Browsing Ph.D. theses by Title

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Internationalization, competitiveness enhancement and export performance of emerging market firms

Evidence from Vietnam

Pham, Ha Thi Van (Frederiksberg, 2009)

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Abstract:

The thesis revolves around the internationalization of Vietnamese firms - that is, how the international competitiveness of these firms is enhanced in terms of both upstream and downstream value chain activities and the export performance implications hereof. For Vietnamese firms, as well as for other firms from emerging markets, internationalization trajectories may differ considerably from the internationalization patterns portrayed in classical theories (such as the Uppsala Model) based on observations of the internationalization of firms from Western, developed market economies. Classical theories have primarily focused on firms’ marketing & sales and networking capabilities as levers of internationalization – and less on upstream capabilities, such as manufacturing and auxiliary service competencies. Likewise the situation in other emerging markets many Vietnamese firms are inserted in global value chains (GVCs) governed by multinational buyers. For these firms, manufacturing skills may be of equal - or greater - importance to export performance than the mastering of marketing & sales and networking in foreign markets. The thesis presents various theoretical perspectives on firms’ internationalization – perspectives that vary in terms of their focus on either upstream or downstream activities (or, the interrelationship of these two types of activities). The thesis tries to fill out the knowledge gap as to which of these theoretical perspectives fit best the trajectories of Vietnamese manufacturing firms involved in exports. In doing so, the thesis also draws on GVC models, entrepreneurial literature, and studies of economic as well as strategic export performance. Unique survey data covering 226 Vietnamese manufacturers involved in exporting was collected through face-to-face interviews conducted in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. On the basis of these data a set of hypotheses is tested using structural equation modelling as a statistical tool. The empirical study suggests that Vietnamese firms create international competitiveness in relation to both upstream and downstream activities. Furthermore, the study suggests that upstream competitiveness of the sample firms is significantly more attractive in terms of economic export performance (export sales, profitability and growth) than downstream competitiveness. However, when export performance is measured in more far-sighted, strategic terms, there are no significant differences between the two dimensions of competitiveness. The study also reveals some interesting industry differences: for firms in the “low-tech” textiles & garments industry, upstream competitiveness has greater impact on economic export performance than downstream competitiveness. Conversely, downstream competitiveness results in a higher economic return than upstream competitiveness for firms from the “high-tech” industries of electronics and mechanical manufactures In the last part of the thesis, theoretical, empirical, and managerial implications are discussed along with conclusions and suggestions for future research.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7934

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The Internationalization of Emerging Market Firms

A Context-Specific Study

Stucchi, Tamara (Frederiksberg, 2013)

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Abstract:

This Ph.D. dissertation investigates some International Business (IB) issues, which emerge from a specific context of research. The study takes inspiration from one of the most currently debated phenomena in IB literature, i.e. the internationalization of Emerging Market (EM) firms. The recent global emergence of these firms is substantial and particularly interesting under several points of view, especially because the IB literature has traditionally been dominated by western-centric theories, whose applicability to the case of EM firms might be questionable. The present Ph.D. thesis recommends an approach to the study of the internationalization of EM firms that can contribute to the advancement of IB literature in general. This is illustrated by the four research articles of the thesis, where a single-country EM context is used to draw general implications useful for researchers, practitioners and policy makers. More in details, the first paper “Emerging market firms’ acquisitions in advanced markets: Matching strategy with resource-, institution- and industry-based antecedents” studies the antecedents that can affect the motivations for the acquisitions that EM firms undertake in advanced markets. The second article, entitled “Time to internationalization and evolving institutions: An event history analysis of Indian firms”, analyzes domestic firms’ earlier versus later internationalization, during a period of radical institutional changes. The third paper, “The role of Overseas National Ownership in Outward FDI: A study of the Indian diaspora”, studies how the presence of overseas national shareholders can influence homeland firms' outward FDI. Finally, the last article is entitled "Business groups’ internationalization: The role of the domestic geographical scope" and analyzes one possible explanation for business groups’ internationalization, from an organizational learning perspective. The Ph.D. thesis is empirically based on a very comprehensive sample of Indian firms. The data are collected from different sources, i.e. the Prowess database, the Zephyr database, the Indian Census and the World Competitiveness Yearbook. The potential value of this singlecountry context perspective is highlighted throughout the Ph.D. thesis, and clearly emerges while I address the different issues of the four research articles.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8699

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Knowledge Management Systems in Practice

