2005-06 Multinational Management Seminar Series
Upcoming Seminar
See you next year
Past Seminars
10:30am Friday, October 7 - David Stark , Columbia and Santa Fe Institute, Location JMHH F55
"Social Times of Network Spaces: Network Sequences and Foreign Investment in Hungary."
By: David Stark (Columbia and Santa Fe Institute) and Balazs Vedres (Central European University and Santa Fe Institute)
JOINT WITH INTERNATIONAL INTERDISCIPLINARY SEMINAR SERIES
ABSTRACT
To model, from its inception, inter-enterprise network formation and its interaction with foreign investment across an entire epoch of rapid and profound economic transformation, we gathered data on the complete ownership histories of 1,696 of the largest Hungarian enterprises from 1987 to 2001. We develop a social sequence analysis to identify distinctive pathways whereby firms use network resources to buffer uncertainty, hide or restructure assets, or gain knowledge and legitimacy. During this period, networked property grew, stabilized, and involved a growing proportion of foreign capital. Cohesive networks of recombinant property were robust, and in fact integrated foreign investment. Although multinationals, through their subsidiaries, dissolved ties in joint venture arrangements, we find evidence that they also built durable networks. Our findings suggest that developing economies do not necessarily face a forced choice between networks of global reach and those of local embeddedness.
12:00pm Tuesday October 11, SH-DH 107
Akos Rona Tas, University of California, San Diego
Title “Consumer Credit and Society in Transition Countries”
ABSTRACT
While a large literature in economics is devoted to the sustainability of the expansion of consumer credit there has been relatively little reflection on the way consumer credit reorganizes social relations between lenders and borrowers and in society in general. One does find some systematic thinking about the link between civil society and credit, but it is mostly focused on public debt or the flow of credit between countries. Sociological treatises of consumer credit, on the other hand, rarely go beyond exposing the supposed catastrophes or extolling the purported virtues of borrowing. I am currently engaged in multinational research project comparing consumer credit markets, and credit card markets in particular, in eight transition countries (Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Russia, China and Vietnam). While my original question guiding this research is concerned with the ways banks decide on creditworthiness of applicants, in this paper I will gather some of the issues emerging from this research that I believe has relevance for civil society. I will begin with developing a notion of modern consumer credit that emerged in a two step process; first, credit separated from other moral obligations, then the relationship between debtor and creditor shifted from trust mediated by personal networks to rational calculation mediated by formal institutions. Then I will discuss the social infrastructure on which modern consumer credit rests and finally, I will make a few observations about some of the social consequences of the growth of consumer credit in transition countries.
12:00pm Tuesday October 25, SH-DH 107
Karl Sauvant, Columbia University (formerly Director, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s Division on Investment, Technology and Enterprise Development)
Title "Offshoring: the cutting edge of the international division of labour"
12:00pm Tuesday November 15, SH-DH 107
Anil K. Gupta, University of Maryland
“Parent-Subsidiary Conflict within Multinational Enterprises”
By: Anil K. Gupta (University of Maryland) and Qing Cao (University of Maryland)
ABSTRACT
Despite its very high salience, the topic of parent-subsidiary (P-S) conflict within multinational enterprises (MNEs) has remained almost totally unexplored. Using empirical data from 374 subsidiaries within 75 MNEs, we find that greater culture distance causes greater P-S conflict in subsidiaries pursuing an exploitation, as opposed to exploration, strategy. We also find that P-S conflict has a negative effect on both subsidiary performance and the subsidiary general manager’s organizational commitment, and that these negative consequences are stronger in the case of acquired, as opposed to greenfield subsidiaries.
12:00pm Tuesday December 13, SH-DH 107
Sri Zaheer, University of Minnesota
Title “Does Mud Stick: Recovery and Performance Effects of Firm Responses to Social Attacks”
By: Anna Lamin (University of Minnesota) and Sri Zaheer (University of Minnesota)
ABSTRACT
Multinational enterprises, and more generally, international firms, have been coming under attack for their international outsourcing practices for a number of years. What responses do these firms use when faced with accusations of illegitimate behavior, and which of these responses work in terms of helping them recover their legitimacy in the short and long term? Finally, does what they do or how they are perceived affect their financial performance?
In this study, we develop and test hypotheses on the effectiveness of four firm responses to accusations – denial, isolation, defiance and accommodation – both suggested by theory and induced from the outsourcing context. We address these questions with twelve years of data from 1990 through 2002 on firms that faced accusations in the retail and apparel industry, coded from media reports and press releases on their use of “sweatshop” labor internationally.
We find that, in the context of accusations, all responses hinder the recovery of legitimacy. However, the responses of isolation and accommodation, which acknowledged the problem, were the most harmful in terms of increasing instead of deflecting criticism. Past legitimacy and a history of accommodation buffer the firm when accused. However, in this context, a decrease in legitimacy with the public was associated with positive stock-market reactions suggesting that there is a trade-off in legitimacy across different groups of stakeholders.
