How Social Context Influences CPA Tactics: Insights from the Business History of the British Empire.

While Corporate Political Activity (CPA) is an increasingly important area of managment research, there is growing awareness of the limitations of the theoretical tools used to understand CPA and firms decisions about which CPA tactics to use. This history-to-theory paper discusses the range of CPA tactics used by British MNEs during the British Empire, documenting that the tactics selected varied along the directness and formality dimensions. We document that as Britain's domestic political system democratized, those British MNEs who participated the imperial project adopted increasingly indirect CPA tactics. We also find that changing moral economy of the political marketplace changes which CPA tactics are used by MNEs. Our findings also suggest that MNEs may have more political power than is generally assumed in the management literature on CPA, particularly in non-democratic countries. Our paper contributes to the wider project of developing a Political Marketplace 2.0 theoretical lens by illustrating the relevance of the historian Thompson's concept of moral economy. We discuss the implications of our research for teleological or Whig views of history and for thinking about how future institutional change could change the CPA tactics used by MNEs headquartered in emerging markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]