Browsing Ph.D. theses (INT) by Year Published
Now showing items 1-18 of 18
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Sulinska, Iwona (Frederiksberg, 2018)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: The aim of the dissertation is to disentangle complexities of social capital in boards of directors through proposing new theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches. Although extant previous research has discussed various aspects of social capital and its association with numerous organizational outcomes, still the literature demonstrates evident shortcomings resulting from overlooking and oversimplifying its complexities. Therefore, to fill gaps in the literature, the dissertation addresses the following research question: in the context of boards of directors, how can social capital be better understood through exploration of its complexities? The dissertation comprises three empirical studies that individually address the identified gaps in the literature and combined address the aforementioned research question. In this way, the dissertation demonstrates that social capital in boards of directors is more complex than it has been assumed in previous studies and its understanding requires a novel approach to conceptualization and empirical research. The first chapter explains the topic and motivation for the dissertation. The following chapter (Chapter 2) synthetizes the previous approaches to investigating board social capital and proposes a new theoretical and methodological approach. It particularly asserts that research on board social capital may be advanced through utilizing configurational perspective and method, what is then shown on an example of the relationship between board social capital and firm performance. Chapter 3 explores social capital of board chair, which has been overlooked in previous studies. It suggests that individual social capital of board chair is as important for organizational performance as social capital of CEO and directors. Therefore, performance effect derives from combined social capital of board chair, CEO, and directors. Further, the dissertation discusses dynamics of board social capital (Chapter 4) in the context of firm expansion. It emphasizes that evolution process of board social capital is driven by multidimensional changes occurring within internal and external networks of social relationships created by board members. Evolution paths are consequently proposed for diversity and strength of external network ties, and for internal network cohesion. In light of the overarching research question, the final chapter summarizes the findings. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9606 Files in this item: 1
Iwona Sulinska.pdf (3.924Mb) -
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Myanmar’s Export Garment Industry 2011–2015Bae, Jinsun (Frederiksberg, 2018)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: A growing number of the multinational enterprises work with a global network of suppliers that undertake production activities on their behalf. These enterprises operationalize CSR by enforcing corporate codes of conduct in their networks. The export garment industry of Myanmar—a country emerging out of economic sanctions imposed by Western countries—is no exception to this CSR trend. International fashion brands and retailors (called buyers) have sought out garment manufacturers in Myanmar, with the capacity to implement their social and environmental demands laid out in buyer-designated codes of conduct. This buyer requirement of CSR has taken many manufacturers by surprise because they were previously unaware of it. To some, suppliers CSR itself has been a novel term, and to others, some provisions of the code of conduct seemed to contradict local ways of taking responsibility for workers and local communities. Against this background, the manufacturers and various stakeholders of Myanmar’s export garment industry have begun to discuss what CSR means and how should one practice it. This dissertation aims to answer the question of how and why has corporate social responsibility (CSR) been introduced, embraced and challenged in Myanmar’s export garment industry during the period 2011 to 2015? The chosen empirical and temporal setting is highly suitable to examine the contestation of different CSR understandings exhibited by actors such as international buyers sourcing garments from Myanmar, and garment manufacturers and international donors in Myanmar. This study combines the global production network (GPN) analysis and institutional theories as analytical lens. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9673 Files in this item: 1
Jinsun Bae.pdf (3.008Mb) -
How Socioemotional Wealth and Familiness Influence InternationalizationSluhan, Anne (Frederiksberg, 2018)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: This doctoral dissertation investigates idiosyncratic behaviors of family firms and contributes to an understanding of how family ownership affects the ways in which firms internationalize. While each chapter in the dissertation is a stand-alone work intended for publication, every study relates to an overarching research question about how non-financial dimensions of family firm ownership—exemplified by socioemotional wealth (SEW) and familiness—influence family firm internationalization. The dissertation contributes to varying literatures including family business, corporate governance, strategic management, and international business. Specifically, the review paper on family