Management Department MOS - Srividya Jandhyala - “Firms Political Strategies Abroad: Opening the Black Box of Commercial Diplomacy”

The Management Department & The Research Center

- MOS  WORKSHOP -

SRIVIDYA JANDHYALA

will present her paper

 Tuesday, June 5th 2018

   Room N231 – 9:15 a.m in Cergy

3:15 p.m in Singapore

Theme: “Firms Political Strategies Abroad: Opening the Black Box of Commercial Diplomacy”

Abstract: A considerable literature in strategy and management assesses firms’ political and non-market strategies, including questions such as how lobbying and political connections influence firm performance. Yet the bulk of this literature has focused on domestic political strategies, ignoring the potential role of political influence abroad. In this paper we examine firms’ political strategies abroad, with a particular focus on the role of commercial diplomacy in investment disputes. We make two primary contributions. First, the few existing studies of international political ties typically treat diplomacy itself as a “black box”, using proxy measures of diplomacy and inferring the effects of diplomacy by observing firm outcomes. We instead use a unique dataset of leaked diplomatic cables to provide a systematic empirical assessment of the specific actions American diplomats undertake to assist firms managing their relationships with host governments. Second, we use structured, focused comparisons across three case studies to probe two potential mechanisms driving diplomats’ decisions to intervene in disputes: a firm’s political power and connections, and its ability to frame its case in clear normative terms. We find that normative framing is particularly important: when firms can successfully frame their treatment at the hands of the host government as illegitimate, diplomats are significantly more likely to intervene—even for small, politically unimportant firms. These findings have important implications for firms seeking to capitalize on available diplomatic channels in managing their relations with host states, and suggest nonmarket strategy can be important even when firms have limited resources for lobbying or building political connections.

Department Seminar Series - Tiziana Casciaro - University of Toronto - Tuesday June 26th 2018

The Management Department

Department Seminar Series

Tiziana casciaro

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

 Tuesday, June 26th 2018

   Room N231 at 10:00 am (4.00 p.m in Singapore)

Theme:  “How do people perceive organizational networks? Toward a theory of Gestalt versus elemental network perception”

 Abstract: “How people perceive organizational networks influences individual and organizational outcomes above and beyond the effects of the network structure underlying those perceptions. In investigating these effects, research on network perception has been dominated by an elemental view of social cognition, which assumes that people encode and recall each tie in the network, and construct their view of the network as a whole based on the sum of these ties.  This dominant view has marginalized a Gestalt, holistic view of network perception, whereby people perceptions of an actor’s network position (i.e., central vs peripheral, high status vs. low status, liked vs. disliked) are created through a top-down, category-driven process that hinges heavily on their organized prior knowledge, as opposed to relying primarily on bottom-up, data-driven processes. I argue and document empirically that recognizing the distinction between elemental and Gestalt forms of network perception allows a greater understanding of the descriptive (how people do perceive networks) and prescriptive (how people should perceive networks) implications of network perception for organizational behavior. I then set the conceptual foundations for a theory that encourages a distinction between thin structure and deep structure as boundary conditions for the relevance of elemental and Gestalt network perceptions. Elemental network cognition, I propose, is necessary to capture the effects of deep structural features of the network—the complex topology of network edges. Gestalt network perceptions may suffice instead when a phenomenon can be understood in terms of its thin structural features—higher-level aggregates and trends of social connections. Working toward such a theory can direct future studies toward a fuller account of the way people form network perceptions, the boundary conditions for the impact of those perceptions on organizational phenomena, and the methodological options that such descriptive and prescriptive theorizing opens up for research on organizational networks.