A Work place Study

Tørning, Kristian (Frederiksberg, 2010)

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Abstract:

This dissertation contributes to the existing body of knowledge on how we design computer systems, particularly multiuser software for knowledge sharing and creation in globally diffused companies. This is achieved by conducting a work place study of a global industrial engineering conglomerate which has the strategy of working with knowledge in the form of “best practices” meant to boost performance. The thesis explores the situation that workers are in, since they are meant to share and develop “best practices” knowledge in a portal based Knowledge Management System (KMS). The study indentifies a set of problems that prevents knowledge sharing from taking place to the degree to which management was specifically aiming. It was explored whether these problems could, to some degree, be mitigated by employing persuasive design, which is a new stance towards design where the aim is to directly seek to change the user’s behavior, i.e., persuading more knowledge sharing. The main contribution is an indication of an anomaly with regards to the strategic approach towards knowledge management, where knowledge sharing is seen as an effort by which companies can gain a competitive advantage by working with knowledge in a structured fashion. The issue is that the descriptions found in literature on strategic knowledge management do not address the many issues uncovered when conducting prolonged fieldwork among workers who engage in the activities that the literature seemingly takes for granted. Thus, many practical problems were uncovered that would need some level of mitigation before a company could hope to gain a strategic advantage from working with knowledge. This challenges the “stock" approach towards knowledge management, which seems to address only the management level of the organization. A contribution is also made in exploring the state-of-the-art of the emerging field of persuasive design. Persuasive design aims at enabling designers to create designs that deliberately change the user’s attitude or behavior. According to this new design tradition, the designer specifically designs with the aim of behavior transformation. The goal is a deliberate behavioral change, rather than supporting a set of existing tasks or a set of existing behaviors. The work presented shows how persuasive design is a very conceptual area of research, and that it is not a fitting approach for attaining a higher degree of participation in computer systems for knowledge sharing and creation. Persuasive design is thus not the remedy for the many problems found that prevent knowledge sharing from taking place

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8168

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Kontraktledelse

Relasjonen mellom virksomhetsledelse og kontraktshåndtering, belyst via fire norske virksomheter

Similä, Jan Ole (Frederiksberg, 2010)

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Abstract:

Why do we focus on the internal arrangements of the contractual process from a leadership perspective? Through empirical research where we have asked questions about the internal organizational arrangements, what kind of knowledge the organization need, and how institutional arrangements affect the contract process, we have tried to answer the main research question. We have also carried with us a question of if the organization's attachment to the public or private sector affects the arrangements. I have conducted a comparative case study where data has been generated from two public sector organizations, The National Road Administration, Helsebygg Midt-Norge, one private sector organization, Siemens, and one hybrid organization, NTE. Data was primarily generated from the governance system of the different organizations, and informant interviews. The analysis was carried out by two steps; first an empirical analysis, then a theoretical analysis, based on contractual theory, of the empirical findings. The empirical analysis shows that the organizations share the same thoughts on how to organize the contractual work; the division between the line and the project organization, the distribution of decision-making authority, and the institutionalization of a specific governance system. The organizational processes are formalized, and the governance system gives the clear recommendation on desired actions. The empirical data gives a clear understanding that the contract process is dominated by one profession — the engineers. Regarding the question on knowledge, I found the organizations to be interested foremost on problem solving competencies (engineering competencies). Other competencies, for example economic or legal competencies, where viewed as support competencies. We also found that personal skills in handling the complex and difficult processes and attitude toward ethics seemed to be of importance. On the question on how institutional elements in the organizational environment affected the contract process, we found that the overall interest of the organizations was stability and predictability. We also found that the market mechanisms cause the organizations some worry. In the end, the empirical findings did not give us any strong reasons to differentiate between public sector organizations and private sector organizations in how to deal with contractual work processes. The theoretical analysis has been carried out within classical and relational contract theory. The analysis shows that the empirical findings, to a great extend, can be explained through classical contract theory. It also gives us some ideas on what areas of the theory, especially relational contract theory that should be improved. Regarding the main research question, the conclusions indicate a need to establish a comprehensive approach to the contract process, to ensure a good balance between different partial processes. There also seem to be necessary to work on improvements on contract theory to increase the applicability of the theory, especially the relational contract theory.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8011

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“Let’s Go Outside”

The Value of Co-Creation

Lopdrup-Hjorth, Thomas (Frederiksberg, 2013)

