Patrick Regnér

The unique attributes of the internal and external contexts of multinational corporations (MNCs) make effective management of organizational change not only a necessity but also a challenge for these firms. The key to success lies in ensuring that the content, context, and process of change efforts are aligned and coherent. In this chapter, we will review each of these change dimensions with a particular focus on the specific issues and concerns faced by MNCs.

Introduction Although strategy-as-practice research has thrived during the last decade, the resource-based view (RBV: Barney 1991; Peteraf 1993; Wernerfelt 1984) and capabilities perspectives (Dosi, Nelson and Winter 2000; Eisenhardt and Martin 2000; Winter 2003) have continued to dominate mainstream strategic management research. Recent work has also started to show an increased interest in the micro aspects of strategy, emphasizing micro-foundations as essential in understanding organizational capabilities and resources and their origins (Abell, Felin and Foss 2008; Felin and Foss 2005; Gavetti 2005; Teece 2007). There have been repeated calls for examinations at the intersection between these research directions and SAP research (Jarzabkowski and Kaplan 2010; Johnson et al. 2007; Johnson, Melin and Whittington 2003; Regnér 2012; Vaara and Whittington 2012), but surprisingly little of this nature has materialized so far, with a few exceptions (for example, Ambrosini 2003; Ambrosini, Bowman and Burton-Taylor 2007; Kaplan 2008; Regnér 2003; 2008; Salvato 2003; 2009). This chapter examines the intersection between strategy as practice and perspectives that have dominated strategy content research during the last couple of decades. Specifically, it examines differences and commonalities, potential relationships and synergies between strategy as practice and the RBV, capabilities perspectives and the micro-foundations approach. It further investigates extant strategy-as-practice research at this intersection and identifies potential future research opportunities. What can possibly be gained from investigating this intersection? There are four points that are of particular importance. First, besides underlining the importance of strategy practices and activities generally for strategic management, it may provide insights into how practices, praxis and practitioners underlie resources and capabilities that maintain competitive advantage. If we accept that there is a relationship between what managers do and strategy content and outcomes, a key issue is determining how practices both enable and impede managers in their strategy praxis concerning resources and capabilities. By linking strategy as practice to resource-based, capabilities and micro-foundations research, it is thus possible to demonstrate the prominence of practices, social contexts and interactions for strategy. This is, of course, in contrast to extant assumptions in these strategy content research areas that often primarily emphasize rational top managers and individuals. The link to the resource-based and capabilities views may thus strengthen the main theoretical traits of the SAP approach and consolidate it. 

If behavioral strategy is set out to bring in “realistic assumptions about human cognition, emotions, and social behavior” (Powell et al., 2011: 1371), research in this emerging stream needs to go beyond conventional rational vs. bounded rational debate. It is not anymore novel to claim that managers are hardwired with cognitive biases. Nor do we see any added value in examining the battery of factors that can explain variance in a uniformly defined type of ‘rationality’. Instead, there is a need for an integrative perspective that can yield a more realistic picture of executive decision makers who interact in different social, political and historical contexts and, accordingly, develop their own heuristics and rules of thumb in order to arrive at their own ‘rational decisions’ attuned to their idiosyncratic ecologies. In this paper, we aim to fulfill this need.

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.