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This paper examines the determinants of direct investment in the UK by technology-intensive Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs). It also investigates the ways in which investment strategies are being employed for entry to the UK and to achieve access to technology. Drawing on an inductive case study strategy it is found that Chinese SOEs are motivated by their ambitions to close the technology gap by tapping into UK knowledge networks. In terms of entry strategies, the findings indicate that the initial focus on existing technology subsequently shifts to the creation of added R&D capacity and new technology. This is achieved from a permanent UK R&D base which is integrated into the parent companies’ wider R&D networks. Technology creation is enabled by adoption of divergent management practices, especially at operational level, reflecting the parent companies’ surprisingly adaptable mindsets.

This research deals with international negotiations in multinational enterprises (MNEs), in particular the HQ–subsidiary negotiations. The theoretical part of the intercultural negotiation framework (Ott, 2011) highlights the potential for MNE negotiation analysis. An empirical investigation into Japanese MNE negotiations strengthens the theory. Different time perceptions and strategies influence HQ–subsidiary negotiations. The outcome of the fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) shows that an integrative approach needs a higher offer with a margin of at least 20% to cover for relationship building, patience and trust.

This article analyzes termination in international joint ventures (IJVs) with a set theoretic approach and fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to show that parent contribution, ownership, managerial configuration and experience can lead to a successful end of a joint venture. The use of fsQCA provides the causal paths leading to termination. Termination by achieving the objectives and termination by corporate restructuring are the most common ways in IJVs to end the collaborative venture and are a consequence of the joint set of foreign contribution, ownership structure, managerial configuration and experience. The duration of terminated IJVs highlights the importance of managerial experience and local contribution. Resumen: Este artículo analiza la terminación en empresas conjuntas internacionales (IJV) con un enfoque teórico conjunto y un conjunto difuso de Análisis Comparativo Cualitativo (fsQCA) para mostrar que la contribución, propiedad, configuración administrativa y experiencia de los padres pueden conducir al final exitoso de una empresa conjunta. El uso de fsQCA proporciona los caminos causales que conducen a la terminación. La terminación mediante el logro de los objetivos y la rescisión mediante reestructuración corporativa son las formas más comunes en que las IJV ponen fin a la empresa de colaboración y son consecuencia del conjunto de contribución extranjera, estructura de propiedad, configuración gerencial y experiencia. La duración de las IJV terminadas destaca la importancia de la experiencia gerencial y la contribución local. JEL classification: C78, D8, F5, Códigos JEL: C78, D8, F5, Keywords: International joint ventures, Termination strategies, fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), Automotive industry, Palabras clave: Empresas conjuntas internacionales, Estrategias de terminación, conjunto difuso Análisis comparativo cualitativo (fsQCA), Industria automotriz

Brexit is decidedly a “big question”. We agree with International Business scholars who say that such questions need to be addressed using an inter-disciplinary approach. We use bargaining theory models of rational behavior and the negotiation literature to explain various Brexit options and predict their consequences. Considering the lack of relevant experiential knowledge, and the multidimensional high-stakes negotiations underway, it is little wonder that anxiety is growing across all 28 European Union member states. Our analysis supports a coherent approach from rational bargaining model to real-life international negotiation. We position outcome scenarios in different agreement zones and explore their ramifications.

This chapter studies repeated contracting in international strategic alliances on the basis of information asymmetries owing to different cultural, organizational and/or technological backgrounds. The theoretical underpinning shows that these problems are embedded in the theoretical paradigms of contract theory. In general, the alliance partners have several options to take into account the uncertainty about ability and effort of the other players and the impact on the durability of the alliance. The complexity of multi-person decision-making is reflected in incentive schemes for the stages of an alliance life cycle. This dynamic contracting scenario should avoid cheating and enhance cooperation in terms of contributions and expertise in the stages of the life cycle. The outcome is the design of inter-temporal, culturally sensitive contracts.

Qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) is a set of techniques that are designed to transfer subjective data into numeric data. QCA has recently become popular, as it sets out to integrate the strengths of qualitative and quantitative methods while overcoming the key concerns inherent in both the approaches. This chapter discusses and explains the QCA method and highlights the possible application of the method in business and management research. The chapter offers an application example and concludes with suggestions regarding future avenues for using QCA approach in the field of management research.

