National Business Systems

Exploring the construct of social-responsibility orientation across three Asian and two Western societies (Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and the United States), we show evidence that top-level executives in these societies hold fundamentally different beliefs about their responsibilities toward different stakeholders, with concomitant implications for their understanding and enactment of responsible leadership. We further find that these variations are more closely aligned with institutional factors than with cultural variables, suggesting a need to clarify the connection between culture and institutions on the one hand and culture and social-responsibility orientations on the other.

Les Système National d’Innovation (SNI) mettent en relation trois systèmes très complexes : le système productif, le système de la formation et le système de la recherche. L’impulsion de la nouvelle économie, les réseaux virtuelles et notamment la révolution de l’économie numérique imposent une nouvelle réflexion sur tous les concepts manipulés à ce jour.
L’environnement numérique apporte une plus grande capacité d’innovation des entreprises en permettant une meilleure coordination managériale et la détection des compétences aux entreprises ; une amélioration des approches créatives par un soutien plus actif et rétroactif ; un soutien pour une exploitation optimale du capital humain et des talents. Les nouveaux usages numériques sont nombreux et très diversifiés. Elles apportent des collaborations professionnelles nouvelles (« créative Commons » au lieu de Copyright), des échanges professionnels publics nouveaux d’innovation (« social network crowdsourcing ») à un niveau mondial…
L’objet de cette communication est de caractériser ce qu’on appellera le SNI Numérique. Il s’agit principalement de mettre en lumière les impacts de l’ouverture par les réseaux numériques sur le management de l’innovation sur les entreprises.

The aim of the paper is to highlight the factors affecting trade unions’ CSR understanding, policies and engagement. The paper focuses on Belgium, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom The factors highlighted in the paper both reflect the theoretical frameworks of national business system and neo-institutionalist perspectives. It is also seen that agency and organizational factors are also effective.

This article introduces the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the seemingly oxymoronic context of Chinese “authoritarian capitalism.” Following an introduction to the emergence of authoritarian capitalism, the article considers the emergence of CSR in China using Matten and Moon’s framework of explaining CSR development in terms
both of a business system’s historic institutions and of the impacts of new institutionalism on corporations arising from societal pressures in their global and national environments. We find two forms of CSR in China, reflecting the “multiplexity” of its business system: one in the mainly family-owned small and medium-sized enterprise sector reflecting concern
with local reputation, and another in the corporate, mainly state-owned enterprise (SOE) sector, reflecting global and national societal expectations. We investigate the dynamics of CSR in China through the interplay of the global and national societal pressures and mediating and even leading roles
played by the State and the Party. We consider the conceptual integrity and practical prospects for “state-led society-driven” CSR and future research opportunities, including those opened up by the three contributing articles to this special issue.

Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to explain the link between national business system (NBS) and innovation decisions at the firm level by offering sequentially ordered sense-making mechanisms that enable the formation of firm-specific knowledge repositories and knowledge-processing capabilities. Design/methodology/approach-This study engages in an extensive scale development effort to collect representative data about the NBS in the Pakistani setting, complemented by relevant validity and reliability tests. The overall theoretical model was tested on 214 firms by means of a structural equation modeling approach, using partial least-squares algorithms. Findings-The results statistically supported the role of firm-level knowledge repositories (intellectual capital) and knowledge exploration and exploitation capabilities (absorptive capacity) as sequential mediators in the association of NBS and firm-level innovation. Besides, bridging networks of lateral ties among Pakistani businesses are found to be more effective than bonding networks of vertical ties in encouraging radical innovations. Originality/value-This study significantly extends the literature about the NBS approach. It provides specific sense-making mechanisms (i.e. priming, triggering and editing) about how abstract institutional templates constituted at the business system level are translated into firm-level actionable sets by the help of intangible resource repositories and processes that guide knowledge exploration and exploitation.

The sociology of the professions has shied away from cross-national comparative work. Yet research in different professional jurisdictions emphasizes the transnational nature of professional fields. Further work is therefore needed that explores the extent to which transnational professional fields are characterized by unity or heterogeneity. To that end, this article presents the results of a qualitative interrogation of the habitus of partners in ‘Big 4’ professional service firms across, primarily, five countries (Bangladesh, Canada, France, Spain and the UK). Marked differences are observed between the partner habitus in Bangladesh and the other countries studied in terms of entrepreneurial and public service dispositions. In turn, these findings highlight the methodological relevance of habitus for both the sociology of the professions and comparative capitalism literatures: for the former, habitus aids in mapping the dynamics of transnational professional fields; for the latte...

I empirically compare the introductory rhetorical strategies used to legitimate TQM and M-form in the US, and TQM and holding structure in Turkey in order to determine to what extent the rhetorical strategies vary across both foreign and indigenous practices and across countries. The findings indicate that the rhetorical strategies for foreign practices contain more ethos and pathos and less logos justifications than those for indigenous practices. In addition, that they contain more ethos and pathos and less logos appeals in Turkey than in the US. The changing rhetorical strategies are explained by the variations in the diffusion processes of foreign and indigenous practices and the differences in the political economies of the two countries.

The sociology of the professions has shied away from cross-national comparative work. Yet research in different professional jurisdictions emphasises the transnational nature of professional fields. Further work is therefore needed that explores the extent to which transnational professional fields are characterised by unity or heterogeneity. To that end, this article presents the results of a qualitative interrogation of the habitus of partners in ‘Big 4’ professional service firms across, primarily, five countries (Bangladesh, Canada, France, Spain and the UK). Marked differences are observed between the partner habitus in Bangladesh and the rest in terms of entrepreneurial and public service dispositions. In turn, these findings highlight the methodological relevance of habitus for both the sociology of the professions and comparative capitalism literatures: for the former, habitus aids in mapping the dynamics of transnational professional fields; for the latter, habitus elucidat...