Multinationale Unternehmen, regionale Governance und Human Resource Management
Final Report Abstract
This research project built on recent literature and research regarding FDI attraction and retention and sought to open the black box of interaction between MNCs and regional governance actors in Germany. With a particular focus on interaction patterns in the form of roles and responsibilities, we analyzed the relationship between the foreign subsidiaries of MNCs and the institutional environments in which they are located. This research project thus contributes to two streams of existing research in organization studies and economic geography with findings on the strategic interaction between foreignowned MNCs and a variety of actors at a regional level. The findings expand the theoretical understanding of embeddedness of MNCs in host institutional environments, specifically the structure and nature of regional institutional environments with their associated actors, as well as the interrelationships between regional actors and MNCs. The results of the research project have been presented at conferences. The first paper draws on the results of the two German regions to discuss the relationship between regional actors and institutions as well as institutional effects on actors’ roles and resources. It contributes to research in economic geography by arguing for the deconflation of institutions and organizations when debating the origins of institutional capacity. Further, it highlights the new insights that such a distinction between rules and actors holds for conceptualizing regional FDI attraction and retention. The second paper based on our findings from region 1 focuses on the construct of an actor that has shown to be of particular value for organization studies, namely the hybrid organization. A case study of one specific regional governance actor as a type of organization that positions itself between existing categories of private and public shows the significance of this behavior as an ability to cope with the vagueness and complexity of a pluralistic institutional environment. The third paper, written with our cooperation partners from Canada, Britain, Ireland and Spain, presents a comparison of different role constellations in relationships between MNCs and regional actors depending on the variety of institutional environments, available resources and existing roles of regional actors. It considers how MNC actors and regional governance actors bring their respective logics and interests to the MNC-region interface. Findings illustrate the potential of regional actors to hold critical institutional resources that may aid the MNC’s access to skills, markets and local innovative capabilities. On the other hand, MNCs have market and innovative expertise that the region may benefit from in terms of socio-economic growth and job quality. The final paper written in collaboration with our international cooperation partners compares the roles adopted by governance actors in different national skills infrastructures. This paper addresses the effects of different institutional environments on the structure and nature of regional actors with a focus on human resources, thereby complementing the above results of the study on the attraction and embeddedness of MNCs in host institutional environments.
Publications
- Regions and the FDI attraction game: The interplay between formal and informal rules and organizations, 2014 SASE annual meeting in Chicago
Tempel, Anne; Schlindwein, Eva
- Semi-public organizations and their brokers: hybrid identity bridging regional state and international business spheres, 2014 New Institutional Workshop in Rome; 2014 Austrian Early Scholars Workshop in Linz
Schlindwein, Eva; Händschke, Sebastian; Walgenbach, Peter
- Traversing the MNE- policy nexus: Evidence from five sub-national regions, 2014 SASE annual meeting in Chicago
Tregaskis, Olga; Monaghan, Sinéad; Menendez González, María; Luque Balbona, David; Tempel, Anne; Schlindwein, Eva; Lavelle, Jonathan; Almond, Philip
- Globalisation, technological advances and the role of social actors in the enactment of skills policy through practice, 2015 Interuniversity Research Centre on Globalization and Work (CRIMT) conference
Tregaskis, Olga; Almond, Phil; Menendez González, María; Tempel, Anne
