Anita Mcgahan

• University of Toronto

Teece (J Int Bus Stud 45(1):8–37, 2014) identifies two theories of the emergence of multinational enterprises (MNEs)—one that focuses on how MNEs solve transactional difficulties that can emerge in market exchanges and another that focuses on how MNEs facilitate economic value creation that is difficult to realize through market exchanges—and sugge...

The field of Strategy has its origins in Business Policy, which emphasized how firms could pursue important social aims that individuals and governments could not pursue otherwise. This emphasis shifted in the 1970s as the field turned towards economics for insights. Strategy scholars began to address how market‐ and industry‐level considerations,...

This Handbook is the first reference created for the large, diverse, and growing field of Open Innovation. Four editors, 75 reviewers, and 136 contributors collaboratively developed 57 handbook chapters. These present the current state of the growing body of work in Open Innovation from leading scholars and researchers in the field. It brings toget...

How should an incumbent respond to the arrival of an entrant? A long-standing literature documents a host of potential responses, but little work explores when each strategy will be more or less effective. This paper develops a model of incumbent-entrant competition between vertically and horizontally differentiated firms and applies that model to...

Research Summary This article examines a firm's investment in the general skills of contract workers in flexible work arrangements. It theorizes that this investment may prolong a productive firm‐worker collaboration even when workers’ mobility barriers are low. It also proposes that achieving such benefits requires that the firm frames the relatio...

How do firms address complex collective action problems effectively? Institutional and stakeholder research suggests that firms may avoid the tragedy of the commons by aligning the interests of critical proximate stakeholders in ways that governments cannot accomplish. This phenomenological paper investigates this possibility by analyzing Amazon ra...

The new stakeholder theory (NST) grapples with two canonical questions: Which stakeholders are enfranchised in organizations? How is the value created through stakeholder collaboration distributed and experienced by stakeholders? This paper first describes how the NST builds on original stakeholder theory to ask these two specific questions. The de...

We conduct a theory-guided review of the literatures on public-private partnerships and Grand Challenges (GCs). We adopt an organization design approach to review and identify constructs in public-private collaborations (PPCs) that address societal challenges. Our review identifies the complexities of organizing to tackle GCs, highlights the plural...

Cross-sector partnerships are vital for maintaining resilient health systems; however, few studies have sought to empirically assess the barriers and enablers of effective and responsible partnerships during public health emergencies. Through a qualitative, multiple case study, we analyzed 210 documents and conducted 26 interviews with stakeholders...

To the surprise of many in the West, the fall of the USSR in 1991 did not lead to the adoption of liberal democratic government around the world and the much anticipated “end of history.” In fact, authoritarianism has made a comeback, and liberal democracy has been on the retreat for at least the last 15 years culminating in the unthinkable: the in...

By introducing the concept of ‘structural advocacy organizations’, this study theorizes and tests the boundary conditions within which organizations designed to protect the rights of disenfranchised groups promote structural changes at the intersection of gender and race. We test these claims on Brazil’s “women´s police stations,” a type of structu...

The challenges and opportunities facing African organizations reflect a long history of tensions, tragedies, triumphs, and accomplishments in relationships across continental boundaries. For example, Africa has long been a source of critical minerals and other raw materials that are integral to a wide range of global industries, but scholars of man...

Purpose is a concept often used in managerial communities to signal and define a firm’s benevolent and pluralistic approach to its stakeholders beyond its focus on shareholders. While some evidence has linked purpose to positive organizational outcomes such as growth, employee satisfaction, innovation, and superior stock market performance, the def...

Are socially irresponsible employment practices, such as abusive discipline and wage theft, systematically tied to manufacturing outcomes in emerging-market countries? Drawing on a stream of stakeholder theory that emphasizes economic interdependencies and insights from the fields of industrial relations and human resource management, we argue that...

Despite the 26-year long civil war, Sri Lanka was declared malaria-free by WHO in 2016. This achievement was the result of nearly 30 years of elimination efforts following the last significant resurgence of malaria cases in Sri Lanka. The resurgence occurred in 1986–1987, when about 600 000 cases of malaria were detected. Obstacles to these efforts...

