Mario Kafouros’s research while affiliated with University of Manchester and other places

The literature has called on business and management scholars to help understand the global challenges we face and to find solutions. The prevailing narratives that have implicitly informed our understanding of business and management knowledge and practice as good need to be reimagined. We question whether our existing theoretical lenses, along with fundamental underlying assumptions about what constitutes labour, value and its creation, and the nature of assets, liabilities and materiality, act as a barrier to advancing business and management practice as a force for good and explore whether we need to go beyond applying existing theory to new research questions. Both Agency Theory and Stakeholder Theory have proven ineffective in aligning social and economic interests, while our disciplinary and publishing customs constrain our imagination and impede conceptions of fundamentally new ways of practising business. We explore why we need to reimagine business and management ; what we mean by reimagining business and management and what it means to be a force for good . We conclude that if the purpose of business needs to be reimagined, business schools will also need to change to be major catalysts in this process.

Research Summary This study explains how heterogeneity in firm competitiveness and performance in emerging economies is influenced jointly by the institutional quality of countries and interindustry variations in technological and market dynamism. The analysis of 12,888 firms from 16 emerging economies shows that while the performance advantages of institutional quality are strengthened for firms in technologically dynamic industries, the opposite pattern emerges in high market‐dynamism industries. The study advances the institution‐based view by explaining the mechanisms through which such effects occur and why two industry‐specific boundary conditions (technological and market dynamism) influence differently the relationship between institutional quality and firm performance. Managerial Summary This study investigates how the performance of firms in emerging economies is influenced by the quality of institutions in each country as well as by the technological and market dynamism in the industry in which each firm operates. To examine these relationships, the study analyzes a sample of 12,888 firms from 16 emerging economies. The results indicate that institutional quality enhances firm performance and that these positive effects are stronger in technologically dynamic industries than in industries that are less technologically dynamic. However, the opposite pattern of results emerges for market dynamism, indicating that the role of institutional quality in enhancing firm performance is weaker in industries that exhibit a high degree of market dynamism than in industries that are less volatile in market demand.

Firms can earn rents not only from their own intangible assets (FIAs), but also from the intangible assets of their owner organizations (OIAs). Although the literature has established that rent creation from FIAs depends on the quality of institutions, it remains unclear how institutional quality influences rents from OIAs. This study examines how the rents from OIAs and FIAs change when they are deployed in environments with different institutional quality. Combining insights from the resource‐based view and institutional economics, we develop and test a set of predictions using a sample of over 6000 energy firms from 23 European countries. The study shows that the effect of institutional quality on rent creation is asymmetric, being positive for FIAs and negative for OIAs. In addition, OIAs drawn from multiple owners create higher rents than OIAs from a single owner. Such ‘multiplicity‐of‐ownership’ advantages are stronger in countries with better institutional quality. The contribution of the study lies in explaining how the two types of intangible assets generate rents for the focal firm, and in clarifying why the creation of such rents is contingent on the institutional context in which they are deployed.

Although MNEs internationalize their R&D not only in developed countries but also in emerging economies that typically feature weak protection of intellectual property rights (IPR), it remains unclear how this strategic decision affects their productivity performance. This limitation has resulted in a rather incomplete understanding of why some MNEs become more productive through R&D internationalization while others do not. This study develops a new explanation, suggesting that R&D internationalization does not affect the productivity of all MNEs equally because of differences in the idiosyncratic way in which MNEs geographically distribute their R&D units across weak and strong IPR protection countries. In advancing this explanation, the study challenges the view that weak IPR protection is disadvantageous for MNEs by showing that (and specifying how) it: 1) increases the efficacy of MNEs' internal R&D, 2) strengthens the advantages of accessing globally dispersed knowledge, and (3) improves MNEs' ability to exploit cross-country differences in IPR protection. The study enhances understanding of the complex role of IPR protection, shifts scholarly attention from the degree of R&D internationalization to how MNEs should internationalize their R&D, and clarifies how the IPR context of their location choices matters.