Copenhagen Business School

About: Copenhagen Business School is a education organization based out in Copenhagen, Hovedstaden, Denmark. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Corporate governance & Context (language use). The organization has 2194 authors who have published 9649 publications receiving 341898 citations.

Strategic organization: a field in search of micro-foundations:

Abstract: Organizations are made up of individuals, and there is no organization without individuals. There is nothing quite as elementary; yet this elementary truth seems to have been lost in the increasing focus on structure, routines, capabilities, culture, institutions and various other collective conceptualizations in much of recent strategic organization research. It is not overstating the matter too much to say that ‘organization’ has generally entered the field of strategy in the form of various aggregate concepts. This editorial essay is born out of a frustration on our part for the present lack of focus on individuals in much of strategic organization and the taken-forgranted status of ‘organization’. Specifically, the underlying argument of this essay is that individuals matter and that micro-foundations are needed for explanation in strategic organization. In fact, to fully explicate organizational anything – whether identity, learning, knowledge or capabilities – one must fundamentally begin with and understand the individuals that compose the whole, specifically their underlying nature, choices, abilities, propensities, heterogeneity, purposes, expectations and motivations. While using the term ‘organizational’ may serve as helpful shorthand for discussion purposes and for reduced-form empirical analysis, truly explaining (beyond correlations) the organization (e.g. existence, decline, capability or performance), or any collective for that matter, requires starting with the individual as the central actor. Our particular focus in this essay is on the organizational capabilities-based literature in strategic management. This focus serves as a specific example of a more general problem of lack of attention to individuals in strategic organization. (Wider implications could be explicated given more space.) As brief support for the fact that our discussion does have wider ramifications, we note that Selznick has also quite poignantly raised the need for micro-foundations on the part of institutional scholars (1996: 274). Whetten (2004) also highlights the fact that scholars are rarely explicit about what they mean by ‘organizational’. STRATEGIC ORGANIZATION Vol 3(4): 441–455 DOI: 10.1177/1476127005055796 Copyright ©2005 Sage Publications (London,Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) http://soq.sagepub.com

Perspectives on multinational enterprises in emerging economies

Abstract: Multinational enterprises (MNEs) play a pivotal role in the development of many emerging economies. In consequence, they became the focus of scholarly research by economists and policy analysts. In contrast, international business scholars have been comparatively uninterested in analysing this role of MNEs. Yet they could make important contributions to these debates. First, studies taking the individual firms as starting point would enhance understanding of the interaction between MNEs and the local environment. Second, theories and research methodologies developed in international business research could provide new insights into the dynamics of MNEs in emerging economies. The objective of this paper is to motivate more international business scholars to engage in research on positive and negative spillovers from foreign direct investment (FDI) in emerging economy societies. To advance this research agenda, scholars need to analyse the specific activities and capabilities of the firms involved, and the impact of FDI on the broader social and environmental context. For management, this agenda raises the ethical question: To what extent ought businesses to care about their local stakeholders?

Inside the Family Firm: The Role of Families in Succession Decisions and Performance

Abstract: This paper uses a unique dataset from Denmark to investigate the impact of family characteristics in corporate decision making, and the consequences of these decisions on firm performance. We focus on the decision to appoint either a family or an external chief executive officer (CEO). The paper uses variation in CEO succession decisions that result from the gender of a departing CEO’s first-born child. This is a plausible instrumental variable (IV) as male firstchild firms are more likely to pass on control to a family CEO relative to female first-child firms, but the gender of a first child is unlikely to affect firms’ outcomes. We find that family successions have a large negative causal impact on firm performance: operating profitability on assets falls by at least four percentage points around CEO transitions. Our IV estimates are significantly larger than those obtained using ordinary least squares. Furthermore, we show that family-CEO underperformance is particularly large for firms in high-growth industries and for relatively large firms. Overall, the empirical results demonstrate that professional non-family CEOs provide extremely valuable services to the organizations they head.