Green Supply Chain Management In Chinese Electronic Manufacturing Organisations; An Analysis Of Senior Managements’ Perceptions., Eoin Plant, Yusen Xu, Gareth R.T. White

Articles

Green supply chain management and reverse logistics has emerged as a key area of research interest. Recent environmental regulations have also stimulated interest in this field. However, information sharing is a pre- requisite to efficient and effective logistics utilisation. Manufacturing organisations in China were argued to be 10-20 years behind their Western counterparts in relation to information sharing in their supply chains (Li and Yuan, 2009). This barrier needs to be addressed if China is going to maintain and grow its manufacturing position in the world, attempt to address green supply chain issues and their negative externalities. A systematic literature …

An Indigenous Women Perspective Of Work And Organisation: The Maya Way, Jennifer Manning, J. Miguel Imas, Paul Donnelly

Conference papers

Western literature in management/organisation studies focuses primarily on gender issues that affect inequalities experienced by women at work. Adopting, in some cases, critical and feminist theoretical positions, the gender debate unfolds questions on the prevailing male discourse that is dominant in management and business organisations. Most of these theoretical assumptions tend to influence, subsequently, the way in which we understand the experiences of women in the developing or under-developed world. That is, these theoretical positions occupy a privileged voice upon which to write, describe and analyse the experiences of women in contexts where these Western discourses seem either alien or …

The Internationalization Of Creative Professional Service Firms, Deirdre Mcquillan

Doctoral

The need to understand the internationalization process of the organization is a field of increasing contemporary interest due to greatly intensified trade flows between nations over the last two decades. While traditionally internationalization was generally pursued by manufacturing firms, service organizations, including creative professional service firms (creative PSFs) such as architects now commonly internationalize their activities. However, theory to date continues to focus on traditional manufacturing firms, and while insights relating to service firm internationalization have gained traction over the last decade, theoretical contributions remain fragmented and overlook the particular features of how creative PSFs internationalize. This is despite the …

How Foreign Firms Transformed Ireland’S Domestic Economy, Paul Donnelly

Articles

Today, Ireland is host to 1,033 multinational corporations. They directly employ 152,785 and account for 70 per cent or €122.5bn of exports. It’s a story that has its roots in the 1940s.

Subsidiary Innovation:A Phenomenon Under Threat?, Marty Reilly, Pamela Sharkey Scott

Articles

Rarely are the linkages between theory and practice as apparent as those between the strategic renewal literature and current structural transformations being realised within many multinationals (MNCs). Strategic renewal promotes the transformation of capabilities, structural models and organisational reform. Similarly, we can see similarly how many MNC organisations, cognizant of both global and technological change are championing these key tenets in choosing a new path, and shifting from networks of mini-replica subsidiaries towards more task-driven, integrated systems of activities. The advance of this transactional approach to operations is driven by an aim to create greater efficiencies, eliminate duplication of efforts …

Developing Strategy From The Middle:Subsidiary Strategy And The Role Of The Subsidiary General Manager, Donal O'Brien, Pamela Sharkey Scott, Patrick Gibbons

Conference Papers

The multinational subsidiary is a unique context to study management processes relating to strategy but so far, there has not been a coherent approach identifiable in the literature. It is recognised that subsidiaries evolve over time and through their own actions and initiatives have the potential to modify the power structures of the Multinational Enterprise (MNE) but little is known about the role of the subsidiary manager in this process. We suggest that the tensions between the headquarters perspective and the subsidiary perspective have resulted in the application of inappropriate frameworks to the study of subsidiary managers. This proposal presents …

Strategic Activity In The Today’S Multinational Subsidiaries, Donal O'Brien, Pamela Sharkey Scott, Patrick Gibbons

Conference Papers

This working paper presents an ongoing empirical study into strategy development at the subsidiary management level of the Multinational Enterprise (MNE). The multinational subsidiary is a unique context to study management processes relating to strategy but so far, despite the emergence of the concept, there has not been a coherent approach identifiable in the literature. It is recognised that subsidiaries evolve over time and through their own actions and initiatives have the potential to modify the power structures of the Multinational Enterprise (MNE) but little is known about the role of the subsidiary manager in this process. We suggest that …

Internationalisation By Idiosyncrasy: Resource Commitments And Competencies For Professional Service Firm Internationalisation, Deirdre Mcquillan, Pamela Sharkey Scott, Vincent Mangematin