This chapter offers the reflections of a late-career scholar working on private entrepreneurship in the public interest. The author imagines what she would say if she could reach back in time and offer advice to her early-career self: Figure out what is important about what is changing in the world. Know yourself as a scholar, citizen, and educator...

Influential management research often entails multiple research studies that build on each other to demonstrate a significant organizational phenomenon, to reveal the reasons and mechanisms that can explain the phenomenon, and to identify boundary conditions that may amplify or constrain the phenomenon. Such research is neither niche nor narrow; it...

Business is redefining itself with purpose and declaring their intentions to restructure core activities in line with sustainable development goals. Yet, scholarly evidence in the management literature to guide practice remains limited. Part of the challenge in sustainability research and practice is that it has interdependencies and interconnected...

After more than 30 years of efforts to eliminate polio, India was certified polio free by WHO in 2014. The final years prior to polio elimination were characterised by concentrated efforts to vaccinate hard-to-reach groups in the state of Uttar Pradesh, including migrant workers, religious minority Muslims and impoverished communities with poor pre...

A powerful new stakeholder theory (NST) of strategic management is emerging. The theory, which is yet incomplete, offers novel and precise tools for understanding stakeholder involvement in organizations. This article identifies open questions in the NST in five areas (organizational formation, resource development, claims on value, governance, and...

This paper reports the results of a Bayesian analysis on large-scale empirical data to assess the effectiveness of eleven types of COVID-control policies that have been implemented at various levels of intensity in 40 countries and U.S. states since the onset of the pandemic. The analysis estimates the marginal impact of each type and level of poli...

This paper reports the results of a Bayesian analysis on large-scale empirical data to assess the effectiveness of eleven types of COVID-control policies that have been implemented at various levels of intensity in 40 countries and U.S. states since the onset of the pandemic. The analysis estimates the marginal impact of each type and level of poli...

Open innovation includes external knowledge sources and paths to market as complements to internal innovation processes. Open innovation has to date been driven largely by business objectives, but the imperative of social challenges has turned attention to the broader set of goals to which open innovation is relevant. In this paper, we discuss how...

On January, 27, 2017, U.S. President Donald J. Trump issued Executive Order 13769 on immigration and travel (EO 13769), which restricted entry into the U.S. of the citizens of seven primarily Muslim countries. Many academics reacted with outrage, including me and other members of the Academy of Management (AOM), of which I was President at the time...

Businesses in a wide range of industries profit from the immigration of vulnerable people who are crossing international boundaries to escape war, famine, poverty, and persecution. I argue that the field of management faces a moral, humanitarian, and social imperative to deal comprehensively with the implications of this fact.

We contribute to the literature of the country, industry and firm effects on performance by developing an autoregressive cross-classified mixed-effect linear model that examines heterogeneity in the profitability of corporations in emerging and developed economies, as well as corporations located in different supranational regions. To this purpose,...

I was the President of the Academy of Management (AOM) in 2016-2017 when U.S. President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order banning immigration and travel to the United States by citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries (EO13769). While I immediately sought to condemn EO13769 as immoral and as a threat to the AOM, I was only able to issu...

In recent years, strategy scholarship expanded its scope beyond the realm of private firms. Despite notable advances, the field still lacks theoretical and empirical frameworks for fully understanding how public and non‐profit organizations interact with private firms to create and appropriate value. By recognizing the inherent complexity of intera...

Research summary We examine how formal collaboration allows organizations to resolve performance tradeoffs that cannot be resolved informally. The theory is tested on U.S. fire departments, which pursue goals that sometimes conflict: reducing casualties and saving property. By relying on intrinsic motivation, informal collaboration reduces casualti...

The organizations and institutions with which we interact in our everyday lives are heavily implicated in the rising levels of global inequality. We develop understanding of the ways in which a preference in social structures for the free market over other forms of economic organization has made inequality almost inevitable. This has been accompani...

The organizations and institutions with which we interact in our everyday lives are heavily implicated in the rising levels of global inequality. We develop understanding of the ways in which a preference in social structures for the free market over other forms of economic organization has made inequality almost inevitable. This has been accompani...