firm internationalization offers a novel presentation of entry modes along the FIBER dimensions of SEW. It proposes a framework to unbundle family firm-specific capabilities and motivations for internationalization for subsequent analysis utilizing the theoretical perspectives of SEW and familiness. The next chapter studies how family firm risk preferences affect behavior when engaging in cross-border acquisitions. While most studies on family firms implicitly assume businesses are run at the will of a controlling family, this paper abandons this assumption and examines whether (and how) non-family shareholders interact with family shareholders when deciding to internationalize. Results indicate international acquisitions will be of greater value when the level of family ownership is high or low, whereas the value of an acquisition is lower when family ownership is relatively balanced vis à vis non-family ownership. The final empirical chapter studies family firm behavior differently by exploring the notion of familiness within the context of an international acquisition. This study applies an action research methodology first to investigate how employees understand the notion of familiness and then to observe how this perception is actively mobilized to facilitate post acquisition integration. The paper emphasizes how aspects of familiness can be purposefully mobilized to facilitate integration, thus contributing to an understanding of familiness in general, and specifically familiness in a context of internationalization. From a methodological perspective, the paper contributes rich data showing how action research can be used in a business setting, presenting a process that facilitates integration between two distinct organizational and national cultures and between family and nonfamily firms as they face challenges in a post-merger or post-acquisition context. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9626 Files in this item: 1
Anne Sluhan.pdf (3.424Mb) -
Essays on China’s Political Organization and Political Economic InstitutionsGrünberg, Nis (Frederiksberg, 2018)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: The present dissertation is a compilation of three individual papers, and an introduction chapter. While the introduction lays out the theoretic backdrop of the project as a whole, the papers represent interventions into three specific dimensions of China’s Party-state order: structural organizational issues, decision-making institutions, and political economic dynamics. These three dimensions are presented as aspects of the same political organizational order, a Party-state order assembled around the hegemony of the Communist Party of China’s (CPC), conceptualized in the introduction using a Gramsci-inspired theory of the state. Employing a historical institutional approach, the three papers engage with specific strands of literatures of China Studies in a conceptual and theoretic manner, while also contributing with empirical findings. They discuss the concept of Fragmented Authoritarianism (FA), the organization and institutionalization of Leading Small Groups, and the social embeddedness of state-owned enterprise (SOE). FA has been an influential concept to explain structural issues of China’s bureaucracy, and with China’s energy administration as example, I review its value as a theoretic notion today, 30 years after its inception. Discussing the growing importance of Leading Small Groups, the second paper addresses some of the institutional “fixes” to decisionmaking and policy coordination, which have evolved in response to structural fault-lines described in the FA paper. The third paper takes the dissertation into the political economic dimension of the Party-state order, providing a case study of how China National Petroleum Corporation, a central, state-owned and CPC led SOE, is organizationally rooted in its local operations, remaining institutionally embedded in local society through its legacy as a socialist work unit (danwei). Using Polanyi’s concept of embeddedness, the paper reveals how SOEs are split into two tiers each tasked with the respective objectives of economic development and political stability, and thus as Party-state organizations are used to flexibly support CPC hegemony. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9596 Files in this item: 1
Nis Grunberg.pdf (2.995Mb) -
A Controversy StudyHansen, Louise Lyngfeldt Gorm (Frederiksberg, 2017)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: This thesis conducts a controversy study focusing on the intermingling of political considerations and emerging science in a controversy over whether or not the Zipingpu dam in China’s Sichuan Province caused the magnitude 7.9 Wenchuan earthquake on May 12th 2008. The 2008 Wenchuan earthquake was one of the deadliest, costliest and biggest earthquakes in China in three decades. Over 90,000 people died, went missing or were presumed dead, and economic damage was estimated at over 100 billion US dollars in 2013. For scientists to suggest that such an unfathomable disaster could have been man-made was controversial to say the least. Not only because the root cause of the earthquake pointed to was a dam, and dam projects are inherently rife with conflict, but also because the Zipingpu dam was itself a high priority project for the Chinese central government and the Sichuan Province. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9562 Files in this item: 1
Louise Lyngfeldt Gorm Hansen.pdf (4.930Mb) -
