• South African EMNEs manage institutional instability (characteristic of emerging markets) by constructing locational portfolios. • They opt for ‘safe’, stable host locations when the home country is unstable, and for riskier, less stable host locations when the home country is stable. • The implication is that how EMNEs view locations evolves. • EMNEs need to hedge risk as a key component of managing performance. • It suggests that managing institutional instability is a feature of EMNEs that deserves more theoretical attention. Emerging markets often experience instability due to rapid changes to the institutional environment, social changes like rapid urbanization, or even unrest. We argue that emerging market multinationals (EMNEs) manage such instability by constructing and changing locational portfolios, and qualitatively analyze six cases in South Africa over a period that included the entrenchment of Apartheid, increasing resistance to it, the immediate post-Apartheid era, and finally the period of state capture. The four periods of (in)stability – initial tenuous stability, extreme instability, comprehensive stability, and finally growing instability – differently affected EMNEs’ location choices. EMNEs went to proximate developing countries when the home country was relatively stable, but left for host countries in the developed world once the home country became unstable. Few EMNEs capitalized on their experience there once home-country stability returned, instead returning to emerging markets. These patterns are best explained by a portfolio logic that takes into account home-country environmental dynamism. 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2022.06.042

Home country (in)stability and the locational portfolio construction of emerging market multinational enterprises

Purpose: This study aimed to better define the boundary conditions of voluntary business engagement for social and economic transformation.Approach: Case study of the Consultative Business Movement (CBM) in South Africa’s democratic transition through historical narrative and analysis, applying both contemporaneous and contemporary lenses.Findings: The analysis demonstrates that creating shared value requires shared power, an arrangement into which incumbent businesses may reluctantly enter, and from which they may quickly exit when their own political interests are met but before transformational economic goals have been achieved. Thus, exogenous forces are necessary to dependably shape a private sector that is fully aligned with economic transformation and peaceful development.Practical implications: Economic and political carrots and sticks combined with the mandatory embedding of business actors in broader networks may be required to ensure that business strategies and operations are more directly the result of consensus reached with more progressive social and economic agents in ways that advance societal goals. Those managers who do want to lead change should take from the experience of CBM the imperative to take no unilateral decisions but rather to share decision-making power with civil society and community actors.Originality/value: The article challenges and refines discourse that assumes that business interests are broadly aligned with sustainable societal outcomes. It thus sheds light on the boundary conditions for the variety of propositions in the management literature that business and societal aims are largely aligned that have been underexplored.

/pdf/shared-value-as-shared-power-business-in-south-africas-udprdsg5.pdf

Shared value as shared power: Business in South Africa’s democratic transition

Our research explores how the historically institutionalized and authoritarian discriminatory South African context continues to affect the experiences of LGBT mid-level managers in the workplace. South Africa provides a rich environment to explore “axes of oppression” (heteronormativity/homophobia, race/racism, gender/sexism), and how these manifest and impact on participants’ work experience. Bringing together intersectionality as an analytical strategy with identity work allows us to examine the interaction between identities and the institutionalized processes by which they are shaped. Our findings show a multifaceted fluidity of oppression where individuals can move between continuums of advantage and disadvantage. We demonstrate the importance of historically embedded modes of oppression within the theory of intersectionality and how this manifests in institutional and organizational practices. As a result, organizations, institutions, and individuals play a role in reproducing inequality through intricate systems of oppression at micro, meso, and macro levels. This affects how individuals draw on their intersecting identities to respond to and decipher encounters with others.

Axes and fluidity of oppression in the workplace: Intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality

This study explores the role that organizations and institutions play in reproducing inequality even after significant political transitions intended to undermine the sources of such inequality. Our analysis reveals how incomplete institutional transitions may give rise to contradictory institutional logics and how this can contribute to high levels of contestation as actors and organizations vie to maintain, disrupt, and create new institutions. We analyse the dynamics of a conflict set within a broader institutional contestation in post-apartheid South Africa by examining the farmworkers strike and unrest of 2012. We expose a complex interlocking system of exploitation and oppression at micro, meso, and macro institutional levels and highlight misalignments between de facto and de jure institutional environments. Our study shows how actors and organizations can exhibit and constrain agency legitimating the unequal access to resources and opportunities and why this can result in the persistence of inequality. 

AbdouMaliq Simone

Papers

Incomplete Institutional Change and the Persistence of Racial Inequality: The Contestation of Institutional Misalignment in South Africa*