We need more knowledge about the bases of internationalization and how the resources used can affect the outcomes of this strategy. Specifically, we examine the importance of valuable firm resources, human capital and relational capital (with corporate clients and with foreign governments), to internationalization and their moderation of the internationalization-firm performance relationship in professional service firms. The results show that human capital and relational capital generally have a positive effect on internationalization (however, relational capital with corporate clients is only positive when teamed with strong human capital). Additionally, we find that human capital positively moderates the relationship between internationalization and firm performance. However, neither form of relational capital moderates the internationalization-firm performance relationship. While relational capital with corporate clients has a strong positive effect on firm performance, relational capital with foreign government clients has a negative effect on firm performance.
Firms employ a variety of political strategies (e.g., lobbying, contributions) in an attempt to gain influence or access to the public policy process. A variety of benefits may accrue to firms that are successful in creating a linkage with the government: information, access, influence, reduced uncertainty and transaction costs, etc. However, the direct benefits of such strategies are difficult to observe. One political strategy is studied here-personal service (having a firm representative serve in a political capacity). Event-study methodology results show that such linkages with the government positively affect firm value. These findings indicate that firmspecific benefits may result from political strategies.
We develop a new perspective on entrepreneurship as a dynamic, complex, subjective process of creative organizing. Our approach, which we call ‘dynamic creation’, synthesizes core ideas from Austrian ‘radical subjectivism’ with complementary ideas from psychology (empathy), strategy and organization theory (modularity), and complexity theory (self-organization). We articulate conjectures at multiple levels about how such dynamic creative processes as empathizing, modularizing, and self-organizing help organize subjectively imagined novel ideas in entrepreneurs’ minds, heterogeneous resources in their firms, and disequilibrium markets in their environments. In our most provocative claim, we argue that entrepreneurs, by imagining divergent futures and (re)combining heterogeneous resources to create novel products, drive far-from-equilibrium market processes to create not market anarchy but market order. We conclude our exposition of each dynamic creative process by offering one possible direction for future research and articulating additional conjectures that help point the way. Throughout, we draw examples from CareerBuilder—a firm that has played a major role in creating and shaping the online model in the job search/recruiting industry—and its industry rivals (e.g. Monster, Yahoo’s HotJobs) to illustrate selected concepts and relationships in dynamic entrepreneurial creation.
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