Conference papers

Using a behavioral process approach within the field of international business theory, this study adopts a resource based lens to examine an area exhibiting exceptional growth, the internationalisation of professional service firms (PSFs). An in-depth qualitative study of the internationalisation process of five architectural firms expanding to multiple international markets was conducted. The paper’s main contribution is the identification of the interplay between the learning process and resource commitments for internationalisation. We reveal how these PSFs can be classified along a continuum whereby they adopt either a project learning or a market learning approach which drives the development and acquisition …

Subsidiary Strategy And The Role Of The Subsidiary Manager : Integrating The Middle Manager Perspective, Donal O'Brien

Conference Papers

Subsidiary strategy is a concept which has emerged in international business literature but research has so far failed to explain how subsidiary managers develop strategy under the constraints of the paradoxical pressures they face in today’s Multinational Enterprises (MNE). On the one hand current trends suggest that (MNE) are developing into more global business structures which are reducing the power and influence of subsidiary managers (Buckley, 2009, Buckley & Ghauri, 2004, Mudambi, 2008). The result of these trends, are that the market orientated aspects of subsidiary strategy are becoming constrained and to some degree taken out of the hands of …

Towards A Decision Making Model For City Break Travel, Gerard Dunne, Sheila Flanagan, Joan Buckley

Articles

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the city break travel decision and in particular to develop a decision making model that reflects the characteristics of this type of trip taking.

Method

The research follows a sequential mixed methods approach consisting of two phases. Phase One involves a quantitative survey of 1,000 visitors to Dublin, from which city break and non city break visitor cohorts are separated and compared. Phase Two entails a qualitative analysis (involving 40 in-depth interviews) that specifically examines the decision making behaviour of city break visitors.

Findings

City break trips were shown to be …

Emerging Threats For Mnc Subsidiaries And The Cycle Of Decline, Pamela Sharkey Scott, P. T. Gibbons Prof

Articles

Purpose – Subsidiary units have traditionally feared relocation of their activities to lower-cost locations. The authors identify other emerging threats which are changing how multinational corporations (MNCs) manage their subsidiary units, and develop a cycle of subsidiary decline demonstrating how these threats can undermine a subsidiary's position within the MNC.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents the results of a survey targeted at over 1,100 subsidiary CEOs of MNCs located in Ireland, a program of in-depth interviews of 24 subsidiary CEOs/directors, and a review of the literature relating to MNC and subsidiary management, are combined to identify emerging threats to subsidiary …

Application Of The Fractional Diffusion Equation For Predicting Market Behaviour, Jonathan Blackledge

Articles

Most Financial modelling system rely on an underlying hypothesis known as the Eficient Market Hypothesi (EMH) including the famous BlackScholes formula for placing an option. However, the EMH has a fundamental flaw: it is based on the assumption that economic processes are normally distributed and it has long been known that this is not the case. This fundamental assumption leads to a number of shortcomings associated with using the EMH to analyse financial data which includes failure to predict the future volatility of a market share value. This paper introduces a new financial risk assessment model based on Levy statistics …

Middle Managers' Searching For Knowledge: The Repository-Interpersonal Dilemma, Esther Tippmann, Pamela Sharkey Scott, Vincent Mangematin

Conference Papers

Drawing on the organizational memory and strategy for managing knowledge literatures to develop a theoretical framework, we empirically examined the organizational memory contexts – interpersonal and repository logic - that set the broader conditions for middle managers’ knowledge searching. Contrary to most studies which examine knowledge storage processes, with the help of multiple case studies, we examined middle managers’ actual activities. Our findings reveal that in the interpersonal logic middle managers more actively engage in knowledge circulation and knowledge co-creation processes. In the repository logic instead, middle managers’ potential seemed to become confined because of cognitive inertia, leading to a …

Discourse At The Edge: Enterprise Discourse In Ireland, Brendan O'Rourke

Conference papers

Ireland is an economy, society and culture at the edge. It is at the edge of Europe and at the edge of both USA/UK and more mainland European or EU variants of capitalism. More recently it has been at the edge of economic crisis. Yet enterprise discourse is still central in Ireland. Enterprise discourse in Ireland is influenced by global and European Union (EU) developments. However, Irish enterprise discourse is not merely a ‘local adoption’. For example, high Irish economic growth rates during the ‘Celtic Tiger’ period have coincided with the development of the EU’s enterprise policy, thus giving the …

From Federations To Global Factories: Assessing The Contribution Of The Subsidiary Middle Manager In Today’S Mne, Donal O'Brien, Pamela Sharkey Scott, Pat Gibbons

