Global Enterprise Management

A firm can only be successful if it applies effective strategies and possesses appropriate intrinsic resources and capabilities and related extrinsic information in order to analyze market opportunities and to capture market share to sustain competitive advantage in the global business landscape. In this context, consumer knowledge, within the framework of a groups’ consumer behavior, is a critical strategic factor in creating competitive advantage. Within this framework it is important to understand that competitive advantage can no longer be measured solely by the amount of resources that are readily accessible or by material production. Accessibility to consumer knowledge is an integral part of a firm’s core competencies. Strategically, consumer knowledge is an intangible resource that helps firms become more flexible and thus more competitive in the business environment (de Vita, Mercurio, & Testa, 2007).

The internationalization of business and the intensification of global competition have brought new challenges into the management of human resources in multinational enterprises (MNEs). These processes have also created the need for a renewed theoretical and practical interest in the management of the employment relationship from an international and comparative perspective. Academic scholarship responded to this need with the emergence of international and comparative human resource management (HRM) as a disciplinary field (Brewster & Mayrhofer, 2012; Delbridge, Hauptmeier, & Sengupta, 2011; Dowling, Festing & Engle, 2008; Martinez-Lucio, 2014).

Job stress has been steadily gaining attention from researchers in many disciplines and is a fundamental theme in the fields of human resources and risk management, as well as in public and occupational health, organizational psychology, health and safety, and medicine. The increasing attention given to job stress can be attributed to the different aspects of the problem: it is a health issue, but it has also become an economic issue for many people and organizations, and for society in general.

Diversity and ethics are two topics that have skyrocketed to the forefront of global corporate performance in the past decades, and have done so for a reason. With phenomena such as glass and pink ceilings, as well as a global financial meltdown, mainly caused by immoral business performance, still on their performance radar, global corporations have come to the understanding that some rigorous measures need to be put in place. Increasingly, we can see the phrases “diversity” and “ethical performance” surfacing in corporate mission statements. At the same time, we see positions such as Chief Diversity Officer and Chief Ethics Officer displayed on the strategic officers’ lists at major corporations. These are all outflows of a not-so-distant past that was tainted by dreadful policies and behaviors in these two regards. Yet, while the above trends represent a positive development, a deeper look into the implementation of diversity and ethics policies in many corporations leads to the disheartening conclusion that they oftentimes implement these policies in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons.

During the last few decades, multinational enterprises (MNEs) have become leading actors on the world economy arena, above and beyond all the controversies that have surrounded them. Although the historical roots of multinationals date from ancient times (Moore & Lewis, 2000), and their dynamics has been revealed by many scholars since the early decades of the twentieth century (Rugman, 2009), the multinational phenomenon—which gave birth to the “truly global enterprises” (Dunning & Lundan, 2008, p. 191) as “key drivers of globalization” (Rugman & Verbeke, 2004, p. 3)—is a much more recent one.

In past decades, standardization versus adaptation has been a focus in global marketing. Standardization is an attempt to offer an essentially uniform marketing mix to all the markets in which firms operate around the world (Cavusgil & Zou, 1994; Dimitrova & Rosenbloom, 2010). Adaptation, on the other hand, involves tailoring marketing strategies to suit business environments, such as social, legal, and economic environments in overseas markets (Dimitrova & Rosenbloom, 2010; O’Donnell & Jeong, 2000; Wong & Merrilees, 2008). Since the publication of Levitt’s (1983) article on the globalization of markets, the issue of standardization versus adaptation in global marketing activities has been intruding into the international marketing literature. He suggested that owing to improved communications, more international travel, and the emergence of demographically similar segments in various countries, there has been an increase in the similarity of markets across the globe. This suggestion is based on a view that the world market consists of a number of uniform markets rather than a large number of different markets. Firms can gain economic benefits by approaching the world market with a standardized large-scale production. Some empirical studies on the Australia context suggest that the standardization of distribution and product strategies has an effect on firm performance (Chung, 2003).

