Martin R.W. Hiebl, Rainer Baule, Andreas Dutzi, Volker Stein and Arnd Wiedemann
Volker Stein, Arnd Wiedemann and Christiane Bouten
The purpose of this paper is to apply the concept of framing in the field of risk governance and risk management research.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to apply the concept of framing in the field of risk governance and risk management research.
Design/methodology/approach
A five-constituent approach to framing – cognitive, strategic, action, emotional and institutional framing – is applied to contrastively analyze the multifaceted character of the two concepts of risk governance and risk management.
Findings
This paper analyzes the multifaceted utilization of risk governance framing and the conscious demarcation between risk governance and risk management. Risk governance framing strengthens the proactive control of strategic risks with regard to business model adaptation to changing risk landscapes. The verbal imagery of risk governance already sets the agenda for the sustainability-oriented as well as value-oriented steering of the risks of a business model. Following the analysis of the different framing areas, propositions are presented.
Originality/value
Although framing is applied in various academic disciplines, there is limited research relating to corporate risks. While risk governance provides companies with a concept to ensure the sustainability of their business models in the complex risk landscape, the related framing brings the appropriate interpretation and the deliberate tone into focus.
Details
Keywords
Christoph Barmeyer, Volker Stein and Jenny Marie Eberhardt
This paper aims to investigate the central roles, functions and competences of third-country nationals (TCNs) in intercultural boundary spanning in multinational corporations…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to investigate the central roles, functions and competences of third-country nationals (TCNs) in intercultural boundary spanning in multinational corporations (MNCs): Why are TCNs particularly important for reducing complexity at the overlapping functional, geographic and external boundaries of MNCs with their related interferences and which role do they play as boundary spanners in cross-boundary collaboration?
Design/methodology/approach
After introducing the theoretical background on boundary spanning and TCNs, the methodology applied in this paper is a theory-driven, qualitative approach based on 13 in-depth semi-structured interviews with TNCs conducted in 10 MNCs.
Findings
The authors aggregate TCNs’ activities into four roles: disembedded cosmopolitan, intermediary, third party and team-related boundary spanner. They show that TCNs tend to understand the complex intercultural context between headquarters and subsidiaries, balance power asymmetries, use their in-between neutrality to create trust, and act in an interculturally highly competent way by using a great variety of intercultural and linguistic skills. The TCNs’ meta-competence permits a higher level, intellectual and abstract perspective, enabling TCNs to consider structures, objects and interactions from an affective distance.
Research limitations/implications
The differences between TCNs and “regular” expatriates or other interface managers are examined and methodological limitations as well as research implications are critically discussed. MNCs can intentionally assign TCNs with their related competence profiles when expecting boundary-spanning tasks.
Originality/value
This paper is one of the few published that undergirds the TCN concept with empirical data and illustrates the suitability of specific role-takers such as TCNs for some complex challenges in international and intercultural management settings.
Details
Keywords
Nancy J. Adler (USA), Sonja A. Sackmann (Switzerland), Sharon Arieli (Israel), Marufa (Mimi) Akter (Bangladesh), Christoph Barmeyer (Germany), Cordula Barzantny (France), Dan V. Caprar (Australia and New Zealand), Yih-teen Lee (Taiwan), Leigh Anne Liu (China), Giovanna Magnani (Italy), Justin Marcus (Turkey), Christof Miska (Austria), Fiona Moore (United Kingdom), Sun Hyun Park (South Korea), B. Sebastian Reiche (Spain), Anne-Marie Søderberg (Denmark and Sweden), Jeremy Solomons (Rwanda) and Zhi-Xue Zhang (China)
The COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic meltdown and social unrest severely challenged most countries, their societies, economies, organizations, and individual citizens…
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic meltdown and social unrest severely challenged most countries, their societies, economies, organizations, and individual citizens. Focusing on both more and less successful country-specific initiatives to fight the pandemic and its multitude of related consequences, this chapter explores implications for leadership and effective action at the individual, organizational, and societal levels. As international management scholars and consultants, the authors document actions taken and their wide-ranging consequences in a diverse set of countries, including countries that have been more or less successful in fighting the pandemic, are geographically larger and smaller, are located in each region of the world, are economically advanced and economically developing, and that chose unique strategies versus strategies more similar to those of their neighbors. Cultural influences on leadership, strategy, and outcomes are described for 19 countries. Informed by a cross-cultural lens, the authors explore such urgent questions as: What is most important for leaders, scholars, and organizations to learn from critical, life-threatening, society-encompassing crises and grand challenges? How do leaders build and maintain trust? What types of communication are most effective at various stages of a crisis? How can we accelerate learning processes globally? How does cultural resilience emerge within rapidly changing environments of fear, shifting cultural norms, and profound challenges to core identity and meaning? This chapter invites readers and authors alike to learn from each other and to begin to discover novel and more successful approaches to tackling grand challenges. It is not definitive; we are all still learning.
