Corporate group

About: Corporate group is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1747 publications have been published within this topic receiving 46868 citations.

A gap in the corporate responsibility to respect human rights

Abstract: The Human Rights Council received well the ‘protect, respect, remedy’ framework that the SRSG for business and human rights, John Ruggie, presented in 2008 and his mandate was renewed for another 3 years. The corporate responsibility to respect human rights is defined narrowly for abuses linked to business activities only. In the same time, the SRSG remarks that conduct in the form of both acts and omissions can fail the responsibility to respect. This article analyses how the SRSG has dealt with a special type of culpable business conduct (omissions as opposed to commissions) of a special business actor (the controlling entity within a business group as opposed to mere affiliates or independent businesses). On what legitimate grounds should the omissions of parent companies be deemed blameworthy and to what extent are issues that the SRSG has not properly differentiated from other cases of business misconduct. The SRSG relies on the concept of “complicity”, which he employs to explain cases of corporate involvement in third parties’ misconduct and took note of jurisprudence, but the incorporation of those insights is partial and the conceptualization is half-baked. An assessment of SRSG’s reports reveals that they lack a proper scheme of attribution to deal with situations where harm caused by third parties gets attributed to the inactive parent company. The result is a hole at the heart of the responsibility to respect. This article explains the problem and considers ways forward to strengthening the foundation of the responsibility to respect in order to go forward in clarifying its scope. (Less)

Of Enterprise Principles & Corporate Groups: Does Corporate Law Reach Human Rights?

Abstract: In recent years, a number of international and cross-sectoral initiatives have attempted to respond to the human rights impacts of corporations. Foremost among these is the United Nations’ 2008 “Protect, Respect, and Remedy” Framework and its Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, adopted in March, 2011. The Framework is noteworthy, in part, because it considers the potential intersections of corporate law and human rights. Conventional wisdom, however, maintains that corporate law is largely irrelevant to questions of human rights. It is generally viewed to be enabling, rather than prescriptive, and concerned with private contracting rather than the public interest. From a practical standpoint, human rights impacts often involve conduct by remote affiliates and business partners of vast multinational corporate organizations. Corporate law, in contrast, governs the "internal affairs" of discrete legal entities within a given jurisdiction, each protected by a limited liability shield. Questions of global corporate accountability for human rights practices have therefore been viewed as beyond its reach. This Article challenges this accepted wisdom by exploring the extent to which corporate law reaches the multinational enterprise. It argues that notwithstanding the centrality of entity-level principles within corporate law, some dimensions of corporate law in fact extend across the formal internal legal boundaries of the multinational corporation. Although corporate law enforcement mechanisms do not offer direct remedies for victims of human rights violations, corporate law is nonetheless an integral part of the emerging institutional infrastructure supporting the human rights responsibilities of corporations.

"Strategic Alliances in the Japanese Economy: Types, Critiques, Embeddedness, and Change"

Abstract: This chapter reviews the role and consequences of strategic alliances in Japanese business. We are not aware of other research published in English that takes a similarly broad look at Japanese firms’ embrace and utilization of strategic alliances. Some readers may take issue with this claim, pointing out that in fact an extensive literature addresses the cooperative customer-supplier relationships that are seen as an integral feature of Japan’s ‘lean production’ model of manufacturing success (Dyer, 1996; Helper et al., 2000; Liker and Choi, 2004). From our perspective, however, those vertical partnerships housed within the durable governance structures known as keiretsu are not strategic alliances in the usual sense of the term. Admittedly, alliances such as the keiretsu that form and persist for other reasons may at times take on strategic purpose. The bulk of our work here addresses the changing interplay between Japan’s keiretsu networks and the strategic-alliance creation process in its domestic economy. Japan, of course, has been a major player in international strategic alliances, and we review the literature on those alliance patterns and how they have changed over time. However, the broad involvement of Japanese firms in alliances with foreign partners appears to have coincided with relatively little strategic-alliance activity at home, especially if we exclude government-led research consortia and the keiretsu themselves.

Improving the financial performance of SMEs: The presence in foreign markets and the moderating role of corporate group and alliance portfolio size

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to assess the influence of the presence in foreign markets on small- and medium-sized enterprises’ (SMEs) financial performance. Furthermore, it seeks to examine the moderating effect of corporate group and alliance portfolio size on this relationship.,First, the authors develop hypotheses concerning the relationship between the presence in foreign markets and SMEs’ financial performance as well as the moderating role of the size of an SME’s corporate group and alliance portfolio. Afterward, the authors used ordinary least square regression to the test the hypotheses based on a sample of 5,885 high-tech US SMEs registered in the Orbis database (Bureau van Dijk).,Results of the study reveal that the presence in foreign markets is positively associated with an SME’s financial performance, with the size of the corporate group enhancing this relationship, hence confirming the conjectures. Instead, the size of the alliance portfolio appears to not exert any moderating effect, in contrast with the last hypothesis.,Form a theoretical perspective, the authors dig into the literature assessing the performance outcomes of SMEs and contingent effects of the possibility to tap into external resources of other firms. By so doing, the findings support a specific stream of the literature in claiming the positive effects deriving from being part of a corporate group. Conversely, the findings seem to go in the opposite direction of the majority of the literature that claim a positive impact of alliances on financial performances, while supporting those studies stressing that alliances pose significant challenges for SMEs and should be carefully identified and managed.

Business group affiliation as institutional linkages in China’s emerging economy: A focus on organizational traits and institutional conditions

Abstract: We conceptualize business group affiliation as institutional linkages by integrating the resource-based view and institutional perspective to examine its direct and moderating effects on firm value in emerging economies. In a sample of 1233 Chinese listed companies, we find that while business group affiliation has mixed direct effects, it moderates the effects of organizational traits and institutional conditions on firm value. Specifically, group affiliation aggravates old firms’ “liability of oldness,” but helps mitigate large firms’ “liability of bigness.” Besides, business group affiliation can reduce the liabilities that institutional voids bring about, as evidenced in its moderating effects on the relationship between regional under-development/industrial restriction and firm value. Our findings point to the moderating effects of business group affiliation in emerging economies.