This chapter introduces the framework of culturally-rooted ‘co-operative cheating’ for international entrepreneurship which provides different degrees of hierarchy and group behavior in individualistic entrepreneurship and group-centered loyalty. International entrepreneurs are exposed to different cultural behavior and workplace cheating. The typologies of co-operative cheating are used to understand the clashes of cultures and how avoid conflicts by offering incentives to co-operate and to divert culturally-rooted cheating.

This paper studies the factors affecting the longevity of international joint ventures (IJVs) in China and investigates the strategic interactions of the players in an IJV (foreign parent, local parent and IJV management) by adopting game theory and using empirical analysis based on national perceptions of time horizons. The theoretical part shows equilibria for the games played by the parents. The empirical evidence, based on a sample of Chinese-US and EU IJVs, as well as Chinese-Japanese and South Korean IJVs, is consistent with the propositions derived from our theoretical models. Our empirical findings show that the longevity of an IJV is affected by senior management control. Access to local knowledge is also a crucial factor affecting longevity. Furthermore, the degree of long-term orientation (LTO) of the parents influences the longevity of Sino-Foreign IJVs. The contributions made by both foreign and local parent firms are also found to influence the longevity.

Cet article mobilise le modele des negociations interculturelles pour analyser la cooperation et le conflit dans les negociations entre acheteurs et vendeurs. Fonde sur le raisonnement de la theorie des jeux, il considere que les modes de negociation, integres culturellement, se transforment en strategies culturellement determinees. Les differences culturelles des negociateurs sont examinees ici au regard de l’offre initiale, des strategies adoptees, du rapport au temps, de la frequence des echecs et des objectifs de negociation. Dans un objectif prescriptif et pour illustrer ce choc des cultures, neuf scenarios de conflit/competition sont declines.

This paper provides new activity-based classifications for cultural differences and similarities, in contrast to the cultural dimensions of hierarchy, group behavior, uncertainty avoidance and timeorientation.\ud Cultural activity types have been classified by Lewis (1999) into linear-active, multiactive\ud and reactive cultures. Moving away from a country perspective based on political boundaries to\ud a cultural community approach, it is not only task-orientation, but also the way cultures communicate, negotiate, and contract that is dominated by activity types. This article conceptualize, hypothesize and test observations with a set-theoretic tool (fsQCA). Our analysis focuses primarily on British and Chinese cultural profiles to start with. This should give us an initial approach towards understanding the similarities, differences and overlaps of cultural behavior. The outcome shows that future managers from Britain and China have more similarities than so far portrayed. Cultural dynamics are at the centre of a cooperative outlook towards managing across cultures.

This study examines the factors and the processes that contribute to a satisfying outcome for negotiations. Based\ud on a set theoretic framework, the authors investigated managers from various countries in terms of their approach\ud to negotiation. The fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) uses detailed data on preparation,\ud information exchange, persuasion, creativity in problem solving and overcoming deadlocks, break-up behavior,\ud as well as how to achieve a satisfying outcome, to test the joint sets of successful outcomes. The implications\ud of these results are relevant for practitioners and future research and highlight necessary and sufficient conditions\ud for a successful negotiation outcome

Does high long-term orientation (LTO) as a distinctive feature of Chinese and Asian national culture still influence modern business decisions? It is difficult to answer this question when any such cultural impact must be qualified by the influence of local Chinese institutions. We study, therefore, different nationalities of international joint ventures (IJVs) within the same institutional setting of China. With foreign partners distanced from their national institutions, this isolates any cultural influence on strategies. We report that strategic commitment does indeed seem to be higher in IJVs with overseas Chinese and other Asian partners, but this conclusion is not general, and is limited to the subset of human resource strategies.

This paper studies a repeated game of contracting in International joint ventures (IJVs) on the basis of information asymmetries due to different cultural backgrounds. Reputational effects, renegotiation and cooperation between the players are analyzed by using formal models. The organization, success and failure of an IJV are determined by the effort levels induced in each stage of the life-cycle. Besides managerial efforts, the cultural distance and convergence influence the design of long-term contracts in form of incentives for efforts of cultural cooperation. This leads to a dynamic contracting over the life-cycle of an IJV, in order to avoid cheating and to enhance co-operation on a cultural and managerial level. The outcome is the design of inter-temporal, culturally sensitive incentive schemes as a new approach to contracting in IJVs.

