Institutional Forms of British Foreign Direct Investment in South America

This article uses South American evidence to substantiate a claim that, notwithstanding the many difficulties of controlling overseas agents, effective strategic control was exerted over much British direct investment in South America through entrepreneurial companies or mercantile investment groups before 1914. The new definition of foreign direct investment established in the 1970s embraces corporate investment, of a sort common in North America, for which British directors were responsible even though they exerted inadequate control, but South American experience, relating to a substantially larger body of investment, supports the stronger contention that it captures substantial pools of entrepreneurial capital, more clearly deserving the name foreign direct investment, and therefore provides a category that can be applied consistently in discussions of foreign direct investment and the expansion of international business over the whole of the period from 1860 to the present.     

The organisation of British textile exports to the River Plate and Chile: Merchant houses in operation,c. 1810–59

During c. 1810–59 over 260 British merchant houses operated in the River Plate or Chile, and many more in the rest of Latin America. These were times when Anglo-Latin American economic relations remained largely commercial, since the region was an important commercial partner of Britain. British investment was unimportant during this period in the region. The main economic activity of these mercantile houses was the import of textiles in exchange for bullion, specie, bills of exchange and local produce. Yet the textile trade has received little attention, despite the importance of the region as a market for British manufacturers. This paper describes in detail the relations between textile manufacturers and/or merchants in Britain and merchants on the spot, in particular for the marketing oftextiles, the backbone of the business of British merchants operating in Latin America. This paper focuses on the particular case of the Southern Cone during c. 1810–59.     

Free-Standing Companies in the Oil Sector in Romania and Poland Before 1948: Typologies and Competencies

Recent research on free-standing companies has focused predominantly on pre-1914 British-registered businesses. The prevailing view suggests that the post-1918 business environment no longer favoured such institutional forms and were replaced over time by tighter managerial hierarchies. In this article it is argued that free-standing companies of British and non-British origin were still active participants in the inter-war period, particularly in the oil industry of Poland and Romania. Two case studies are developed to illustrate this observation: the British Phoenix Oil & Transport Co. and the French Crédit Générale des Pétroles. This article shows how these free-standing companies integrated horizontally and vertically and evolved into new organisational structures resembling the so-called ‘classic’ multinational entities. Their viability and success over the long run depended on their ability to withstand the unfavourable financial conditions of the early 1930s, which in turn was largely shaped by country-specific conditions affecting their field of operation.     

The missing link? Understanding the relationship between individual and organisational learning

This article recognises that individual learning plays a key role in organisational learning. It identifies that there has been little empirical research to date exploring the interaction between individual and organisational learning. New research is presented from a company engaged in organisational learning, by a case study investigation utilising qualitative and quantitative research methods. The article explores key issues in training and development related to the interaction of individual and organisational learning, and concludes that individual learning is related to organisational learning through a range of factors including positive learning climate, active informal learning by individuals, and effective communication of skills and knowledge.     

Unions and Management in Engineering: A Case Study, 1964–79

Britain' direct investment overseas has become the subject of debate. Not only is much more known about British multinationals, but the concepts of investment groups and free-standing companies have further enriched the discussions. This study examines an example of British capital export – to the Brazilian coffee trade before and after the First World War. The case study illustrates the difficulties in developing typologies for direct investment abroad, and it also considers the managerial and organisational problems facing such companies for the businessmen who developed them. Further, the article speculates that the retreat of British commercial enterprise from Latin America before 1914 may have been more selective than was once thought.     

The British house magazine 1945 to 2015: The creation of family,organisation and markets

Abstract

This article examines the history of British house magazines from 1945 to 2015. It discusses their content, audience and function within companies. From tools of internal public relations, house magazines switched to being used as mediums of industrial relations in the 1960s and 1970s, and by the late 1980s were increasingly applied to the creation of corporate identity, organisational culture and internal marketing. They were also forced to accommodate the rise of internal communications and electronic media. The article discusses the rise and relative decline of the British house magazine, and ends by asking whether it has a future.     

The Development of Female Global Managers: The Role of Mentoring and Networking

This paper explores the role of mentoring and networking in the career development of global female managers. The paper is based on data collected from interviews with 50 senior female managers. The voices of the female managers illustrate some of the difficulties associated with informal organisational processes, in particular mentoring and networking, which hinder their career development. The findings confirm that female managers can miss out on global appointments because they lack mentors, role models, sponsorship, or access to appropriate networks – all of which are commonly available to their male counterparts. The interviewees suggest that men, as the dominant group, may want to maintain their dominance by excluding women from the informal interactions of mentoring and networking. The findings further suggest that if females had more access to networks and mentors they could be socialised in both the formal and informal norms of the organisation and gain career advantages from these. The managers reveal that they encounter additional barriers in ‹a man’s world’ and remind us that there is still much to be changed.     