Faigen, Benjamin (Frederiksberg, 2016)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: This thesis examines ownership of the firm by its employees, of varying stakes. It begins by identifying the existence of employee ownership in a Chinese context, presented in the form of a general analytical discussion which is informed by a review of the available evidence on the subject. This work sets the stage for a focus on this form of ownership at the individual level of analysis, involving both conceptual and empirical explorations. Together, this constitutes three papers, put together with introductory and concluding chapters. The first thesis paper identifies the drivers of, and barriers to, employee ownership in China at three levels of analysis: the societal, organisational and individual. Its intended contribution to the employee ownership literature is to organise the scattered evidence in order to provide a systematic and comprehensive coverage of the development of this phenomenon. Employee ownership is found to have played a role in Chinese economic transition as a transitory phase before non-state enterprises were afforded official recognition in a context of publicly-owned enterprise privatisation. Senior managers became the key beneficiaries in firm sales and most ventures that were at one stage employee-owned, dissolved. Outside of a couple of notable examples in the tertiary sector, enterprises featuring some level of employees as owners persist in reduced numbers in rural areas today. In the second thesis paper, the interest is in the role of the individual actor with regard to employee ownership outside of a narrower Chinese context. At this level of analysis, it is preferences (attitudes) and resources which are decisive. A more detailed exploration of the former in particular follows, the idea being to theorise the compatibility of defined individual ‘types’ with specific ownership structures. Yet, because the existence of different forms and mechanisms with regard to employee ownership is not always made clear in the related literature, notable pathways to ownership— cooperative, professional partnership, controlling ownership, share ownership plan mechanism, share option mechanism, and direct ownership—are first clarified to facilitate the analysis. The paper’s overall contribution to the literature is the provision of a coherent conceptual treatment of the individual-level antecedents to employee ownership. The third thesis paper comprises mixed-method empirical research into the characteristics of individuals who have recently purchased shares in their employing firms in an Icelandic context, as well as their specific motives for doing so (or reasons for not doing so). Determinants of employee ownership, as well as direct insights into the considerations surrounding share acquisition, are less common at this level of analysis and this is the where the paper contributes to the literature. In order to conduct the empirical analysis, original material is gathered from six case study firms, the details of which are presented within the paper. Income, tenure and age are found to influence ownership status. Furthermore, some support is found for financial motives outweighing non-financial motives behind share purchases in minority employee-owned firms relative to majority employee-owned firms. Internal barriers to ownership, together with a lack of funds, hindered share purchases in majority employee-owned firms in particular. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9392 Files in this item: 1
Benjamin Faigen.pdf (1.949Mb) -
Rethinking Autonomy, Space & Time In Today’s World Of ArtBertelsen, Marianne (Frederiksberg, 2016)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: By studying what goes on in the world of art, it is possible not only to make observations about art and the artist but also to understand how modern-day culture is being organized and negotiated. From this perspective, understanding the experiences of autonomy and contemporaneity in being an artist today, and how these relate to cultural structures, can serve to explain some of the cultural structures that organize the world of art. In this thesis, my empirical starting point is the local context of a Danish art school and global attitudes to cultural policy-making and art education. These attitudes, in turn, carry my research process across the global world of art, involving the local context of a Chinese art school. Moving away from the somewhat simplified conflicts of autonomy and heteronomy, the global and the local, and the traditional and the contemporary, the three main themes of autonomy, time, and space serve as essential prisms through which to understand and explain the everyday experiences of contemporary art at art schools today. This thesis is positioned as a contribution to the sociology of art but also draws on, and hopes to inspire, scholarship in global art history and aesthetic philosophy. Building upon the classic groundwork in the sociology of art I shed light on how, in an ever more changing world of art, the idea of contemporary art now involves a complex group of issues which go beyond classic approaches, and I suggest the explanatory potential of focusing on individual artists, acting in and making sense of the cultural structures of the world of art. My research process has been guided by critical realism and the methodological meta-approach of engaging with complexity through reflexive research. In this sense, the title “Aesthetic Encounters” refers not only to the conceptual and empirical results and contributions of the thesis but also to the explorative research process of engaging with the complexity of cultural and artistic worlds. As the main outcome of my research, I develop and present the concepts of “antinomies of autonomy”, globally connected but locally present contemporaneity, and the “heterochronies” of specific space-times. These are the socio-cultural dynamics which the experiences of the Chinese and Danish artists and their faculties brought me to understand. I then appropriate these dynamics as a means of rethinking and explaining some of the structural features in the world of art and the cultural developments evolving around the increased globalization of and changes in the role of the artist. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9287 Files in this item: 1