We live in curious times. People’s sense of individual autonomy co-exists with structures of power. How do these two phenomena co-exist? An important answer to this lies in the menu. The menu operates as a key form of mediation between people’s sense of individual autonomy and larger structures of power, allowing both to co-exist. This article illustrates the operation of the menu in society within consumption, within production, and within citizenship. The article also considers how far the metaphor of the menu in society is compatible with important contemporary attempts to characterize the macro-nature of society. The conclusion articulates how the metaphor of the menu in society can help open up the nature of society to critical investigation.

In lightly regulated economies many jobs are becoming subject to a process of ‘marketization’ involving an externalization of the employment relationship in the context of intensified product market competition. At the same time, a number of front-line jobs are becoming redefined to encompass more proactive sales aims. This study examines two sites at an intersection of these trends — sites where financial service jobs have been marketized and redefined to revolve around proactive sales activity. It examines the key social relations of the sales workers — relations with managers, immediate colleagues, back-office staff, customers and referrers — in considering how far marketization leads to the social relations of the cash nexus along bare market principles. It is found that one group of workers is enmeshed in a dehumanized, instrumental and antagonistic set of relations, while another, smaller, group of workers is insulated against such relations by the functioning of tight trust-based referral networks. It is concluded that the texture of the social relations of sales work under marketization is centrally influenced by the social constitution of the specific product market in which sales workers act. In addition, it is argued that the process of marketization tends to corrode the factors that support the functioning of tight trust-based networks.

The central cultural contradiction of capitalism, argued Bell some 25 years ago, was the existence of rationalized, disciplined production alongside free and hedonistic consumption. This paper argues that this thesis, although overstated, has resonance within contemporary capitalism. The paper then considers the question of how this contradiction is managed when production and consumption meet directly within the service interaction. On the production-side rationalization is joined by customer-orientation, and on the consumption-side management promotes consumption of the enchanting myth of sovereignty. Here the customer is meant to experience a sense of being sovereign. At the same time the space is created for the customer to be, potentially, substantively directed and influenced to follow the requirements that flow from the rationalized elements of production. Key aspects of the service interaction, including the menu and its presentation, the display of empathy and aesthetic labour, and the use of naming within the service interaction, are analysed in terms of the promotion of the enchanting myth of sovereignty. Consumption, however, is a fragile process, and remains, to an important degree, ‘unmanageable’. The analysis, therefore, also examines how the promotion of the enchanting myth of sovereignty systematically creates the conditions for the myth's negation.

This paper offers a new theoretical model which combines game theory and cultural bargaining behavior. It is based on the framework of activity-based cultural types called linear-active (time-is-money approach), multi-active (negotiation-is-an-art approach) and reactive (building-up-trust approach) categories of culture. The complexities of international negotiations can be analyzed by using an activity-based approach with game theoretic bargaining models. In order to come up with useful results, the paper takes on the perspective of multi-active bargaining types as sellers and buyers which shows different outcomes, respectively. The article is structured into the literature review, the description of activity-based bargaining types, the game trees (time lines) and the models of uncertainty. In terms of solution concepts we are dealing with Perfect Bayesian Equilibria (PBE) and a new way of solving three-type problems. The results of the games show the equilibrium types and a possibility to circumvent problems in international business negotiations which are related to different time perceptions and strategic behavior in this respect. It is therefore important to anticipate the deadlocks, stalemates and even break-ups when bargaining with culturally programmed types. We are, now, able to show that international negotiations are prone to fail due to incompatibilities and lack of knowledge of different cultural bargaining strategies.

The literature review is already structured in the rules of the game, which might be in other circumstances unusual, yet it serves the purpose of guiding the reader through the literature and defining the elements of an IJV game in relation to its life cycle. The life cycle of an IJV is related to the timing of the games involved. Thus, the duration of an IJV is split into parts which can be modeled as games.

Suppose the situation of a three-player IJV-model (i = foreign firm, local firm and IJV), the impact of their different utility functions (ui = uFor, uLoc, uIJV) on the management and the efforts of the IJV board of directors may lead to success or failure of the business endeavor. The actions (ci = cFor, cLoc and cIJV) chosen to contribute to the success or failure of the IJV have to be considered too. Different strategic behavior occurs in the long run of an IJV. Developing a reputation over the special stages and considering learning of the players, the co-operative aspect of the joint enterprise in the beginning of the endgame scenario has to be taken as a prerequisite of the game. Apart from focusing on the several reasons, which may lead to the difficulties in managing the joint venture, the abstraction of the problem might provide solution concepts.

