US-China geopolitical tensions have produced decoupling policies that restrict Chinese firms’ access to most assets within strategic industries in the US. Yet Chinese firms in strategic industries can still legally obtain patents in the US, though doing so poses political risks and even this access may be restricted in the future. How do Chinese firms seek assets abroad in this new geopolitical environment? Drawing on the Attention-Based View, we argue that decoupling redirects attention of managers at Chinese firms in strategic industries to significantly increase US patenting because restrictions on alternative assets heighten patents’ relative value, reduce the perceived costs of exploiting them aggressively, and create urgency to secure them before access is potentially restricted. In contrast, managers with lived experience in the US or politically similar markets are theorized to perceive greater political risks of this strategy, leading their firms to increase patenting less. Using a difference-in-differences approach analyzing USPTO patent filings by publicly-listed Chinese firms from 2013–2023, we find support for our hypotheses. Robustness checks, including tests showing no comparable increase in patenting by the Chinese firms in other major foreign markets, corroborate these results. Further, supplementary analysis indicates that the increase in patenting is associated with fewer claims per patent — a pattern consistent with the strategic use of patents, potentially as weapons and transactable assets, rather than proportionally greater inventiveness. Our findings highlight how geopolitical decoupling intensifies firms’ pursuit of still-accessible assets in host markets, tempered by managers’ attention to political risks.
The rapid catchup and growing capabilities of emerging-market multinational enterprises (EMNEs) have made them increasingly susceptible to geopolitical tensions, especially in complex product systems (CoPS) industries deeply intertwined with national security and modern industrialization. Through a longitudinal case study of an EMNE in the offshore engineering equipment industry, we develop an integrative framework that illustrates how such firms can navigate the perceived threat of geopolitical tensions while sustaining their global operations, particularly when they have not undergone substantial disruption. We find that, in anticipation of such risks, firms proactively reconfigure their businesses through a dual logic of adjustment (recombining existing elements) and pivoting (integrating novel elements with existing ones) across market, technology, and ecosystem dimensions. Our study extends the strategic choice perspective by framing EMNEs’ evolution as a process in which this dual logic embodies strategic ambidexterity under structural constraints. It further advances the action-based view of dynamic capabilities by specifying how the interplay among multiple strategic dimensions enables sustained firm evolution under the perceived threat of geopolitical tensions.
Social entrepreneurship (SE) often seeks to empower marginalized beneficiaries by reshaping unequal power relations and promoting more enduring forms of social change. Yet efforts to empower others inherently involve the exercise of power and may therefore reproduce the very asymmetries they seek to overcome. While this “empowerment paradox” has primarily been conceptualized through discrete empowerer-empoweree relationships, considerably less is known about how it unfolds across broader relational systems, particularly in international social entrepreneurship (ISE), where organizations operate across institutional contexts characterized by Global South-North asymmetries. Drawing on a qualitative multi-case study of six ISE ventures, informed by 45 interviews and extensive archival data, we develop an integrative model explaining how the empowerment paradox is structured, experienced, and navigated in these settings. We show that empowerment is organized through multilevel relational chains spanning ecosystem, organizational, and operational levels, that the paradox is experienced differently depending on actors’ positions within these chains, and that organizations navigate persistent tensions through the recursive interplay of relational and structural mechanisms. Building on these findings, we introduce ethical ambidexterity, the capacity to integrate pragmatic and critical orientations toward the use of power, as a means of engaging with rather than resolving the empowerment paradox.
How does competitive pressure shape CSR strategy, and does this relationship vary across national institutional contexts? We challenge the prevailing binary framing that competitive pressure either promotes or suppresses CSR by arguing that competition reshapes how firms configure their CSR portfolios, not merely how much they engage. We introduce CSR focus strategy: a firm's selective emphasis on specific CSR dimensions while deliberately de-emphasizing others, allowing simultaneous differentiation and cost-economization through CSR under some conditions. Employing multilevel linear modeling (MLM) on a global dataset of 41 countries comprising 2294 firms from 2002 to 2020, we demonstrate that competitive intensity drives adoption of CSR focus strategy. Critically, this effect is contingent on national market-supporting institutions and firm size, where CSR focus strategies are most pronounced in institutionally weaker environments characterized by limited property rights protection and among smaller firms with limited stakeholder relational capital and opportunities. Further analyses reveal two subtypes, namely CSR excellence and CSR distinction, reflecting different portfolio configurations under competition. By establishing that institutional context shapes firms' CSR portfolio configuration under competition, our study advances international business research and reconciles opposing theoretical positions in the competition-CSR debate. Collectively, these findings extend the emerging portfolio-based view of CSR into the cross-country competitive domain.
This study examines how multinational enterprises (MNEs) bargain with host-country stakeholders after market entry as they expand their operations across decentralized emerging markets characterized by multiple layers of government and influential non-state actors. Drawing on a longitudinal case study of a global MNE with 24 extractive sites across Indonesia, we show that post-entry bargaining requires continuous engagement with multiple layers of government over permits and regulations, as well as with local communities over employment, land and environmental impacts to avoid social unrest. In one region, community opposition forced the MNE to exit, despite substantial sunk costs, demonstrating that formal permits and government support cannot substitute for a social license to operate. We find that post-entry bargaining under institutional complexity requires cross-level strategies that address tensions across government and community levels. These strategies generate spillovers, allowing MNEs to alleviate tensions beyond their intended target. We thus demonstrate that foreign investment is shaped not only by national governments, but also by subnational authorities and communities who play a direct and often decisive role in shaping the terms and success of investments.