Marianne Bertelsen.pdf (1.617Mb) -
A study of emerging producer organisations in IndiaAbraham, Mathew (Frederiksberg, 2015)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: A majority of the world’s agricultural production takes place on small farms (less than 2 hectares). India has one of the smallest average farm sizes with over 68 per cent of its farms being marginal in size (below 1 hectare). Small farm production is constrained by challenges of accessing lumpy inputs of management and asset specific machinery, markets, credit, extension services and technology. Collective actions in the form of cooperatives in many parts of the world have played a vital role in overcoming these challenges and enabling agricultural growth. However, cooperatives in India have suffered from low participation, over-dependence on state assistance, poor management, political interference in their functioning and poor benefits to intended target groups. In recent years Producer Organisational Formats (POFs) such as Producer Companies (PCs), Joint Liability Groups (JLGs) and Farmers Federations (FFs) have emerged in an attempt to address some of these challenges faced by small producers. Although policy makers recognize this new cooperativism to have the potential to address small producer disadvantages, progress has been little in supporting or promoting POFs in India due to limited understanding of their functioning, impact and potential. This knowledge gap motivated this research. Using a conceptual framework grounded in institutional and collective action theories, this thesis examines (a) how POFs are structured on organisational, social and economic terms and (b) how resources are allocated and incentives aligned within these institutions. The thesis finds that the examined POFs are small, regionspecific collective actions, organised with the help of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) supported by the state. POFs relied on networks of social relationships, trust, norms and sometimes religious ideology to prevent collective action problems that hindered effective organisation. In economic terms, POFs helped improve market access and increased marketable agricultural surplus at the household level; yet, this surplus was not sufficient for households with marginal sized land to solely depend on farming as a livelihood activity. As for resource allocation and incentive alignment within POFs, the even distribution of collective goods to all members was a strong material incentive for participation. Social capital in the form of networks, norms and trust among members also incentivised participation. In sum the study finds that POFs have the potential to improve access to markets, credit, inputs and research and extension services, the lack of which has hindered small and marginal producer viability. In some cases social disadvantages of access arising from gender and caste were addressed through these organisations. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9120 Files in this item: 1
Mathew_Abraham.pdf (2.185Mb) -
Entrepreneurship-Enabled Dynamic Capability of Medium-Sized Multinational EnterprisesCao, Yangfeng (Frederiksberg, 2015)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: This PhD dissertation focuses on business model innovation (BMI), which plays a central role in explaining firm performance and is viewed as a source of competitive advantage. A recent global survey of more than 4,000 senior executives by the Economist Intelligence Unit found that the majority (54%) favoured BMI over product or service innovation as a source of future competitive advantage. Hence, the research on BMI is a salient topic for strategic management and entrepreneurship studies because it is central to a firm‘s dynamic capability for novel value creation and novel value capture on a sustainable basis. Prior studies have argued that a business model can be only effective if it is designed properly for a specific context. In this sense, the business models of multinational enterprises (MNEs) should differ from those of domestic firms. Specifically, owing to the large gaps or distances in the economic and institutional contexts between advanced and emerging economies, as two sides of the global divide, cross-divide entry by MNEs, either from an advanced economy into an emerging economy as a top-down venture or from an emerging economy to an advanced economy as a bottom-up venture, will depend heavily on the novel business model designed to match the host context on the other side of the global divide. This is particularly true in the case of entering the mid-end market as the mainstream in the host economy. In addition, owing to the internal contextual dimensions of corporate size and age, the key challenge to a top-down venture seems more acute for medium-sized MNEs (MMNEs) than both large and small MNEs (the latter is often referred to as ‗born-global‘ firms). This is because MMNEs tend to have more limited resources than large MNEs, but less flexibility than small MNEs. Given the salience of the cross-divide context to MNEs as well as the paucity of research on MMNEs, this PhD dissertation focuses on how BMI occurs in the special context of cross-divide entry with a top-down venture for a mid-end market by MMNEs. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9241 Files in this item: 1
