区域经济网络与跨国零售业外文参考文献及译文 第4页
FIGURE 1 here
Key suppliers are those whose inputs are critical to the development of the flagship’s competitive advantage. The flagship recognises in them the ability to produce value added inputs and services in an efficient manner. Key customers are businesses specialising in distribution and intermediation with final consumers. The non-business infrastructure (NBI) is made up of non-profit organisations that are relevant to the flagship firm’s competitiveness across borders. These partners can be government agencies, universities, research centres or trade associations. Finally, key competitors are those firms that the flagship may select to form alliances of joint ventures in the cases where the economic risks to be borne are greater than one party alone can support.
The flagship MNE provides the strategic vision and coordination to lead the network through successful international expansion. All five partners interact freely and openly with each other and the complementarities of skills necessary to improve the overall network performance are coordinated by the flagship through a multi-directional information flow. Although the upstream and downstream partners, the key distributors and the key suppliers relinquish strategic direction to the flagship (strategic asymmetry), they gain additional decentralised value-added activities of their own. All relationships are long-term and knowledge-sharing agreements. Key partners specialize in achieving commonly agreed tasks. Relationships with key suppliers rely on international benchmarking rather than on competitive tendering.
All these traits make the flagship strategy quite distinct from other network strategies in the literature. While some network studies focus on social relations between individuals and organisations but without any specific strategic intent and others have a strategic management purpose, few address international business issues. To recognize the contribution of flagship strategy to the international management field, it is important to differentiate the flagship framework from multiple and heterogeneous definitions of networks.
As underscored in Table 1 which contrasts these different views with the flagship, sociological accounts of networks either emphasise the network landscape in which firms are broadly embedded (see Nohria’s work for instance ), or inter-personal networks where the structure and the nature of ties between individuals is the object of study (see for example Burt’s or Krackhardt’s developments ). These views have only indirectly emphasised the benefits of networks for firms’ innovation, competitive advantage creation, and learning.
In contrast, the strategic management stream to which the flagship strategy belongs emphasises strategic networks geared toward innovation, flexibility, learning, and capability development. This work models firms as internal networks, such as the ‘heterarchy’ (proposed by Hedlund ), and the ‘differentiated network’ by Nohria and Ghoshal . Yet they have focused on the intra-organisational level. At the inter-organisational level Lorenzoni and Baden-Fuller’s ‘strategic centre’ is the closest to the flagship concept since it stresses the role of one lean firm, the strategic centre which coordinates a web of multiple partners, both upstream and upstream to share risks, innovate and gain flexibility. However, this configuration, and others, are not internationally oriented. They neglect one crucial challenge facing managers contemplating internationalisation: how to overcome barriers to FDI when the firm has limitedly geographically transferable capabilities (i.e. when it lacks the capabilities needed to operate in foreign markets, and/or when host-environments are hostile.)
The Håkanson and Johansson’s framework does consider these internationalisation challenges (in addition to innovation-enhancement), but in contrast with the flagship, Håkanson and Johansson’s ‘industrial networks’ do not feature a strategically leading multinational firm that acts as a strategic centre for all the partners. Instead, their network configuration consists of several strategic centres and peripheral firms such that they emphasise power rivalries between different sub-networks. In the flagship strategy, however, no partner is the rival of the others, which limits political clashes. The flagship strategy is also distinct from typologies of locally based clusters of cooperative firms (Porter) which can also cooperate across geographic boundaries (Nachum and Keeble) but which are analyzed at an aggregated industry level, and therefore make the benefits for each firm difficult to disentangle .
In addition to its specific focus on MNEs’ strategy, a flagship strategy presents two other distinct features. First, the flagship network relies原文请找腾讯752018766优,文-论'文'网
http://www.youerw.com curb the risk of opportunism incurred by coordination outside the hierarchy. While most studies emphasise the common participation of all partners to strategy, in the flagship strategy, independent partners relinquish the strategic leadership of the network to the central MNE for those activities relevant to the network’s scope. Indeed, strategic asymmetry increases the network stability through shared inter-organisational purpose based on a constant agreement on a well-defined strategic agenda. If all partners participated in strategy formulation, competing objectives between partners would undermine trust and shared purpose. It also helps the development of a ‘common language’ necessary to inter-organisational learning. The flagship is the coordinator/facilitator of learning.
Second, the flagship strategy is based on consistent multilateral and multidirectional partnerships. Where other studies consider one or two types of partners at a time (vertical or horizontal), the flagship strategy stands on the interactions of all key business partners. The flagship strategy is also distinct by the important role it attributes to non-business infrastructures.
Overall, the flagship strategy presents unique configuration traits which can help MNEs to internationalise more effectively and efficiently when they lack transferable resources to do so, or when they face high environmental pressures in host markets. When FDI is risky and difficult, MNEs are advised to coordinate a web of key partners in which they act as the strategic centre.
Before we turn to the case analysis to determine whether these privileged links exist in retail and why, we now introduce the rationale of our case selection and of our research methodology. 上一页 [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] 下一页
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