Word from the editor

The year’s final issue is comprised of 11 articles, four of which form a special Atlas-AFMI report following the Nice conference that the association ran in 2022. Note as well the pithily entitled foreword –Ethics, resilience and new challenges in international management – which the guest editors-in-chief have written to contextualise the challenges currently facing both the Management International review and the four articles chosen for said report.

Savéria Cecchi’s article – entitled The role of routines and their artefacts in the articulation between standardization and flexibility: A proposal for an integrative conceptual framework – offers a way to organise a variety contributions that seemingly have little to say to one another into a single integrated framework. The proposition here revolves around the further development of concepts such as inscription and affordance. Its goal is to conceptualise artefacts in light of their embeddedness in the social situations where they were first conceived and are now being used, while also accounting for the material forms that they have assumed.

Ali Uyar, Faten Lakhal, Cemil Kuzey and Abdullah S. Karaman’s article - Do stockholders appreciate CSR? The role of firm visibility, financial slack and monitoring – follows a plethora of studies that have generated mixed findings when studying the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate value. The focus here is to ascertain how corporate visibility, financial resources and oversight affect the relationship between CSR and company value. The authors find strong support for the idea that CSR performance (and its three environmental, social and governance dimensions) impacts positively on a company’s value when excess resources and strong corporate governance are present. The findings suggest that managers need to take shareholder interests into account while also responding to stakeholder concerns, especially when the company has at its disposal both an effective board and sufficient financial resources.

Stefano Valdemarin’s article - Back to origins: Rediscovering the role of individuals in the Uppsala model – revisits how this 40-year-old corporate internationalisation model treats individual level analysis as a kind of black box. Recent critiques had prompted Uppsala’s authors to introduce a micro level analysis of certain dimensions, raising questions as to the feasability of individual level analysis being fully integrated into the model. Valdemarin answers this via a systematic literature review, discovering that above and beyond Uppsala’s methodological contributions, individuals do indeed have a role to play in the model, one that could be integrated if a fully-fledged micro-fundamental approach were to be developed, thereby paving the way for new avenues of research.

Vyacheslav Avioutskii and Fabrice Roth’s article - Analysis of geopolitical and normative reactions of firms with Russian operations to the aggression against Ukraine - studies the effects of the ongoing aggression in light of foreign companies’ decisions to exit the Russian market. The geopolitical approach to international management that they suggest situates decisions of this nature in a deglobalisation context and incorporates ESG factors into the explanation of corporate exit decisions. Multiple regression analysis is used to test the variables’ effects on a sample comprised of ca. 2000 firms. The findings show that corporate exit decisions tend to be aligned more with the geopolitical orientations of the headquarter’s home country than with economic interests; and that ESG factors, together with values shared in the home office’s country of origin (such as democracy and Human Rights), also have an important role to play in exit decisions.

Jacqueline Boysselle and René Díaz-Pichardo’s article - The moderating effect of participation in alternative food networks on the relationship between socially responsible corporate communication and brand trust – speaks to the discovery that notwithstanding the influence which socially responsible business communications (SRBC) exert on consumers’ perceptions of corporate ethics (hence purchasing and consumption decisions), there is also the risk that CSC might be construed as greenwashing. The authors leverage signaling theory to suggest that membership in an alternative food network (AAN) moderates the way in which SRBC perceptions impact brand trust. Using a cross-sectional experimental design as well as Likert-like scales applied within structural equation models, they find that AAN members possess greater brand trust when a SRBC signal is being emitted – a discovery that enhances overall understanding of the ways in which consumers have transitioned towards more sustainable kinds of consumption.

Mariana Bassi Suter, Felipe Mendes Borini, Lucas dos Santos Costa, Alison J. Glaister, Raquel Meneses and Nathalie Georgia Carina Johnston’s article - Understanding employee branding capability and country-of-origin image impacts for internationalised firms – focuses on the role that Employee Branding Capacity (EmpBCap) performs as a company resource capable of being deployed to improve a country of origin image (COI). Drawing from resource theory and signal theory, the authors find that EmpBCap enhances COI in the sense that it can also mutate into a country-specific advantage (CIO-CSA). Three datasets featuring 1060 observations of managers working in internationalised companies based in Portugal and Brazil are compiled and tested. Using psychometric procedures and structural analysis of simultaneous equations, the findings reveal that EmpBCap is an antecedent of CIO-CSA and indirectly affects overall corporate performance.

Lastly, Marie Kerveillant, Philippe Lorino, Michaël Mangeon and Olivier Saulpic’s article - Opening a major nuclear project to the public, Going beyond the framework of technical dialogue by developing pluralist deliberations – looks at the important issue of public involvement in the governance of organisations participating in risky activities. The authors suggest that this involvement (and the effects thereof) will be better understood if a micro level study is conducted of the dialogue between institutional experts and civil society – exemplified in this particular study by the “Safety Options File” compiled around the CIGEO (Centre industriel de stockage géologique) deep underground nuclear waste disposal facility in Eastern France. They find that notwithstanding constraints relating to the structuring of expertise in the French nuclear sector, dialogue can lead to real (albeit limited) transformations. The discussion sketches out the possibility of (and conditions for) introducing a pluralism construct to surmount any habitual expert technical dialogue frameworks.

Enjoy reading it!