Developing international social capital: The role of communities of practice and clustering

Abstract

One criteria regarding where to invest in foreign markets is linked to the international social capital (ISC) that exists on the place, which enables the access to local knowledge and other location-specific advantages. There are alternative ways to create and make use of that ISC that are still unexplored by International Business literature. In this paper, we study the geographic communities of practice (CoP) that are formed by FDI firms from the same country-of-origin (the so-called country-of-origin clusters). For that purpose, the paper adopts a qualitative methodological approach through an inductive case study of expatriates from 13 Spanish subsidiaries co-located in China. Our findings suggest that there are particular mechanisms based on the informal connections and repeated interactions facilitated by a common language and non-competitive relationships that create an ISC in the CoP. Moreover, our analysis shows there is a heterogeneity in the way these mechanisms are developed and used by the member firms, and this is due to organizational and individual factors, as well as leadership dynamics. Our work contributes to Internationalization and Network theories by identifying unexplored mechanisms through which the ISC is developed at the host country level. Besides, it helps identifying competences (i.e. clustering competences) that help expatriate managers to be successful in their international assignments.

Exploring the maturity and development of global communities of practice

“…The success of the TGs begs the question, “Why not leave the CoPs (TGs) alone?” Indeed some studies consider the CoP an emergent phenomenon which is self‐organised (Lave & Wenger, ; Orr, ; Urzelai & Puig, ), and without initiatives from the management, the TGs could probably function, whereas some would fade away (Wenger et al, ). However, to leverage the potential of CoPs and bring systematic benefit to an organisation, initiatives such as recruiting a stream of new participants, allocating resources, and providing technical support are necessary (Scarso, Bolisani, & Salvador, ; Wenger et al, ).…”

“…The term was coined in a study underlining the importance of learning in the physical and social context of the actual work (Lave & Wenger, ). While some scholars view CoPs as self‐organised and autonomous (Gabbay & le May, ; Orr, ; Urzelai & Puig, ), others assert that CoPs can be intentionally developed to improve organisational knowledge sharing and collaboration (Aljuwaiber, ; Barbour, Armstrong, Condron, & Palermo, ; Cornes et al, ; Wenger et al, ).…”

Cause-related marketing

“…Furthermore, we examine the relationship between supplier CRM-led philanthropic CSR reputation and foreign customer business engagement in this research. Further research might adopt our approach to examine the impact of supplier CRM-led philanthropic CSR reputation on other characteristics of the international business relationship, such as social capital (e.g., Urzelai and Puig, 2019) or joint/collaborative activity (e.g., Liu et al, 2019).…”

Role and Competence of the Manager of the Example of a Production Enterprise

“…Nowadays, human capital is considered to be the most valuable wealth and at the same time the most important factor of success for any enterprise (Al- Jinini, Dina Khalid et all, 2019, Urzelai, Puig, 2019. Therefore, personnel management plays an increasingly important role in the organization (Chang, et al, 2019).…”