From mercantile strategy to domestic demand stimulation: changes in China's solar PV subsidies

Through scrutinizing China's industrial subsidies towards its solar photovoltaic (PV) sector from a theoretical perspective constructed by Michael Porter on the government's role in forging national comparative advantages, this study tries to capture recent dynamics in China's state capitalism, which has been evolving from a mercantile stage in which most subsidies were designed to influence factor conditions and supporting industries, to a new stage of domestic demand with more subsidies aimed at reshaping domestic demand conditions to absorb redundant manufacture capacity. China has emerged as the world's largest solar panel producer, but compared to its fast-expanding wind power market that has congenital advantages in attracting policy support, China's domestic solar PV market has been underdeveloped and failed to absorb a large part of its inflated production capacity. Empirical evidences have shown that in sync with the state's recent policy shift to domestic demand from export-orientated mercantile strategy, the government's role in supporting the solar PV industry has been transforming from subsidizing the production side to subsiding the demand side. As solar PV power generation is approaching the breaking point of grid parity with existing subsidies and feed-in tariffs, China could witness its PV installed capacity grow exponentially in the near future.     

The Coalescence of a Cluster of Corporate International Banks, 1855–75

Through reviewing the establishment of British international corporate banks during the mid-nineteenth century, the paper reveals the remarkable, disproportionate role played by a promotional group composed of members and associates of the London private bank Glyn, Mills. However, despite the banking and merchanting backgrounds of this group, the successful creation of these international banks involved the resolution of substantial difficulties, arising from competition for the necessary concessions, problems in composing suitable boards of directors, and both economic and political instability. This is shown through an examination in particular of the founding of the Imperial Ottoman Bank, the London & Brazilian Bank and the Anglo-Italian Bank. Lastly, an analysis of the subscribers to the banks' shares reveals that, more widely, they were largely backed financially by the banking and mercantile milieu of the metropolis, but also with a significant capital involvement of a European cosmopolitan bourgeoisie.     

Change dynamics in institutional discontinuities: Do formal or informal institutions change first? Lessons from rule changes in professional American baseball

Abstract

Extant research presents a conflicting picture of change dynamics during institutional discontinuities. Some studies propose or depict formal rules as changing first. Others argue that norms need to change before formal rules can be revisited, let alone change. An examination of the literature suggests a contingency theory. In mature organisational fields with institutionalised informal rules, norms need to be questioned and changed before any change in formal rules can take place. On the other hand, in emergent organisational fields – where no particular rules of the game have been institutionalised ? change in higher-level institutions begins with a change in formal rules. The article also presents two historical cases of major institutional change in professional American baseball that illustrate the theory proposed.     

Corporate Psychological Defences: An Oil Spill Case

Organisational psychological defences protect the self-esteem and moral integrity of the organisational personality even at the expense of sacrificing the morality of actions. This paper analyses the spectrum of defences used by an oil refinery and its parent company during an oil spill incident. A hypothetical model of defences built on Swajkowski’s four responses to accusations of organisational misconduct – refusals, excuses, justifications and concessions – is tested through this case. On the basis of empirical findings it is obvious that defences delay, impede and interrupt the mitigation and recovery actions of incidents. It is not possible to break the defence behaviour of individuals because it is a built-in psychological mechanism in all humans serving a valuable purpose of dosing the pain of injury. However, it is possible to separate individual and organisational behaviour so that automatic organisational procedures mitigate, recover and, ultimately, prevent incidents. The organisational psychological task of crisis management is to mitigate the organisation’s ego defences, recover from its emotional turmoil and prevent further traumas by making its ego stronger and more flexible. The argument of this paper is that in practice organisational defences act as bumpers against becoming too conscious of the gap between the corporate rhetoric and reality, as subconscious breaks against too fast change demands, and as batteries in their preconscious effort to prepare for the change. Organisational refusals act as bumpers, excuses as breaks and justifications as batteries, while concessions imply that a change towards a more responsible corporation is taking place. Tarja Ketola is Adjunct Professor of Environmental Management at the Department of Management, Turku School of Economics, Finland. She took her Ph. D. at Imperial College, University of London, and worked as a Lecturer in the Department of Management Studies at Brunel University before returning to Finland. Her research interests include eco-psychological leadership, strategic environmental management and corporate responsibility. She has written books and published articles in many journals, including Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, Business Strategy and the Environment, Sustainable Development and Long Range Planning.     

Corporate Social Responsibility in China: A Corporate Governance Approach

Ethics training—an important means to foster ethical decision-making in organisations—is carried out formally as well as informally. There are mixed findings as regards the effectiveness of formal versus informal ethics training. This study is one of its first kinds in which we have investigated the effectiveness of ethics training as it is carried out in the Indian IT sector. We have collected the views of Indian IT industry professionals concerning ethics training (N = 266), and employed positivist (regression analysis and hierarchical linear modeling) and interpretive research (content analysis). We first have argued that the importance of the perception towards ethics has bearings not only on the individual ideologies but also on the organisational ethical values. In doing so, first we have conceptualised a theoretical framework: Perception of Ethics Training in Employees and Organisations (PETINEO). Second, we have studied the correlations between various components of this model. Third, we, under the rubric of PETINEO, examined the effectiveness of ethics training programmes for the Indian IT companies. Fourth, we have elaborated upon the results of our study. Our results suggest that the combination of both formal and informal means to undertake ethics training has superior impact on ethical decision-making in the Indian IT industry as compared to the use of any one of them in isolation.     