The entry discusses the strategy of designing and implementing public policies intended to promote public interests. It begins by recognizing that public interests are complex, multifaceted, ambiguous and implemented in weak selection environments. However, theories from strategic management, originally formulated to deal with private-sector issues...

Governance gives life to an organization by establishing the rules that shape organizational action. Structures of governance rest on stakeholder engagement, particularly on how stakeholders assess the prospects for earning a return by committing their specialized resources to the organization. Once formalized, governance structures and processes c...

Background Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are developing novel approaches to healthcare that may be relevant to high-income countries (HICs). These include products, services, organizational processes, or policies that improve access, cost, or efficiency of healthcare. However, given the challenge of replication, it is difficult to identi...

Background: Mental illness is a substantial and rising contributor to the global burden of disease. Access to and utilization of mental health care, however, is limited by structural barriers such as specialist availability, time, out-of-pocket costs, and attitudinal barriers including stigma. Innovative solutions like virtual care are rapidly ent...

Perhaps the most compelling Grand Challenge in healthcare is addressing diseases that primarily afflict the poor. In this paper, we examine the effect of the World Trade Organization's (WTO's) 1994 policy of Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which was justified in part by a claim that patents and other intellectual property protec...

Organizational performance is at the heart of the field of strategy and innovation management. Indeed, the field of strategy is frequently defined as the study of organizational performance (Porter 1980, 1985; Barney 2011). This entry begins by describing the challenges, opportunities and trade-offs associated with various measures of corporate per...

The entry discusses the strategy of designing and implementing public policies intended to promote public interests. It begins by recognizing that public interests are complex, multifaceted, ambiguous and implemented in weak selection environments. However, theories from strategic management, originally formulated to deal with private-sector issues...

Background Many health service delivery models are adapting health services to meet rising demand and evolving health burdens in low- and middle-income countries. While innovative private sector models provide potential benefits to health care delivery, the evidence base on the characteristics and impact of such approaches is limited. We have devel...

Costas Markides and Anita McGahan take small steps to make the world a better place

Improvements in life expectancy have been considerable over the past hundred years. Forecasters have taken to applying historical trends under an assumption of continuing improvements in life expectancy in the future. A linear mixed effects model was used to estimate the trends in global and regional rates of improvements in life expectancy, child,...

On August 9th, 2001, the federal government of the United States announced a policy restricting federal funds available for research on human embryonic stem cell (hESCs) out of concern for the "vast ethical mine fields" associated with the creation of embryos for research purposes. Until the policy was repealed on March 9th, 2009, no U.S. federal f...

True and long-lasting change only happens if the structure of the underlying system is changed. Costas Markides and Anita McGahan explain why.

In emerging-market countries, commercial institutions do not always develop sufficiently quickly or effectively to support ambitious entrepreneurs. How might intermediaries remedy these problems? We address this question by drawing on institutional literatures to develop the concept of "open system intermediaries." Our research design involves exam...

This chapter describes the nexus of urbanization, human trafficking, and public health and identifies promising innovations to address global human trafficking. First, we briefly describe why human trafficking is an urban health concern. Second, we provide a brief overview of the social determinants of human trafficking. Third, we highlight innovat...

By 2050, more than 75 % of the world’s population is expected to live in cities. Cities in lower-income countries will absorb 95 % of population growth and will be home to 80 % of the world’s urban population. The health of a city’s residents depends on critical infrastructure, the maintenance of water and sanitation systems, the availability of af...

Background: Scaling up innovative healthcare programs offers a means to improve access, quality, and health equity across multiple health areas. Despite large numbers of promising projects, little is known about successful efforts to scale up. This study examines trans-national scale, whereby a program operates in two or more countries. Trans-nati...

Each panellist intends to evaluate the power and limitations of words for governance systems from a different point of view and line of argumentation. Ruth Aguilera proposes an examination of the words in corporate governance research, which is rooted predominantly in the context of shareholder-value principles and challenges researchers to explore...

The purpose of this panel symposium is to show why and how context matters, and to draw attention to the benefits of integrating causal mechanisms and context to explain complex organizational phenomena. Our goal is to initiate a new dialogue among various constituents of the Academy of Management by bringing forward new questions and perspectives...