Details
Keywords
Mahalakshmi Satyanarayana and Shubha Ranganathan
The viewpoint essay focusses on the significance of integrated care (IC) for chronic pain in India, in an attempt to reflect on how pain management and care can be made more…
Abstract
Purpose
The viewpoint essay focusses on the significance of integrated care (IC) for chronic pain in India, in an attempt to reflect on how pain management and care can be made more accessible and available to patients.
Design/methodology/approach
This reflective essay invites looking at chronic pain beyond biomedical perspectives. Insights from the medical humanities and the social sciences are used to emphasise chronic pain as a psychosocial and socio-political phenomenon and not just a biomedical category.
Findings
The essay argues that there are several challenges and barriers to the recognition and validation of chronic pain as a speciality.
Originality/value
IC has not received sufficient attention in the Indian context, where medical curricula and training do not sufficiently include an understanding of the multi-faceted aspects surrounding chronic pain. By highlighting the role of humanistic approaches to effectively bridge the gap, this viewpoint essay illustrates the significance of drawing on an integrated or holistic healthcare framework.
Details
Keywords
Clemens Harten, Matthias Meyer and Lucia Bellora-Bienengräber
This paper aims to explore drivers of the effectiveness of risk assessments in risk workshops.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore drivers of the effectiveness of risk assessments in risk workshops.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses an agent-based model to simulate risk assessments in risk workshops. Combining the notions of transactive memory and the ideal speech situation, this study establishes a risk assessment benchmark and then investigates real-world deviations from this benchmark. Specifically, this study models limits to information transfer, incomplete discussions and potentially detrimental group characteristics, as well as interaction patterns.
Findings
First, limits to information transfer among workshop participants can prevent a correct consensus. Second, increasing the required number of stable discussion rounds before an assessment improves the correct assessment of high but not low likelihood risks. Third, while theoretically advantageous group characteristics are associated with the highest assessment correctness for all risks, theoretically detrimental group characteristics are associated with the highest assessment correctness for high likelihood risks. Fourth, prioritizing participants who are particularly concerned about the risk leads to the highest level of correctness.
Originality/value
This study shows that by increasing the duration of simulated risk workshops, the assessments change – as a rule – from underestimating to overestimating risks, unraveling a trade-off for risk workshop facilitators. Methodologically, this approach overcomes limitations of prior research, specifically the lack of an assessment and process benchmark, the inability to disentangle multiple effects and the difficulty of capturing individual cognitive processes.
Details
Keywords
This paper examines the problems of parallel proceedings against financial intermediaries, and the solutions offered by German law. The first part identifies the practical…
Abstract
This paper examines the problems of parallel proceedings against financial intermediaries, and the solutions offered by German law. The first part identifies the practical problems and principal questions of parallel proceedings. The second part describes the proceedings which can be brought against financial intermediaries in Germany. The third part provides an overview of how the fundamental problems and questions of parallel proceedings are dealt with under German law. The fourth and final part analyses special problems and constellations.
Nancy Maclean’s Democracy in Chains (2017) is an attempt to provide a narrative arc for the rise of free market ideas in political action during the second half of the twentieth…
Abstract
Nancy Maclean’s Democracy in Chains (2017) is an attempt to provide a narrative arc for the rise of free market ideas in political action during the second half of the twentieth century and into the first decades of the twenty-first century. The central character in her narrative is neither F.A. Hayek nor Milton Friedman, let alone Adam Smith or Ludwig von Mises, but James M. Buchanan, the 1986 Nobel Prize winner in economics. MacLean argues that rather than extol the virtues of the market economy as Hayek and Friedman did before him, Buchanan focused on the dysfunctions of politics. Due to a series of argumentative fallacies and failures that follow from her ideological blinders, I argue that MacLean’s attempt is a missed opportunity to seriously engage some very pressing issues in public choice and political economy and understand how James Buchanan attempted to resolve them in a democratic manner. As such, Democracy in Chains is not only a mischaracterization of Buchanan and his project but also a poignant lesson to us all about how ideological blinders can subvert even the sincerest effort to unearth truth in the social sciences and the humanities.