Call for Papers Special Issue:
Novel methodological approaches to study socio-political
risks
Journal of International Management
Guest Co-Editors:
Tatiana Vashchilko (University of Calgary, Canada),
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George O. White III (University of Michigan – Flint, USA)
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Andreea Mihalache-OKeef (Roanoke College, USA)
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Crystal Jiang (Bryant University, USA),
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Irem Demirkan (Loyola University Maryland, USA)
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Asda Chintakananda (National Institute of Development Administration, Thailand)
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Supervising Editor:
Tazeeb Rajwani (University of Surrey, UK)
Deadline for submission: November 1, 2021
(a special workshop for the SI will be planned in the future)
Background and rationale for the special issue
The goal of this special issue is to showcase a wide range of discipline-specific and interdisciplinary methodologies for studying socio-political risks (SPRs). This issue will bring together a selection of papers that can provide a more granular understanding of methodological issues in complex and fast-changing contexts.
The socio-political environment is a major source of objective and subjective uncertainties for international business and multinational enterprise (MNE) operations (John and Lawton, 2008; Kobrin, 1979; Lawton, Doh, and Rajwani, 2014) resulting in additional transaction costs that tend to be inherently higher in more complex systems of exchange and greater competition for scarce resources (e.g., North, 1991). With important megatrends changing the SPR landscape such as increased complexity of the international political environment (Teng et al. 2017), growing efficiencies of supply chains, and the tech revolution transforming these global phenomenon (Rice and Zegart, 2018), scholars have expanded their inquiry into different types of SPRs such as corruption (Karhunen and Ledyaeva, 2012; Sartor and Beamish, 2017), legal uncertainty (White et al., 2015), socio-political violence (Oh and Oetzel, 2017), military conflict (Arikan et al., 2019; Li and Vashchilko, 2010), natural disasters (Oetzel and Oh, 2014), and property rights violations (Jiang et al., 2011), while also exploring ways to mitigate exposure to SPRs (John and Lawton, 2017) and turn what would otherwise be disadvantages into advantages (Darendeli and Hill, 2016; Harvey and Novicevic, 2002) via, for example, developing political capabilities (Schnyder and Sallai, 2020; White et al., 2018).
To identify and further study the complexities of SPRs require scholars to more profoundly examine the inherent uncertainty associated with the business environment (i.e., socio-politico-economic systems or structures), which commands additional expertise in the corresponding disciplines (e.g., law, political science, sociology). Furthermore, to improve our understanding of the integrated influences of SPR on managerial phenomena, international managerial research should capitalize on methodological advances across a wider range of disciplines (e.g., data science, political science) to optimize cross-disciplinary access and usability of scientific SPR information. SPR scholars have utilized diverse methodological approaches in identifying SPRs and analyzing their impact on business outcomes.
Yet, absent cohesive conceptualization, methodological issues associated with operationalization and measurement of SPRs (and their types) abound resulting in the inconclusiveness of empirical results concerning the impact of SPRs on performance outcomes (Beugelsdijk et al., 2018; Cavusgil et al., 2020; Magnusson and Tarverdi, 2020). With the understanding that SPR measures often lack accuracy (Sottilotta 2015), scholars have started to re-evaluate widely used measures of SPRs, including indicators of institutional quality such as the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) (Magnusson and Tarverdi, 2020). Dissatisfaction with the accuracy of aggregate SPR indicators, especially in contexts exhibiting high socio-political uncertainty, has intensified the use of surveys, survey experiments, and interviews to develop a better understanding of SPRs, their sources, and implications for international management (Weber et al., 2020). These mixed methods have proved to be especially valuable for capturing heterogeneous exposure of MNEs to SPRs across geography, industry, and other firm attributes as well as variations in corporate political activities (Dang et al., 2020; Schnyder and Sallai, 2020; White et al., 2018). However, much more can be done to further illuminate and advance these methodological approaches.
This SI will therefore offer a platform and forum for scholars to facilitate this process and elucidate novel methodological approaches to study SPRs. With specific attention to theory-driven methodological approaches of SPR analysis, the main focus of the SI is to foster an interdisciplinary conversation over novel methodologies in examining SPRs and MNE strategic responses to the complexities of international and national operating environments. The SI will provide an opportunity for: (1) the systematic examination of pros and cons of a range of novel qualitative and quantitative methodologies for advancement of SPR knowledge; and (2) the identification of state-of-the-art analytical tools to study different types of SPR in diverse contexts. This SI will therefore facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue and has the potential to generate new theoretical explanations of important SPR-related phenomena combined with appropriate choices of analytical tools and novel applications of existing methods from other disciplines. Thus, in the long term, the SI should (1) lead to the improvement in theoretical and empirical research across multiple methodological dimensions such as efficiency, accuracy, and the overall quality of SPR research; as well as (2) drive the improvement in the ability of scholars to assess the danger of existing risks and to identify emergent ones.
We envision the SI to engage scholars from different disciplines in the discussion of novel methodological approaches that can connect and integrate the ever-increasing volumes of discipline specific SPR knowledge important for international management. These approaches will improve the efficiency, accuracy, and overall quality of SPR research but also serve practitioners (through future scholarship) interested in building socio-political risk assessment and resilience by providing a more comprehensive basis for managerial decision-making, especially in the situations characterized by high levels of uncertainty. The relatively insular insights of discipline-rooted research ought to confront and complement each other; building bridges across disciplines that will improve our comprehension of the many manifestations of SPRs, its sources, and implications for international management practices. Thus, international management scholars will have a better understanding of methodologies and analytical tools that can be utilized in SPR research.
Potential Topics
This special issue welcomes submissions with an interdisciplinary perspective. Papers could incorporate one or multiple aspects of novel methodological approaches for identifying and explaining SPRs, including but not limited to:
· Leveraging theory and methodology from several disciplines to gain better insight into different types of SPRs and the strategic responses of business and society
·
New
data sources and analytical approaches in law, political science, sociology, international
business, and other disciplines to study changes in national and
international socio-political environments and their impact on MNEs at different levels of analysis (manager-, firm-, industry-, or country-level)
·
Fine-grained
measures of different types of SPR and their management by MNEs (e.g.,
political instability, terrorism, the rule of law, international military
conflict,
indirect expropriation, civil conflict, revolution, bureaucracy, corruption, political ties)
· Leveraging and/or comparing different types of data (primary or secondary) suited for identifying and analyzing types of SPRs
· Systematically evaluating the reliability of sources of information to assess risks in foreign markets
· Data collection and analysis of risk perceptions in various contexts
· Taxonomy development for SPRs and their management (e.g., corporate political activity as a political risk management tool)
· Mixed-method approaches to identify SPR types in lesser-known contexts
·
Development of new metrics to analyze types of SPR
(e.g., intensity of political ties) or potential of a country’s political
environment to generate political risks (e.g.,
dynamic factor analysis)
· Identification if and how the COVID-19 pandemic may modify SPR types and their impact on MNE political behavior and/or international management practices
Submission Process:
The deadline of paper submission to this special issue is 1 November 2021. A special workshop for the SI will be planned in the future. All papers will be subject to double‐blind review process. Papers for this issue should be prepared as per the Journal’s guidelines available at: https://www.elsevier.com/journals/journal-of-international-management/1075-4253/guide-for-authors
Authors should submit an electronic copy of their manuscript via the journal’s online submission system via https://www.evise.com/profile/#/INTMAN/login
References
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