Competitive advantage and the transformation of value chains over time: The example of a South Korean diversified business group, 1953–2013

We examine the historical evolution of different elements in value chains that create value-added and competitive advantage. This is achieved by using the conceptual model of the ‘smile curve’ with a longitudinal case study of a diversified business group, CJ Group, a former affiliated firm of Samsung Group. We found that the value-added structure graph in the industrialisation period displayed an ‘upside-down U shape’, indicating that production and manufacturing were the most value-adding sectors. However, in the more recent knowledge-based economy period, the graph shows a quite different shape, indicating R&D, firm infrastructure, manufacturing, logistics, service, and marketing as sources of value-added. This shows that competitive advantage diversified into other fields to fit with the changed economy. We also investigate what type of organisational structure, strategy, and capabilities were adopted for organisational change. We found an evolution, with an unrelated diversification strategy by altering capabilities from contacts and generic to organisational and technological capabilities.     

Consumer Marketing in Britain 1914–60

This paper explores the implications of the post-war settlement for British industrial productivity performance during the period 1945–60. We argue that the exigencies of the situation at the end of the war precluded supply-side reforms which might have promoted faster growth. At the same time, however, the informal ‘social contract’ which emerged was conducive to low unemployment without inflation. Building upon our earlier findings for the 1930s, we show that the weakness of competition policy inhibited British catching-up on American productivity levels, while long-standing aspects of the British systems of human capital accumulation and industrial relations became more costly as industry adopted more American-style production methods. We support our conclusions with both econometric analysis and case studies.     

Currency board,dollarisation or flexible exchange rates for emerging economies? Reflections on Argentina

Since the 1990s many emerging countries have adopted a fixed exchange-rate peg vis-à-vis a reserve currency in order to cope with economic imbalances such as buoyant inflation, high unemployment or staggering economic growth. However, after a period of economic stabilisation and prosperity, overheating effects showed up in several countries that were often coupled with difficulties in the banking and/or the real estate sector. Sticking with a fixed peg, the likelihood of a currency crisis increased. The case of Argentina shows that even with a currency board it is difficult to restore confidence if a crisis has already been developing for several years. This article presents an economic analysis of the Argentina crisis.     

Looking for contagion in currency futures markets

This article tests whether there are pure contagion effects in both conditional means and volatilities among British pound, Canadian dollar, Deutsche mark, and Swiss franc futures markets during the 1992 ERM crisis. A conditional version of international capital asset pricing model (ICAPM) in the absence of purchasing power parity (PPP) is used to control for economic fundamentals. The empirical results indicate that overall there are no mean spillovers among those futures markets, but they are detected during the crisis period. That is, past return shocks originating in any one of the four markets have no impact on the other three markets during the entire sample period, suggesting that these markets are weak‐form efficient. However, this weak‐form market efficiency fails to hold during the market turmoil, especially for British pound and Swiss franc, and the sources of contagion‐in‐mean effects are mainly due to the return shocks originating in three European currency futures markets. As for the contagion‐in‐volatility, it is detected for British pound only because its conditional volatility is influenced by the negative volatility shocks from Canadian dollar, Deutsche mark, and Swiss franc, with Deutsche mark playing the dominant role in generating these shocks. JEL Classifications: C32; F31; G12. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 23:957–988, 2003     

Managing negative word-of-mouth: an exploratory study

Abstract

This exploratory study investigates how executive-level and functional managers in three large organisations understand and respond to negative word-of-mouth (NWOM). The findings, based principally on analysis of 54 interviews over 3 years, show that organisations devote far more resources to the management of NWOM than they do to the promotion of positive word-of-mouth. Marketing and other customer-facing work groups play varied roles in organisational response to NWOM, which often involves complaints management and crisis management. We find that senior management, marketing, sales, advertising, PR and contact-centre staff all have different fears about NWOM and therefore respond to it in various ways. Our recommendations for better management of NWOM stress three points – leadership, organisational readiness and public relations management.     

The early emergence of European commercial education in the nineteenth century: Insights from higher engineering schools

The setting of European commercial education has traditionally been addressed with reference to higher schools of commerce and faculties of business. This has not taken into account empirical evidence showing that, historically, higher engineering schools also offered a mixed education in mercantile and technical subjects to students who wanted to devote themselves to business. However, this type of schooling has received little attention. This article investigates how commercial departments from higher engineering schools constituted an initial, yet ephemeral, public attempt to build an engineering model of commercial education that closely combined mercantile and technical instruction well before the twentieth century.     

The globalization of retailing: volumes I and II

As a form of crisis management, business continuity management (BCM) has evolved since the 1970s in response to the technical and operational risks that threaten an organisation's recovery from hazards and interruptions. This paper examines the development of business practices related to crisis management alongside the emergence of legislation, regulations and standards (drivers) requiring organisations to implement specific business continuity activities. From the resulting historical review, three distinct phases of management practice and four phases in the development of drivers are identified, revealing the influence of events over governance, the internationalisation of influence, and organisational resilience as a meta-institution.