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CALL FOR PAPERS
Special Issue of the Journal of Management Studies
Divide and rule? The emergence and implications of increasingly disaggregated and dispersed headquarters activities in contemporary firms
Special Issue Editors
Deadline for submission: June 30, 2015
INTRODUCTION
Headquarters (HQ) activities have long been a subject of research in management, strategy, and international business. This research focuses on activities such as control and coordination of subunits, resource allocation, conflict resolution, the orchestration
of innovations, and many more sometimes subsumed under the term “parenting” activities.
Interestingly, recent empirical evidence suggests that firms seem to use increasingly fine-grained and complex approaches to organize their HQ activities and they increasingly locate these activities abroad. For example, Desai (2009: 1284) formulates that
we are now witnessing firms that are “Bermuda-incorporated, Paris-headquartered (...), listed on the NYSE [New York Stock Exchange] with US-style investor protections and disclosure rules, a chief information officer in Bangalore, a chief finance officer
in Brussels and a chief operating officer in Beijing”. What seems to emerge is a picture where not only regular value chain activities are increasingly “disaggregated” and “dispersed” (cf. Contractor, Kumar, Kundu, and Pedersen, Journal of Management Studies
Special Issue, 2010) but where this applies also to HQ activities.
Although much is known of individual HQ units (e.g. corporate HQs) and individual HQ activities, we believe that these recent trends have not been focused upon sufficiently in extant research. Furthermore, extant research is relatively silent regarding the
overall structuring of HQ activities. In fact, much of the empirical and theoretical work in the past has used a relatively simple concept of the HQ frequently viewing it as a single, identifiable unit at the apex of the organization at one particular location.
This work has produced very valuable insights but the assumption of the HQ as a single, identifiable unit located at one particular location seems to be increasingly at odds with reality.
What is the impact of relaxing this assumption for our theories that explain vertical relationships within firms, the way how hierarchy functions, and the way how responsibilities are distributed between headquarters and subunits? Given the trend towards more
disaggregated and dispersed HQ activities we may suffer from a reductive fallacy that impairs our understanding of the way contemporary firms are managed.
The objective of this special issue is to address the lack of attention to such complex HQ configurations. The contributions we envision would have to explicitly break with the dominant literature viewing the HQ as a single, identifiable unit located
at one specific location. We call for contributions to the special issue that could significantly enhance our understanding around the nature and the consequences of complex HQ configurations, building on the notion of increasing disaggregation and dispersion
that we borrow from the extensive work on value chain activities.
While we are interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the phenomenon we are also interested in receiving manuscripts that make substantial theoretical contributions. That is, we think that many theories could benefit from being exposed to the complexity
of contemporary HQ configurations which allows for testing, verifying, and fine-tuning of these theories.
Note that we do not favor any particular epistemological or theoretical perspective and we wish to attract a diverse range of papers. We anticipate submissions focusing on a variety of analysis levels. We also think that the Special Issue topic is conducive
to multi-level methodologies. Thus, investigations could focus on and combine HQ activity levels such as corporate HQs, divisional HQs, executive teams, individual HQ or subunit managers, or the entire HQ system. Questions that papers might explore include,
but are not limited to:
Determinants and nature of complex configurations of HQ activities
Value-creation (or destruction) by complex HQ configurations
Consequences of complex HQ configurations
SUBMISSION PROCESS AND DEADLINES
The deadline for submissions is June 30, 2015
Manuscript Development Workshop