Articles

The evolution of MNEs (Multinational Enterprises) from rigid and hierarchical structures to more distributed authority and autonomy led to the theoretical justification for conceptualising them as a federative rather than unitary organisations (Ghoshal and Bartlett, 1990). Fundamental to the Federative MNE is the suggestion that subsidiary units, through their own actions, can modify the power base and influence MNE strategy ‘from below’ (Andersson et al., 2007). Considerable research highlights the potential of subsidiary units for knowledge creation and initiative (Birkinshaw, 1997, Rugman and Verbeke, 2001, Williams, 2009), but to date it has failed to confirm that MNEs actually operate as …

Subsidiary Entrepreneurship, Strategy Development Processes And Strategic Initiatives, Pamela Sharkey Scott, P. T. Gibbons

Conference Papers

MNCs gain competitive advantage through leveraging initiatives generated by their subsidiary networks. Yet we continue to have limited understanding of the complex conditions which promote initiatives. By integrating the subsidiary entrepreneurship literature and strategy development theory, we argue that the subsidiary’s approach to strategy development mediates the relationship between entrepreneurship and strategic initiative generation. We test our propositions on data generated from surveying the total population of Irish subsidiaries of foreign MNCs. Our findings confirm that an entrepreneurial subsidiary’s engagement in formal strategy development makes it better at generating strategic initiatives. This evidences the need for headquarters to encourage both …

The Role Of The Middle Manager In The Strategy Development Process Of The Multinational Subsidiary, Donal O'Brien, Pamela Sharkey Scott

Conference Papers

As multinational corporations (MNC) strive for long term competitiveness in complex business environments the Strategic Development Process has emerged as a potential source of competitive advantage (Grant, 2003). Despite this recognition there is limited knowledge of the strategy development process and the contributors to strategy development at the subsidiary level of the MNC. The essence of strategy development is contributing to competitive advantage through management activities (Papadakis et al, 1998), but much of the focus of research up to this point has been on the strategic relationship between subsidiary top management and corporate headquarters with little attention being paid to …

Developing Subsidiary Contribution To The Mnc:Subsidiary Entrepreneurship And Strategy Creativity, Pamela Sharkey Scott, P. T. Gibbons Prof, Joseph Coughlan

Conference Papers

Despite its theoretical and managerial significance, subsidiary entrepreneurship and its effects on subsidiary contribution remain underexplored in the literature. We propose that subsidiary entrepreneurship encourages more creative strategic responses to escalating environmental change. We explore the direct and mediating effects of subsidiary entrepreneurship on subsidiary contribution to the MNC, particularly subsidiary strategy creativity. We use structural equation modelling to test our propositions on data generated from surveying the population of Irish subsidiaries of foreign MNCs, and find strong support for our theoretical predictions. The managerial implications of subsidiary entrepreneurship in generating creative strategy, prompting strategic initiatives and improving performance are …

A Narratives’ Exploration Of Non-Traditional International Assignees Locally Resident And Employed In The South Of France, Marian Crowley-Henry

Conference papers

Contemporary publications in international human resource management call for the pluralisation of international assignees beyond the widely described expatriate. This paper presents an under-explored category of international assignees: highly educated, non French, Western (first world) individuals who reside indefinitely in the South of France, maintaining their professional careers while resident in the host country. A sample of over thirty individuals meeting these criteria was interviewed in France in depth over a three year period. These individuals are not migrants as by their own descriptions they consider migrants to have to move internationally (economic migrants) while their decisions to move to …

International Knowledge Professionals: Contemporary Career Concerns And Implications, Marian Crowley-Henry

Conference papers

This study supplements existing contemporary research on knowledge workers. It takes an interpretivist approach to represent and analyse a new breed and under-researched sub-category of international assignee termed ‘bounded transnationals’ by the author. In the context of this paper these can be simply described as internationally-located knowledge professionals. This sample has committed to living indefinitely in the host country as foreign residents where they are employed under local country contracts of employment. The paper explores how the sample perceives and makes sense of careers in the context of globalisation and change.

Women’S Careers Internationally: A Qualitative Study Of Female Western Knowledge Professionals Living In The South Of France, Marian Crowley-Henry

Conference papers

This paper is founded on a qualitative PhD study researching the careers of individuals who live outside their home country on a potentially permanent basis in the South of France. It interprets the careers of the females in the sample, and the findings highlight both the personal nature of careers and the permeable career/life boundary with the females ‘morphing’ their careers over time, as circumstances dictate and opportunities facilitate. The phenomenon of ‘morphing careers’ is identified in the literature as the protean career. Specific elements from the work/life trajectory influence women’s career choices at varying points in their life and …

Control And The Protean Career: A Critical Perspective From The Multinational’S International Assignees, Marian Crowley-Henry, David Weir

