Essays on global non-market strategy

Abstract

This dissertation is centrally concerned with the management of a firm's global non-market environment. The non-market environment of a given firm is conceived as the set of relationships, confrontational or collaborative, that it establishes with actors other than its clients, suppliers and competitors. Because the actions carried out by non-market actors increasingly span multiple country borders, the appropriate level of analysis of this phenomenon is the global arena. In order to better understand how firms manage their non-market environment this thesis focuses in on one particular type of non-market actor: the so-called Non-Government Organizations (NGOs). The reason for choosing NGOs as the central counterpart of firms in the non-market domain is due to its increasing influence in the economic, social and political arenas, and the fact that their influence on firms is still relatively unexplored. While this does not detract from the fact that other non-market actors, namely governments, play a crucial role in the behavior and performance of firms, it is important to acknowledge that the transnational nature of a growing number of NGOs is making firms face challenges that are different in nature to the ones they have had of address in the past. In order to explore this relevant topic, this dissertation is organized in two parts. The first one is conceptual in nature. It provides a framework that integrates the main perspectives in the field of non-market strategy and also helps characterize the sources of internationality of a given non-market environment. The second, by contrast, is an empirical study. It examines the relationships between oil firms operating in the Ecuadorian Amazon and NGOs concerned with the social, environmental and economic impacts of this activity.

(Cont.) While extant research on interorganizational non-market behavior has favored structural approaches, the project developed here takes an interpretive perspective. More concretely, instead of trying to explain why NGOs and firms interact in a given way based on their size, the nature of their business, their objectives, or the strategies they favor, the focus is placed here on the extent and the mechanisms by which a given situation is interpreted in different ways by different actors. As a whole, this dissertation joins a small but growing chorus of voices interested in issues such as sustainability, corporate citizenship and ethical management. Because of the incipiency of this academic domain and the interpretive lens chosen to study it, the contributions of this thesis have a marked foundational character. Both the conceptual model developed in the first part and the cognitive perspective proposed in the second aim at providing tools that help make sense of a corporate environment that is radically different from that of just a decade ago.