Search results

Corporate growth and how to finance it are issues fundamental to business strategy. Starting in the mid‐1960s, many firms issued bonds and borrowed heavily to fuel their growth. At the time, this method of creating capital offered numerous potential benefits, including improved returns to shareholders and lower average costs of capital. However, as the economy began to enter a volatile period of increased competition and skyrocketing interest rates, many firms began to feel the first symptoms of overindulgence in debt. Yet, despite these warning symptoms, the trend toward higher leverage and declining interest‐expense‐coverage ratios continued clear through the 1970s. Only with the financial crunch of the 1980s bringing the well‐publicized problems of Braniff, Chrysler, and International Harvester before us as cautionary tales, have corporate strategists begun to ask themselves: Has financial leverage gone too far?

The following bibliography focuses mainly on programs which can run on IBM microcomputers and compatibles under the operating system PC DOS/MS DOS, and which can be used in online information and documentation work. They fall into the following categories:

Antitrust legislation in the United States was originally enacted in 1890. This legislation and subsequent amendments established the historic precedent of government controlling the power of business by limiting its influence over markets. This paper reflects on why this unique set of laws was originally enacted, reviews these laws in the United States compared to other global competitors, and recommends revisions in the present legislation to more accurately reflect the competitive arena that United States based companies face in the global economy.

This is a follow‐up of a study conducted by William Shanklin and published in 1988. He found a positive relationship between market share and return on total assets, but concluded that the absence of market share leadership did not preclude achievement of superior profitability. Attempts to verify Shanklin′s findings, but analysis of the data in this study does not support Shanklin; it suggests that the relationship between market share and profitability is questionable, except in certain industries. The pursuit of market share is not a useful “generic” strategy which can be applied in most industries.

The complexity and competitiveness of global business is increasingly being managed by international strategic alliances. As a result, the two central tenets of market‐based‐capitalism, that competitive market forces ensure optimum innovation‐led growth and that individual firms can best accomplish this by competition rather than cooperation, are being re‐examined. These tenets directed management in an elaborate process of alliances control, which is now giving way to a system of control based on trust. The economic model explaining the formation of alliances and the research on joint venture alliances are discussed. This is followed by a discussion of trust and a process‐approach to trust development. Finally, a case methodology to examine evolving IJV relationships is proposed.

We introduce agency and team production theories to explain the international joint venture (IJV) phenomenon. We regard IJV partners as participants in a team production and identified agency conflicts among partners as well as between parents and IJV affi liates. We empirically test the stability of IJVs with such determinants as the existence of monitoring principal, the history of repeated exchanges between partners, the efficiency of mutual monitoring by partners, the effi ciency of affiliate monitoring by parent firms, and the degree of international experience of the partners. The test results show that the existence of monitoring principal and the degree of international experience prove to be significant factors for IJV stability.

Porter's activity‐based view of the firm is a comprehensive strategic framework which analyzes firm‐level competitive advantage. Although Porter's activity‐based view is widely cited by academics, taught to students, and applied by practitioners, little is known about its intellectual roots. Given that a framework's intellectual antecedents not only determine its current content, but also its future development, this paper aims to examine the intellectual roots of Porter's activity‐based view and the value chain.

The paper examines Porter's writings in an effort to document his influences while developing the activity‐based view and value chain. Porter's and other scholars' explanations are found to be lacking, so the paper ventures further down paths first suggested by Porter and others.

Whereas Porter's five forces framework built on the existing industrial organization paradigm, the activity‐based view is not derived from any existing paradigms. While consultants of the 1970s impacted Porter's development of the value chain and the activity‐based view, its deeper roots lay in operations research, particularly activity analysis; and the work of Arch Shaw, who was the first to teach a business policy course at Harvard Business School. Porter's contribution is to bring the diverse threads together into a coherent whole which managers can apply to analyze and improve their competitive positions.

Following Porter, the authors argue that activities are a key link between resource holdings and strategic positions. Therefore, it is only when the activity‐based and resource‐based views are integrated that they provide a comprehensive explanation of firm value creation.

The paper is the first to critically examine the intellectual antecedents of the activity‐based view.

