Essays on subsidiary roles and entrepreneurship in the multinational enterprise.
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文摘
This dissertation includes six related papers/essays on subsidiary roles and subsidiary entrepreneurship in the multinational enterprise (MNE). Subsidiary roles and subsidiary entrepreneurship represent two distinct, but closely related areas of research on the MNE, and both play complementary roles driving the evolution of the MNE in practice. Subsidiary roles represent rational assignments by MNE corporate management in line with the firm's dominant logic. In contrast, bounded rationality constraints faced by this same corporate management imply it should support subsidiaries to assume entrepreneurial initiatives, thereby allowing these subsidiaries to co-determine the MNE's evolutionary path.;The dissertation starts with the behavioural analysis of subsidiary roles and subsidiary entrepreneurship in Chapter 1. I propose that bounded rationality constraints faced by MNE corporate level management lead to severe limits imposed on subsidiary entrepreneurship. This leads to a new conceptual framework to gain insights into the governance-related conditions for the successful development of subsidiary entrepreneurship. The behavioural analysis developed in this essay underlies all the other chapters in the dissertation.;The following two chapters largely address the issue of subsidiary roles. Based on current MNE practice, Chapter 2 extends the dominant typology of subsidiary roles as developed by Bartlett and Ghoshal (1986), by differentiating between the subsidiary's national environment as an input market versus an output market, and between back-end and customer-end firm-specific advantages. I then examine how subsidiary roles change as a result of both subsidiary entrepreneurship and the increasingly important phenomenon of regional integration. The effect of regional integration is tested empirically in Chapter 3, using a sample of 50 foreign subsidiaries operating in Canada. I find that subsidiaries of outsider (in this case European Union) MNEs do face a liability of inter-regional foreignness as compared to insider (in this case American) MNE subsidiaries. However, such liability tends to diminish over time, though at a different pace for the various value chain activities considered.;The final three chapters examine subsidiary entrepreneurship from different perspectives. In Chapter 4, I analyze how the quantity of managerial services required for firm-level organic expansion affects subsidiary entrepreneurship and subsidiary expansion. In Chapters 5 and 6 , I explore the determinants of subsidiary entrepreneurship from the behavioural theory perspective and the mainstream entrepreneurship perspective. Each perspective leads to a set of specific hypotheses, which augment the conceptual foundation for future empirical studies on subsidiary initiatives in MNEs.