Scientific experts have traditionally enjoyed high public trust, but their stock of social capital is eroding (Jacobs, 2020). This is particularly the case for management researchers, who are already viewed as elites disconnected from practice and the public. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated lingering concerns about using public resources for university education and social sciences that yield questionable social returns with obfuscated outputs, lack of timeliness and accessibility, and fragmentation, but it has also 'changed science forever' (Yong, 2020): The post-COVID-19 scientific enterprise demands responsible use of societal resources through fast-paced research, social embeddedness, and coordination. Management research is everything but. For management scholars, this means recalibrating how research is conducted, evaluated, and disseminated to society. This commentary briefly outlines some tangible pathways toward that end.
CHRONIC PROBLEMS TURNED EXISTENTIALThe notion that management research seldom reaches a broad audience or lacks pivotal societal impact is not new (Buckley et al., 2017), but stakeholder patience for using resources for management research has rapidly depleted due to COVID-19-driven resource constraints. The endless calls for individual researchers to do more 'impactful' or
International business (IB) research focused on practical insights requires analytical techniques that come closer to reality by embracing complexity. In this article, we discuss Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), a configurational technique researchers can leverage to study complex causal patterns in IB phenomena. We briefly review the basics of QCA, provide an example of how it can be applied to study practical IB issues, and outline the first steps for researchers situated at the intersection of IB practice and scholarship. Employing such techniques may make applied IB research even better positioned to make impactful contributions to practice and society.
Research summaryWe offer a novel view of formal institutions as a layer cake, suggesting a structural relationship between higher‐level and lower‐level institutions. In this context, inter‐layer conflict imposes complex pressures on multinational corporations (MNCs). These tensions have become more rife amid the growth in global connectedness and the commensurate increase in the importance of within‐country differences. Drawing on political science and economic geography research, we introduce regime type and the distribution of economic resources as conditions under which inter‐layer conflict is most likely to arise. We leverage two caselets to illustrate the inter‐layer conflict and the novel response options MNCs can deploy. Our perspective advances the theoretical understanding of intra‐national institutional diversity, laying the groundwork for future research at the nexus of institutional theory and global strategy.Managerial summaryFirms often encounter opposing pressures in their operating environments because institutions within the nation‐state impose misaligned policies. Despite acknowledging that such interactions exist, firms traditionally did not make it an integral part of their strategy. We demarcate how formal institutions cascade, forming a layer cake of relevant influences whereby the structural relationship between higher‐level and lower‐level institutions may impose complex pressures when in conflict. We turn to political science and economic geography literatures for explanations of when such conflict is most likely and offer a window into the responses by multinational firms using caselets within the COVID‐19 pandemic context. We offer new avenues for research on the ways in which institutions function to affect multinational firms in a global economy increasingly characterized by institutional complexity.
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