of institutions on multinational enterprises (MNEs), but the opposite relationship has attracted less research - that is, MNE agency in relation to institutions. Based on a comparative case study of six MNEs from the United States and Sweden, this paper remedies this. It explores and explicates MNE subunits' strategic responses to host country institutional constraints and opportunities in five different regions. A new-institutional approach is adopted, which allows for an investigation of MNE subunit agency in relation to normative and cognitive institutions, as well as regulative ones. This fine-grained analysis reveals not only what kinds of responses MNE subunits invoke, but why and how they are able to respond. We identify four strategic responses by which subunits shape, transpose and evade institutions in the pursuit of competitive advantage: Innovation, Arbitrage, Circumvention and Adaptation. These responses are driven by three key enablers: multinationality, foreignness and institutional ambiguity - that serve to enhance and heighten three mechanisms: reflexivity, role expectations and resources. By linking the enablers and the mechanisms to specific types of strategic responses in a framework and typology, the paper not only contributes to emerging research on the interplay between MNEs, institutions and strategy, but to strategy practice. © 2014 Academy of International Business.

International business scholars increasingly emphasize regional strategies based on an optimal location of downstream sales. There has been less scholarly attention, however, to the relationship between international strategy and upstream knowledge creation including R&D. Building on contemporary strategic management theory and the knowledge-based view we remedy this. The viability of home-regional or bi-regional strategies is based on common assumptions that imply negative consequences of distance and foreignness for downstream sales and marketing and benefits from agglomeration for upstream knowledge creation activities including R&D. In contrast, we propose that upstream knowledge creation, radical innovation in particular, rather gains from distance and foreignness and from being dispersed, suggesting the effectiveness of a global strategy. Based on the resource-based view and recent research on the economics of strategic opportunities and competitive advantage, we provide theoretical explanations for this. We demonstrate how a global multinational corporation is uniquely equipped with knowledge extensity including heterogeneous social-identity frames in multiple sub-units. Thanks to arbitrage advantages between the sub-units' separate and often locally embedded knowledge, a global multinational corporation can address complex interdependences and interactions between knowledge sets required for knowledge creation. This suggests that maximum exploration capabilities are made possible by a global rather than a home-regional or bi-regional strategy. © 2014 British Academy of Management.

Imperfectly imitable resources are central in contemporary analysis of sustainable competitive advantage. While prior work has focused on limitations on the ability to imitate, we argue that it is only a third step in an imitation procedure that also involves the identification of what to imitate and the willingness to imitate. In this study we focus on this last step of unwillingness to imitate due to institutionalized professional norms on product appropriateness. Drawing on institutional theory, we test hypotheses and discuss the complex relationship between institutionalized norms, core competences, and systematic differences in the willingness to imitate.

This article identifies an essential research area where a strategy-as-practice approach can make important contributions to the strategic management field: the dynamic process through which organizational assets are developed. It compares strategy-as-practice and dynamic capabilities perspectives and demonstrates how the former may complement the latter in analyzing activities that underpin and may create and modify organizational assets. Several distinct features of the practice approach are identified as fertile ground for examining the micro-foundations of strategy dynamics. It is demonstrated how activity configurations, socio-cultural embeddedness, co-evolution, social interactions, the inclusion of multiple strategists and an awareness of the importance of imagination can complement the dynamic capabilities perspective and may provide suggestions for a dynamic view more generally.

Although strategy process research has provided careful and in-depth descriptions and examinations of strategy, micro-level processes and activities have been less commonly evaluated, especially as regards strategy creation and development. This paper examines how managers create and develop strategy in practice. A dual longitudinal case methodology, including a single in-depth study combined with a multiple retrospective study is used, invoking four multinational companies. The findings show a twofold character of strategy creation, including fundamental different strategy activities in the periphery and centre, reflecting their diverse location and social embeddedness. Strategy making in the periphery was inductive, including externally oriented and exploratory strategy activities like trial and error, informal noticing, experiments and the use of heuristics. In contrast, strategy making in the centre was more deductive invoking an industry and exploitation focus, and activities like planning, analysis, formal intelligence and the use of standard routines.