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Co-creation has emerged today as a concept which thinkers across otherwise largely opposed traditions have come to embrace. This dissertation substantiates how the concept of co-creation, from proponents of Strategic Management Thought to thinkers coming out of Autonomist Marxism and Critical Management Studies, appears as designating either: (1) a new win-win mode of value creation where businesses co-create value with various sorts of outsiders; (2) a new social, commons-based value creation autonomous from business interests; or (3) a mode of value creation intimately intertwined with new modes of management capable of harnessing and exploiting productive capacities outside established organizations. Behind these contemporary differences, the dissertation discloses a more encompassing history. Through this, the emergence of a widely shared co-creation vocabulary is brought forth. While this vocabulary is used persistently to express a whole new mode of value creation, in whatever form, the dissertation argues that the co-creation vocabulary actually undermines the very possibility of speaking about value creation in a consistent manner. At the same time, however, it is not a vocabulary which can just be dispensed with, since its emergence is intimately intertwined with an accelerated emphatic injunction; an injunction advanced by a reformulated managementality that throughout the twentieth century has tempted management ‘to go outside’. Accounting for this history, the dissertation claims that a complex experience has been born, an experience of the outside. Through this experience, the outside has emerged not merely as a source of value creation and an object of management; it has also emerged as an obligation that has to be met, an obligation which is forcefully expressed today through the co-creation vocabulary. In order to inquire into contemporary accounts of co-creation, as well as the historical trajectories through which this phenomenon has come to emerge, the dissertation develops what is designated as the historical problematization analysis, inspired by and reconstructed from the very late work of Michel Foucault. By utilizing this mode of analysis, it becomes possible to bring together otherwise separate accounts of co-creation on the same level of analysis, to inquire into central historical conditions of possibility through which the phenomenon of cocreation has come to emerge and to take stock of what difference the arrival of cocreation introduces in relation to yesterday.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8701

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Making Ensemble Possible

How special groups organize for collaborative creativity in conditions of spatial variability and distance

O’Donnell, Shannon (Frederiksberg, 2013)

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Abstract:

The enormous challenges and opportunities impacting the world community today increasingly require people to practice collaborative innovation effectively both in person and across geographic boundaries. Simultaneously, advances in technology such as social networking tools, digital 3-D representations, virtual worlds, and open source practices are inspiring generations of users to develop new kinds of adaptive collaborative networks and capabilities. But when people work across organizational and geographic boundaries, new challenges arise that make it difficult for groups to achieve the levels of excellence they are capable of achieving together in close proximity. Practitioners need help determining how best to perform collaborative creativity given unique and dynamic work conditions. Meanwhile, as new forms of creative group work emerge at an accelerating pace, researchers struggle to keep up with and develop nuanced understanding of the variations in collaborative processes we increasingly see performed. With this PhD research, I aim to increase our understanding of a particular, specialized form of collaborative creativity called “ensembling.” I investigate this phenomenon by studying it in diverse—including “stretched”—conditions. By stretched, I mean that, literally, groups are stretched apart in space as membership size and spatial distance between members increase and work configurations vary. The groups I study are those both capable of achieving and driven to achieve a peak-performance state of ensemble, and do so via the enactment of an interdependent set of methods that call ensemble into being, a process I call ensembling. In their ideal form, these work methods support the emergence of ensemble and result in the creation of aesthetically coherent and novel outcomes that are particularly responsive to the contexts in which they are made. To investigate the phenomenon of ensemble, I first develop a construct of ensemble based on informant descriptions, and use theory and data to develop a detailed description of how ensembling is performed in natural conditions (i.e., in close physical proximity). Then I look at an extreme example in which a set of expert groups’ ability to ensemble was put under stress by an unprecedented work task. In 2009, multiple string quartets (many considered world class) organized to perform a new musical composition. The composition challenged four quartets at a time to perform as an integrated ensemble while sitting apart, in various configurations, and at spatial distances of up to 70 feet. To help them address the difficulties produced by increased membership and distance, the musicians integrated a simple coordinating technology into their process. To learn how participants made ensemble possible given these new conditions, I engaged multiple qualitative methods for generating data and multiple perspectives for interpretation. I first considered their process as an iterative approach to exploring strategies for addressing constraints, in order to show how the methods of ensembling interacted with conditions of increased group size, increased spatial distance and configurational variability, and to elicit their evolving beliefs about what methods made ensemble more likely to occur given these conditions. Then I performed an alternative interpretation, disrupting this logic and exploring the ways in which participants used methods of ensembling—particularly openness to uncertainty and reconceiving—to create unanticipated potentialities for ensemble to emerge despite constraints. I show how they worked with a coordinating technology called a “click-track” in important new ways that went beyond “merely” achieving synchronous coordination to increasing their autonomy, relatedness, and ability to demonstrate artistic virtuosity, enabling them to engage equally in leadership and participation and to play. Finally, performing a comparative analysis across sub-units of the case, including examples of breakdown in the process, I generated additional insights into what conditions, beliefs, methods and behaviors enable or inhibit processes of ensembling. Integrating learning from analysis and interpretation, I propose a new range of conditions in which ensembling is possible, and a revised and expanded description of the methods by which groups ensemble. Conditions can expand to include larger groups with limited-tenure consisting of enduring-tenure sub-groups, multiple task interdependencies at group and sub-group levels, balanced tenure at sub-group level, a balance between proximity and distance, opportunities to work with and without technological mediation, and self-determined configuration variability. I show that the emergence of ensemble depends on, for instance, a shared purpose to ensemble, and methods such as a “struggle” phase, episodes of close physical proximity, collective leadership, “dueting” in different configurations, reconceiving constraints, living with the paradox of one-and-four, opening the process to uncertainty and to the emergence of consent, and subliminal technology engagement. Ultimately, these groups demonstrated an increasing ability to adapt to new conditions faster and more creatively, making new configurations possible, and suggesting ways in which ensemble might be performed in other kinds of group settings. I summarize findings in the form of a “framework of ensembling” that is meant to serve as a tool to further enrich our yet nascent understanding of this complex phenomenon and to aid in the exploration of ensembling in contexts outside the usual places we expect it to occur.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8653

