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Management International Review
Published in: Management International Review 4/2015

01-08-2015 | Research Article

Are Social Ties Always Valuable to Knowledge Search? Contextualizing Knowledge Search by Foreign Subsidiary Executives in an Emerging Economy

Author: Hongxin Zhao

Published in: Management International Review | Issue 4/2015

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Abstract

The extant research of cross-border knowledge acquisition by multinational enterprises often assumes away the role of local contexts within which knowledge acquisition occurs. To extend this line of research, this study contextualizes the knowledge search by foreign subsidiary executives to examine the contingency value of social ties. The results based on the multilevel analyses of both micro (433 dyad ties) and macro effects of the regional knowledge environment (26 provinces) provide support for the hypotheses that, though close social ties facilitated knowledge search as predicted by social capital theory, the utility value of social ties for knowledge search tends to be attenuated in the regions with high level of social capital and FDI density.
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Appendix
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Footnotes
1
Technology cluster is different from learning region. Learning region is a broader context primarily referring to a geographic area endowed with knowledge-facilitative social and economic institutions. In this sense, technology cluster can be a subset of the learning region.
 
2
In our survey based on the random sample, we do not exclude respondents who are Chinese by ethnicity for the reasons: (1) we target respondents who are executives representing foreign subsidiaries even though some of them happen to be Chinese by ethnicity. (2) Among these executives of Chinese ethnicity, there may be a mix of different types such as some are descendants of Chinese but were born and grew up in another country (e.g., US, UK etc.), some are Chinese but studied and lived in a foreign country and are expatriated on job assignments in China, some could be a “third-country national” in international human resource term, who are Chinese ethnicity hired by a MNE to manage the operation in China (e.g., a Singaporean works for GE in China).
 
3
While social capital can be measured in many ways, the review of social capital research by Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998) conceptualizes social capital consists of structural (the proper-ties of the social system and of the network of relations as a whole), the relational (the kind of personal relation-ships people have developed with each other through a history of interactions, and the cognitive (shared representations, interpretations, and systems of meaning among parties dimensions. The extant studies have used variety of ways to measure the relational dimension of social capital at various levels. Just to name a few, for example, Ellis (2000) studied the impact of personal relationships established through business interactions market entry and export initiation. Zhao and Hsu (2007) examined the effects of family-based personal ties on resource commitment and timing of entry. At the national level, Knack and Keefer (1997) measured the “associative aspect” of social capital based on nine items from World Value Survey (WVS).
 
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Metadata
Title
Are Social Ties Always Valuable to Knowledge Search? Contextualizing Knowledge Search by Foreign Subsidiary Executives in an Emerging Economy
Author
Hongxin Zhao
Publication date
01-08-2015
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Published in
Management International Review / Issue 4/2015
Print ISSN: 0938-8249
Electronic ISSN: 1861-8901
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11575-014-0234-3

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