This chapter deals with cheating in a cooperative enterprise in an international context. Since an international joint venture (IJV) is a complex organizational form of market entry, the information asymmetries between the parent firms and their cooperative venture may be an important determinant of the success or failure of the endeavour. The problem of cheating may exist between the players in an IJV because of the possibilities for hidden action by the participants. This chapter, therefore, aims to develop a typology to show the likelihood of cheating in this international context. It develops a theoretical model that should help managers to decide on appropriate incentive schemes within the remuneration structure for employees in IJVs, based on cultural and institutional differences, to reduce the likelihood of cheating.

This chapter can be seen as the source for the next chapters. Notation, configuration, and mechanisms are explained and will be used in the adverse selection, moral hazard, signaling and endgame chapters to provide consistency throughout. Regarding an IJV as an international enterprise dealing with multi-person decision-making processes, the information structure between the parent firms and the management bodies is furthermore of special interest. How to handle a decision-making process? Is it a poker or chess situation? Which strategies do we and our counterparts use or how to reveal the hidden information? What about signals? As far as game theory provides solution concepts for bargaining situations, principal-agent relationships and other problems of multi-person decision-making, the application of this mathematical tool might be appropriate, although the formal level will be kept on a minimum in this part.

Considering an international joint venture as a game of three players with different tasks, capacities and strengths, the focus of this chapter lies on showing the theoretical background of the static common agency problem. As far as two parent firms located in two countries with special regulations are concerned, there exists at least one agent on the other side. The agent has hidden information of the joint venture enterprise. To reveal this information, incentive schemes and reporting methods could be applied. The theory of multi-principals describes how different incentive mechanisms compete with each other. Regarding the set of relationships between several parent firms and the joint venture, they regulate a set of competing contracts in which the control of the process is shared among these different participants. The design of control and communication channels is crucial to the underlying problem.

Based on the uncertainties about the quality of the management, this chapter will look at the dynamic approach towards this problem. In general, skills are not observable ex ante. Thus, contracts have to be offered to get a true revelation of the quality of their skills. Several ways of moving are possible which might result in screening or signaling. Signaling takes place when the agent knows his ability and offers his skills first. In case the parents move first and offer their contracts, there we have a screening scenario.

The paper reviews what the prior literature has to say about the issues of conflict and cooperation during the life cycle of an international joint venture (IJV). The rules of the game are derived from an overview of the empirical IJVliterature. The timing and the order of the play show the difficulties due to information asymmetries. The paper offers a framework to organize the literature about the games being played in an IJV such as bargaining, common agency and repeated games.

In an international joint venture, two parent companies in two countries called the local and the foreign firm found a new enterprise or form a third player - the IJV–management or the board of directors of the IJV. The triangle structure of this particular enterprise creates a special information problem: the common agency (several principals have one agent) situation. The two parent firms contribute their expertise to the joint enterprise in order to develop a new product or production process, to get market access or to avoid risks. Since the third player acts as their agent in the IJV, both principals are interested in gaining knowledge about the effort of the IJV–management. The agent knows more about the actual costs, the production process, market potential and/or other factors of the management process. Thus, the parents offer incentives to get truthful reports about the ability or effort levels of the management by applying the revelation principle in order to disclose the hidden information or action. The paper studies the translation of the particular IJV information structure into the terms of common agency theory as a special form of the game theoretical application to a three–player mechanism design problem.

The paper studies the applicability of game theory to the last period of an international joint venture life cycle. Since the past three decades were marked by the prosperity of multinational enterprises, IJVs are coming more and more in a mature stage. The termination of a cross–border business transaction causes, in general, various problems and needs mechanisms to solve. Besides legal considerations, issues of decision–making in endgame scenarios, such as the strategic settings of co–operation and control, play an important role. The special structure of the IJV–triangle might tell more about future ways of termination and the effect of co–operation and conflict. Not only the constellation of the players but also the duration of an IJV contract (short–term and long–term) has an impact on the behaviour of the players in the last stage of the life cycle. Using theoretical frameworks of game theory like common agency games and repeated games in combination offers a tool for dealing with special termination issues. "Divorce scenarios" capture problems of reputation, learning and renegotiation in which the repetition of certain actions leads to the end of the game.