The importance of political institutions in structuring markets and shaping firm outcomes is increasingly appreciated across multiple areas of strategy research. Moreover, as scholarship in the emerging subfield of nonmarket strategy has highlighted, political institutions are themselves often shaped by the strategic activities of firms. This extension seeks to bring together scholars interested in the broader role of political institutions in strategy research with those focusing on the area of nonmarket strategy to address issues and questions of common interest. The extension will provide participants with an opportunity to think more critically about the role of political institutions in strategy research, identify open questions, theoretical blind spots, as well as the strengths and weaknesses in extant empirical approaches. In doing so, the extension will highlight potential new directions for collaboration across strategy subfields.

This will be a full day workshop on Friday, so we recommend attendees plan to arrive in Madrid on Thursday night.

Political institutions & strategy research

• Which political institutions are most relevant to different areas of strategy research?
• Which institutions deserve greater attention than they have received so far in (e.g. legal institutions, international institutions)?
• Can we develop measures of institutional characteristics that are both generalizable across multiple contexts while still being suitable for addressing questions that interest strategy scholars?
• Are there any steps we can take to diversify research beyond certain contexts where data quality and availability is superior?
• Should we view the role of the manager as being more reactive or proactive with respect to institutional shifts?

Political institutions & nonmarket strategy

• How institutionally contingent is what we know about nonmarket strategy today? When can we confidently generalize from single-country/single-industry studies, and when should we be more cautious?
• Do different institutional contexts reward some types of nonmarket activities more than others?
• What implications does institutional heterogeneity have for nonmarket strategy development in multinational firms?  Which types of nonmarket strategy are portable across different institutional contexts, and which are not?
• What role do firms play in shaping institutional change?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of “institutionalizing” nonmarket strategy (e.g. working through business associations)?

How can we better link research within the discipline that highlights the role of political institutions, as well as establish stronger connections to other disciplines?

• What is the relationship between nonmarket strategy and strategic responses to political institutions that do not involve direct engagement with nonmarket actors (e.g. avoidance, mitigation and circumvention)?
• What are the challenges strategy scholars face in importing data and concepts regarding political institutions from other fields?
• What are the trade-offs in conducting interdisciplinary research in this area?

We are pleased to be hosting this extension at IE Business School.

IE Business School
Calle de María de Molina 11-13-15
28006 Madrid
Spain