What is a business model? In its essence, a firm’s business model is a routine for (i) creating economic value for the firm’s stakeholders and (ii) appropriating part of this value for the firm itself and its shareholders (Osiyevskyy, 2014; Osiyevskyy & Dewald, 2015; Zott et al., 2011). In this definition, the term “routine” is used in a sense of the evolutionary theory of the firm (Nelson & Winter, 1982), as a regular behavioral pattern within an organization. In other words, a business model is a regular sequence of activities performed by the firm that serves two purposes. On the one hand, a business model must create economic value for all of a firm’s stakeholders (most importantly, customers, partners in the value chain, and employees), sufficient enough to motivate them to interact (participate in economic transactions) with the firm. This value creation implies that the benefits that each stakeholder receives from the firm exceed the costs incurred. On the other hand, the business model must ensure that a sufficient portion of the created economic value is retained for the firm’s shareholders in the form of profit; therefore, the total revenue received by the firm from all economic transactions with other stakeholders must exceed the costs incurred by the firm.

A relatively recent term that has come into favor by shedding light on the transformative processes of globalization has been “glocalization.” In a narrow sense, glocalization has come to suggest the interplay between the global and the local dynamics in order to produce unique kinds of political, social, and economic relations. Several studies suggest that the intersection of global strategies and local elements produces the source of a durable competitive advantage in the case of multinational firms. However, little research has empirically investigated the ways in which multinational firms are able to successfully apply a glocal approach in order to obtain superior performance.

Managers have long been faced with government regulations, such as worker protection, wage and price controls, and production standards (Braithwaite & Drahos, 2000). However, the intensity of regulation has increased dramatically since the Second World War. Estimates that regulation costs 10 percent of a developed country’s gross domestic product are not unusual (e.g., Friedman 2003; see also the studies cited in Crain & Crain, 2010, note 10). Although regulatory costs can be relatively larger for smaller businesses (World Bank, 2013), managers of multinational enterprises (MNEs) face the additional complexity of dealing with multiple governments (Nicoletti, Scarpetta, & Boylaud, 2000), whose rules and practices not only vary tremendously but all too often conflict (cf. Braithwaite & Drahos, 2000). This particularly is the case when dealing with taxation.

The past several decades have witnessed the continuous growth of international trade volume in the global economy (Martin, 2001; Simintiras & Thomas, 1998), during which time business globalization, employment mobility, and flattening organizations together have underlined the popularity and the necessity of communication across cultural boundaries. Culture affects what and how negotiators communicate with each other during the bargaining process (Kopelman & Olekalns, 1999). It also increases the uncertainties faced by each party due to various differences in their behavioral norms and patterns (Luo & Shenkar, 2002). In striving to overcome cultural barriers at the bargaining table, negotiators are likely to adapt their behavior across cultural gaps. For example, Rao and Schmidt (1998) combined the literatures of strategy and behavioral inf luence to investigate negotiations for international alliances and found that US negotiators use more soft strategies with their counterparts who are at a greater cultural distance (e.g., Far East and Eastern Europe) because they are “adapting their tactics to the culture of their counterpart” (p. 682). The adaptation of negotiator behavior indicates that the negotiation process is not invariable from a behavioral perspective.

The Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide) developed by the Project Management Institute (PMI, 2012) is a project management methodology that is known and used worldwide. This methodology describes the decision-making processes in the ten knowledge areas of project management inter alia project integration management, project scope management, project time management, project cost management, project quality management, and project risk management. Another area is a group of project processes connected with procurement management. From the point of view of the contractual relationship, the project may occur if both the client and the provider are contracting for goods and services. In the first of these cases, we will address contract management processes, and, in the second case, we will address procurement management processes. In a situation in which the agreement seems to be beneficial to the contractor, but he or she is not able to provide sufficient resources for its implementation or the knowledge, experience, and technology are not sufficient, the contractor will be considered for the purchase of selected scopes of work with external contractors. The structure of the PMBOK Guide processes is based on a systemic approach that determines the range of the input data in the sphere of implementation tools of individual processes and their results.

International acquisitions (IAs) have become an increasingly important strategy for firms in global economies. In particular, IAs by emerging market multinational corporations (EMNCs) are rapidly gaining important attention (Beebenroth & Hemmert, 2013) because they have recently started influencing the world economies by means of their acquisitions of major MNCs from advanced economies with an annual growth rate of 26 percent (Rothenbuecher & Hoyningen-Huene, 2008).