Yangfeng_CAO.pdf (2.993Mb) -
Brandl, Kristin Martina (Frederiksberg, 2014)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: The global economy is perpetually changing to a highly knowledge-based economy in which services and especially knowledge-intensive services are increasingly offshored (geographically relocated) to emerging market economies such as India. This trend is interesting as for decades services had been characterized as intangible, perishable, heterogeneous and inseparable from their sources of origin making a geographic dispersion of service production and consumption unimaginable. Thus, the geographic relocation of the services is expected to infer organizational and operational reconfigurations also impacting the service production. The thesis studies these reconfigurations by questioning: how does offshoring impact on the production of services. In order to capture the unique characteristics of services and provide a thorough understanding of the phenomenon, detailed and dynamic analyses of activities and actors through process perspectives are argued to be necessary. Process perspectives allow studying relationships between actions and individual actors from an organizational and operational angle. Two process perspectives are applied in this thesis in three independent research papers. The first research paper studies the offshoring process as a strategic and organizational change process that leads to a misalignment of components of a services production system and questions how this impact elicits a reconfiguration of the system. The second and third paper investigates the offshored production process of knowledge-intensive services with a focus on actors in the processes and their activities. That is, the second paper questions how the increase of cognitive distance between actors inferred by offshoring changes the production of the services including costs and value outcomes. The third paper questions how offshoring impacts client co-production, i.e. the transfer and co-creation of knowledge, in a similarly designed service production process of knowledgeintensive business services. Collectively, this research shows that process perspectives on service offshoring are essential to study the impact of offshoring on service production. It also allows an understanding on the importance of actors and the causal links between them and activities. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9046 Files in this item: 1
Kristin_Brandl_2.pdf (930.0Kb) -
Spliid, Robert (Frederiksberg, 2014)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: Afhandlingens overordnede forskningsspørgsmål er, hvordan kapitalfondene skaber værdi for deres porteføljevirksomheder ved brug af metoder og kompetencer. Metoderne er de instrumenter, kapitalfondene anvender, mens kompetencerne er deres evne til at benytte metoderne effektivt. Siden den første kapitalfond så dagens lys i midten af 70’erne, har der været betydelig fokus på denne ejerskabsform. På den ene side er kapitalfondene blevet kritiseret for at skabe værdi for aktionærerne på andre stakeholderes bekostning, på den anden side er der gjort adskillige forsøg på at påvise, at virksomheder i kapitalfondsejerskab klarer sig bedre end andre virksomheder. Udgangspunktet for denne undersøgelse er, at ingen ejerskabsform er den optimale under alle forhold. Alle virksomheder gennemlever forskellige faser, og kapitalfondsejerskabet egner sig bedst for virksomheder, der har behov for hurtig transformation. Undersøgelser af, hvordan kapitalfondsejede virksomheder klarer sig i sammenligning med andre virksomheder, bidrager derfor ikke til at fremme forståelsen for kapitalfondenes værdiskabelsesproces. Kapitalfondenes funktion som tidsbegrænset ejer forstås bedst ved at analysere dem i den kontekst, de opererer. Kapitalfondene udgør ikke en homogen investorgruppe, der handler ens på alle udfordringer, men de råder over bestemte instrumenter og kompetencer, som tegner et mønster i den måde, de arbejder på. Afhandlingens formål er at afdække dette mønster. Metoden er en casebaseret analyse af tre danske kapitalfondsejede virksomheder, som er udvalgt efter en række krav til forskellighed. De tre cases er byggevarekæden DT, som var ejet af en kapitalfond fra 2003 til 2006, fjernvarmerørsproducenten Logstor, som var ejet af kapitalfonde i to omgange fra 1999 til 2013, og medicinalvirksomheden Nycomed, som var ejet af kapitalfonde i tre omgange fra 1999 til 2011. Der er således i alle tre tilfælde tale om virksomheder, som er exited, så kapitalfondsejerskaberne kan ses i deres helhed. Undersøgelsen er baseret på interviews med 21 personer, hvoraf de 20 har haft en tilknytning til en af de tre virksomheder, mens den sidste repræsenterer en bank, der har deltaget i finansieringen af alle tre virksomheder. De 20 personer med direkte tilknytning til de tre virksomheder repræsenterede fire grupper: kapitalfondene, bestyrelsen, ledelsen og medarbejderne. Repræsentanterne for de fire grupper redegjorde fra hver deres synsvinkel for, hvorledes de mente, kapitalfondene arbejdede med virksomheden. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8934 Files in this item: 1