Articles

Mainstream management literature and research regarding the international career has long focused on the traditional expatriate experience. In this discourse the tendency has been to outline the benefits and issues to be considered for organizations and individuals embarking on international assignments. In contrast this chapter focuses on a special group whose positioning in the structures of employment and organization is in some ways exemplary of developing trends in the global labor force. They are the highly educated permanent expatriates who remain in the host country indefinitely (that is without a pre-determined organizational option of repatriation to their initial home country). …

The Protean Career: Exemplified By First World Foreign Residents In Western Europe?, Marian Crowley-Henry

Articles

This article presents findings from a qualitative study exploring the career-related motivations and experiences of a sample of 20 expatriates living and working on a permanent basis in the South of France (Sophia Antipolis) and in Germany (Munich). By virtue of their having established local links in the host country, either in having local working contracts or being installed in the area on a permanent basis (home owners; children born/being schooled in the host country), these expatriates could also be termed foreign residents in the host country. The study’s sample of highly educated workers originating from the United States of …

Geo-Politics, The ‘War On Terror’ And The Competitiveness Of The City Of London, Richard Woodward

Books/Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

The International Protean Career: Four Women’S Narratives, Marian Crowley-Henry, David Weir

Articles

In this paper, we share individual narratives outlining the experiences of four well-educated western women following a permanent international career in the South of France. By virtue of detailed interview transcripts and contextual information regarding the specificity of the location in question, a comprehensive picture of the experiences and choices of individual women in leadership business positions on an international level is painted. Our aim is not to generalise the findings to a wider population, but to gain an insight into the depth and complexity of career issues for women in general, and particularly for women working in a foreign …

The International Protean Career: Considerations For Human Resource Management, Marian Crowley-Henry

Conference papers

This paper presents some career patterns from a research undertaking which qualitatively sampled highly educated Western foreign residents in the South of France. In the data collection, their individual career stories were relayed to the researcher from in-depth exploratory interviews. The very personal and individual nature of these careers is underlined in the research findings. The aim of this paper is to share some of the broader findings from the study, which invoke discussion on the wider concerns for career management within the HRM discipline in the future.

Strategy Development Processes And Organisational Performance, Pamela Sharkey Scott, P. T. Gibbons Prof

Conference Papers

A recent resurgence in both academic and practitioner interest on strategy development processes and their influence on organisational performance highlights the absence of empirical studies in this area, particularly from an MNC perspective. This study attempts to fill this important gap by applying a multifaceted conceptualisation of the strategy development process to the subsidiary level of analysis. A broad perspective on the effectiveness of strategy making is adopted and measures of contribution examined include financial and market performance, international responsibility, initiative generation and strategy creativity.

Interesting insights into subsidiary behaviour and specifically into the strategy development styles of subsidiaries are …

Strategy Development Processes And Subsidiary Contribution, Pamela Sharkey Scott, P. T. Gibbons

Conference Papers

Intensifying international competition, increasing volatility, and systemic technological and political transformations (Dunning, 1995; Hitt, Keats and DeMarie, 1998) constitute the current competitive landscape for organisational activities (Sampler, 1998). To successfully adapt to these challenges and find new ways to renew fast obsolescing firm-specific advantage (Buckley and Casson, 1976; 1998) a more holistic approach to organisational management is emerging. This involves the integration of the traditional strategic management or advantage seeking perspective with the more innovative or opportunity seeking dimensions of entrepreneurship (Hitt et al, 1998). Developing a culture of creating or identifying opportunities and exploiting them is fundamental to entrepreneurship …

Cultural Diversity In Multinational Organisations, Marian Crowley-Henry

Conference papers

With the rhetoric in international management espousing the value of being able to access and capitalise on the knowledge of a workforce with international experience in order to compete globally and the need to embrace diversity (including cultural or ethnic diversity) in and across organisations, this paper discusses the findings from a qualitative research undertaking where senior and middle managers working for multinational organisations in a cross-section of industry sectors were interviewed. A total of twenty in-depth interviews were conducted with “foreign” managers based in Europe, the majority hired on local contracts. The findings presented in this paper outline the …

Personal Or Organisational Control? A Critical Perspective From The Multinational’S International Assignees, Marian Crowley-Henry, David Weir

Conference papers

This paper presents findings from a qualitative study of non-national employees of multinational organisations based in Sophia Antipolis (South of France). Here twenty-three in-depth interviews with non-nationals employed by a multinational in the area, together with contextual data regarding the particular case of Sophia Antipolis contribute to the discussion on power and control in an international, organisational context. Irrespective of the initial motivations to follow on an international career, this study highlights the tensions individuals encounter in their desire to retain their international status while seeking out a more individual, balanced, protean career, potentially beyond their current employing organisations. Extracts …