The purpose of this study is to test a model for cross-border technological acquisitions (CBTAs) focusing on the level of ownership acquired in the target firm and the acquiring firm's post-acquisition innovation performance (PAIP), with the degree of integration as a mediator, based on the dynamic capability perspective of the resource-based view. This study further concludes the role of the country-of-origin effect (COE) (when emerging economies' acquiring firms purchase technological resources from developed economies' target firms) on the success of the acquiring firms in CBTAs.

Data on CBTAs initiated by 542 acquiring firms was quantified from four high technology industries from 1995 to 2015 for the empirical investigation of the research hypotheses. Hierarchical fixed year effect negative binomial regression technique was used to analyze the proposed model for the success of CBTAs.

The analysis of the CBTAs confirmed that acquiring firms who opt for a higher level of acquired ownership strategy increase the degree of integration of the target firm's technological resource stock. The level of acquired ownership improves the PAIP of the acquiring firms; however, the degree of integration positively accelerates the relationship between the acquired ownership and the PAIP. Considering the COE, acquiring firms that initiated CBTAs from emerging economies to purchase technological resources from developed economies' targets have firm-specific technological capability holes to execute the integration, which negatively impacts the emerging economies acquiring firm's PAIP.

This study contributes to the CBTAs literature by exploring the enabling role of the degree of integration between the level of acquired ownership and the PAIP of the acquiring firms. Further, this study put forward empirics on the COE of the acquiring firms for their integrative capability to integrate the target firm's resource stock and subsequent innovation performance.

Drawing on organizational design theory and organizational learning theory, this paper aims to examine component technology (CT) and the interaction between CT and experiential learning (EL) effects on the degree of integration (DI) of cross-border technological acquisitions.

Using a sample of 267 firms consisting of 229 acquirer firms who started cross-border technological acquisitions from developed economies and 38 acquirer firms who initiated cross-border technological acquisitions from emerging economies over the period of 1993–2016, this study adopts a value chain framework to measure the acquirers’ acquisition integration degree for the investigation of the effects of CT and the interaction between CT and EL.

First, this paper finds CT in cross-border technological acquisitions exerting a positive influence on the acquirer firm’s likelihood of the DI implementation, in line with the organizational design theory. Second, in view of organizational learning theory, this study finds EL and the combined effect of CT and EL to have an inverse influence on the DI.

The results imply that the moderating role of EL significantly optimizes decision choices for an acquirer firm for integration implementation strategies in the form of DI, such as full integration (structural integration), partial integration and no integration (structural separation), which appears to be crucial for cross-border technological acquisitions.

This study contributed to international business strategies by shedding light on the importance of the DI for an acquirer firm that undertakes a cross-border technological acquisition with a CT target firm. This study explains why structural integration might be necessary in cross-border technological acquisitions regardless of the costs of disruption it imposes, as well as the contexts in which it becomes less important or unnecessary. The study disclosed that the increase in the likelihood of DI because of CT depends on the EL of the acquisition company in the host country environment and fluctuates with the prior acquisition knowledge and EL of the host country. Combining two cross-border technological acquisition’s literature streams, such as CT and EL, this study enlightens the importance of organizational learning theory and theory of organization design strategic direction making on acquisition integration implementation strategies.

This paper offers a conceptualization of the internationalization decision confronted by a firm in an environment of terrorism‐induced risk.

The approach taken is a conceptualization of the internationalization decision framed from theoretical reasoning and informed by the literature.

The model presents the internationalization decision, a product/market/mode (PMM) combination, in the case of a terrorism‐free context and in a with‐terrorism context. Using indifference curve mapping of risk/return tradeoffs, an opportunities set of possible PMM combinations and the notion of efficiency, it traces the most attractive opportunities set to show that within this set, the frontier of attractive opportunities is constrained in the with‐terrorism case. Propositions are framed to guide future research. While conditions of risk can be calculated, it is concluded that remaining uncalculable is the true uncertainty incited by the systemic effects of international terrorism that call for managerial judgment.

The literature in this field reports little on the effects of international terrorism on the firm. With heightened awareness of international terrorism, and the changed environment for the firm operating internationally, it is timely that the effects of terrorism on decision‐making in firms be investigated. Advancing beyond description to substantive conceptualization of this decision is an essential step for better understanding of this now pervasive phenomenon.