Political strategy formulation for international firms: The role of firm, industry, and institutional variables.

摘要

This dissertation was an exploratory analysis of the relationship between firm, industry, and institutional variables and the choice of political strategies used by international firms. While market strategies, such as pricing and promotion, have received a great deal of attention in strategic management literature, nonmarket strategies, such as the political strategies firms use to affect public policy, have received scant attention in the literature. This study was an attempt to more fully integrate political strategies into the strategic management domain. A comprehensive taxonomy of four political strategy types: information, direct access/pressure, constituency building, and cooperative strategies was developed along with the theoretical distinction between transactional and relational approaches to political strategy.;From this theoretical development, a model was developed to depict political strategy formulation and formal hypotheses were formed regarding three specific firm variables: financial resources, firm size, and firm experience; two industry variables: technical nature and competitors' strategies; and one institutional variable: corporatism versus pluralism. The effect of these six variables on the use/non-use of the four types of political strategies and the two types of approaches to political strategies was the focus of the hypotheses.;An analysis of surveys completed by U.S. multinational corporations operating in the European Union found that firms are using a variety of political strategies throughout different subsidiary locations. This result confirms the need for an integration of political strategies into our understanding of corporate strategy, as market and nonmarket strategies go hand in hand. Testing of the hypotheses revealed that the institutional variable of corporatism/pluralism was a significant predictor of the likelihood of using an information strategy, the direct access/pressure strategy, and transactional/relational approaches to political strategy. In addition, corporatism/pluralism was found to be a significant predictor of the likelihood of a firm matching a competitors' strategy. Thus, the relationship between the institutional variable and one industry variable and the use of political strategy and approach type was confirmed.