Robert_Spliid.pdf (1.921Mb) -
Insights from Annual General MeetingsStrand, Therese (Frederiksberg, 2012)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: This thesis consists of five empirical studies, all relating to shareholder activism at annual general meetings. The first study concerns the structure and content of general meetings in Denmark and Sweden comparatively. The paper reveals significant differences in the level of activism, with Swedish investors being the most active in terms of proposals, proxy voting, and ‘voice’. The paper takes a legal approach, and discusses divergence in activism levels from the perspective of shareholder prerequisites to engage in monitoring efforts. Further, the paper investigating the topics addressed through questions and opinions. The results show that matters which can be categorized as irrelevant are reasonably rare. This is an important finding, as suggestions to abolish general meetings have often been based on the assumption that general meetings facilitate nothing but irrelevant, time consuming, and costly discussions that serves no monitoring function. The second study analyses the impact of voting power on shareholder activism. We hypothesize that there is a positive relationship between shareholder activism and a measure of the largest shareholder’s sensitivity to increased participation by small shareholders and find that firms’ amenability to small shareholder influence leads to more proposals by the nomination committee, but fewer proposals by other shareholders. We interpret this as evidence that the shareholder elected nomination committees effectively channel shareholder concerns and preempt other kinds of activism. Politicians and companies that desire active shareholders could improve the amenability of firms to shareholder influence by ownership transparency, shareholder committees, and contacts with shareholder associations and other vehicles for collective action... URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8460 Files in this item: 1
Therese_Strand.pdf (1.719Mb) -
An application to ChinaLi, Xin (Frederiksberg, 2011)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: The starting point of this PhD research is two observations. The first is that people often tend to discuss a country’s national competitiveness in a general tone, i.e., judging a country to be either competitive or uncompetitive, rather than making more balanced assessment, and therefore their opinions often contradict each other. The second observation is that there are many competing international reports that rank a large number of countries in terms of their national competitiveness. These reports often provide different rankings for a given country (e.g., China), and therefore the readers of these reports are often left with a confusing picture. The first observation reflects the reality that there has been a lack of commonly accepted definition of national competitiveness. The second reflects the methodological problems of the indexing-and-ranking methods commonly used by international competitiveness reports... URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8357 Files in this item: 1
Xin_Li.pdf (5.486Mb) -
Sigurjonsson, Throstur Olaf (Frederiksberg, 2011)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: Currently, the corporate governance has the agenda of categorizing reality and thereby determining which systems are more effective and efficient in a given context. A question is posed; how has the internationalization of markets, liberalization, deregulation, and privatization adapted to rapid changes in traditionally based models of corporate governance? When corporate governance practices are exported from one country to another, they tend to be translated and customized to local practices before being adopted. The objective of this thesis is to examine this type of adaptation and explain the circumstances that led to a collapse of governance mechanisms, using Iceland as an example. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8336 Files in this item: 1
Throstur Sigurjonsson.pdf (3.434Mb) -
An Empirical Reconciliation of Two Critical ConceptsOhnemus, Lars (Frederiksberg, 2010)[More information][Less information]
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An empirical analysis of Economics and ManagementÓladóttir, Ásta Dis (Frederiksberg, 2010)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: This dissertation consists of an introductory chapter, followed by four papers that approach the topic of internationalization of small economies and the multinational firm from different angles. The concluding chapter deals with what happened in Iceland after the crisis that started in October 2008 with the collapse of the Icelandic financial system and how the very fast internationalization of Icelandic firms was possible, but only as further issues that need to be researched. Each of the papers can be read individually as well as in the larger context of this dissertation. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7993 Files in this item: 1
Ásta_Dis_Óladóttir.pdf (2.005Mb) -