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Making sense of management with logics

An ethnographic study of accountants who become managers

Bévort, Frans (Frederiksberg, 2012)

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Management in a professional service firm such as Deloitte is suspended between a range of different fundamental concerns and ways of thinking. There is a market in which client needs are to be met, competitors matched and outperformed. There is the general public in which accounting firms such as Deloitte increasingly have become the object of critical scrutiny in their role as guardians of the common rules of accountability and legislation on accounting. There is a very strong professional culture and ethics, stemming from being a part of the professional community of a profession which creates unique ways of organizing and managing. And there is a growing concern about how to run the continually growing accounting-based advisory organizations (or professional service firms) in a way that efficiently utilizes the aggregated resources, which again creates a focus on management as a distinct issue. It is primarily the contradiction and dynamics of the latter two ‘internal’ concerns that the study of the dissertation is about - seen as institutional logics of professionalism and, or versus, bureaucracy. While the focus of most research into professional service firms has been on how general structural changes affect this unique species of organization, this study investigates how these contradictions affect the way accountants live and work performing roles as managers; how do accountants who become managers make sense of these contradictory logics? The dissertation treats this question theoretically by applying extant literature dealing with institutional change and logics with a special emphasis on recent research that focuses on the micro-processes which are the foundations of institutions and concretizes how institutional logics affect the action and sensemaking of actors. The dissertation contributes to this research by applying sensemaking theory and symbolic interactionism. The study is based on a 3-year ethnographic study in which managers at all levels have been interviewed and observed. Actual management processes and management training have been observed, via shadowing and participant observation. Relevant archival material has been included in the analysis. All these sources have been recorded and systematized in order to create a point of departure for the analyses of the dissertation. The main findings of the study point to: The institutional changes described by the Professional Service Firms research can be identified at the micro- or actor level in terms of ideals, systems, way organizing and structures which use a logic of bureaucracy and among which the development of a new middle-management role is a critical feature. These changes seem to have important consequences for the basic psychological contract between the professional and the organization in professional service firms. The changes, as they are found in the case, are more complex and laden with conflicts than otherwise described in the literature about professional service firms. This is based on the way the actors ‘draw on the existing logics’ and the conditions they have for doing this locally. This points to the importance of investigating the interaction of actors in order to understand how the new management practices are institutionalized/structurated. The changes towards a new model of management, found in the study, are based on the ability (and will) of the managers to navigate the contradictory logics in such a way that they can establish a meaningful identity as managers, and that they can mobilize other actors who support a new way of understanding management and that they are able to create space for the conversational reflection upon their behavior as managers and management. The ability (and will) of the managers is in its turn dependent on local conditions and interaction enabling these steps of sensemaking.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8448

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