The Norwegian maritime sectorWallevik, Kristin (Frederiksberg, 2009)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: The four papers in this thesis investigate corporate governance in family firms from different angles, with emphasis on industry and industry networks. I divide the industry networks into social and commercial networks, where social networks are measured by interlocking boards and commercial networks by investments in other firms in the same industry. Focus is on the governance structures in family firms, how industry and networks may be determinants of family ownership, and the effect of family ownership and strong industry networks on financial performance in certain industries (such as the maritime industry). Two of the papers are theoretical papers and two are empirical papers. The empirical papers are based on the same hand-collected dataset comprising 167 Norwegian listed companies from 1996-2005. The first paper - “Corporate Governance in Family firms” comprises a survey of the corporate governance literature on family firms, paying attention to the unique issues in the governance of these firms. I discuss different forms of ownership and how different agency contexts and business environments may suit family ownership better than other ownership structures. I also discuss how firms can reap the benefits of family ownership, by using a relational governance model, if there is an atmosphere of positive relationships, trust and shared visions. A relational governance model focuses on the social capital embedded in personal relations between owners, managers and board members. A contractual governance model, however, focuses on finding the optimal incentives in the relations between owners and managers, in addition to having greater focus on the monitoring role of the board. These two models may complement and supplement each other in a governance structure. The question is how these different governance models affect firms’ operations, decision-making, and competitiveness. The second paper - “The Effect of Industry Networks on Family Ownership” deals with possible effects of industry networks on the prevalence of family firms in different industries. I discuss how various networks can be determinants of family ownership, in addition to elements like incentives, monitoring, and altruism, as well as firm, industry and nation specific factors. I also discuss whether family firms can gain more from these industry networks than other firms due to a higher degree of ”thick trust”, strong owner-manager relations and the use of a relational governance structure. This paper proposes that strong social and commercial networks affect the number of family firms in an industry, as a result of the social capital embedded in these relations. Paper three - “Social and Commercial Networks as Determinants of Family Ownership - The Norwegian Shipping Industry” is an empirical paper testing whether industry networks are among the determinants of family ownership in the Norwegian shipping industry. The overall question is why family ownership is more prevalent in some industries, and which elements that influence this ownership structure. I focus on industry effects such as the number of firms in an industry and the social and commercial industry networks between firms. These are potential determinants of family ownership. I find that both industry and various industry networks have a significant and positive effect on family ownership in the shipping industry. The fourth paper - “Family Ownership, Networks and Financial Performance” takes up the question whether family ownership and various networks affect financial performance, measured by Tobin’s q and ROA lagged, or not. Earlier studies come to different conclusions regarding the relationship between family ownership and firm performance, which may be due to differences in the agency context of the studies. I add industry and industry networks as central variables to disentangle some of the contextual factors in this relationship. This paper argues that it is not necessarily the family ownership that affects performance, but how this ownership is used in a strategic manner. Establishing and using networks are seemingly a means of operation in some industries, sometimes with a positive effect on performance. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7901 Files in this item: 1
Kristin_Wallevik.pdf (3.039Mb) -
Entry timing and mode choiceJakobsen, Kristian (København, 2008)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: This dissertation consists of an introduction followed by four papers on issues related to the choice of entry timing and entry mode in transition economies. Below is a list of the papers that is included in the dissertation with information about their current publication status and coauthorships. * Jakobsen, K. 2007. First mover advantages in Central and Eastern Europe: A comparative analysis of performance measures, Journal of East-West Business, 13(1), 35-61. * Jakobsen, K. 2008. Competition for Markets in the Brewing Industry in Central and Eastern Europe. In J. Larimo (Ed.) Perspectives on Internationalization and International Management, Vassan Yliopiston Julkaisuja, p. 299-316. ISBN 978-952-476-228-1 * Jakobsen, K., & Meyer, K. E. 2008. Partial Acquisition: The overlooked entry mode. In J. H. Dunning and P. Gugler (eds.) Progress in International Business Research 2, Elsevier Science, p. 203-226. ISBN 978-0-7623-1475-1. * Jakobsen, K., & Meyer, K. E. 2007. Negotiating entry modes: Partial acquisitions in transition economies. Revise and resubmit at International Business Review URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7681 Files in this item: 1
kristian_jakobsen.pdf (1.922Mb)
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