Miguel Rivera-Santos

Clearing a Path Through the Forest: A Meta-Review of Interorganizational Relationships

Interorganizational relationships (IORs) encompass a broad array of collaborative exchanges, including strategic alliances, joint ventures, buyer—supplier agreements, licensing, co-branding, franchising, cross-sector partnerships, networks, trade associations, and consortia. Scholarly work in this area typically focuses on particular forms, which has made it difficult to build a holistic understanding of why organizations engage in these relationships. This article summarizes the IOR literature by conducting a meta-review, a review of the reviews that have covered various IOR forms and theories. Through this approach, the authors highlight similarities and differences among forms and acknowledge perspectives grounded in organizational economics and organization theory. In line with March’s seminal framework, the authors identify two pure forms of IORs: co-exploration and co-exploitation. Explicating these pure forms enables the integration of different theories and the reconciliation of the empirical reality that IORs, like firms, combine exploration and exploitation. The authors conclude by suggesting directions for future work, highlighting areas rich in potential.

Reviewing a Decade of Research on the 'Base/Bottom of the Pyramid' (BOP) Concept

In 1998-1999, Prahalad and colleagues introduced the base/bottom of the pyramid (BOP) concept in an article and a working paper. This article’s goal is to answer the following question: What has become of the concept over the decade following its first systematic exposition in 1999? To answer this question, the authors conducted a systematic review of articles on the BOP, identifying 104 articles published in journals or proceedings over a 10-year period (2000-2009). This count excludes books, chapters, and teaching cases. The review shows that the BOP concept evolved dramatically following Prahalad’s original call to multinational enterprises (MNEs). Deemphasizing the role of MNEs over time, published BOP articles portray a more complex picture, with wide variations in terms of BOP contexts, of BOP initiatives, and of impacts of the BOP approach. A simple framework for organizing the reviewed articles helps discuss findings, identify the gaps that still exist in the literature, and suggest directions for future research.

Global Village vs. Small Town: Understanding Networks at the Base of the Pyramid

We compare and contrast business networks at the Base of the Pyramid (BOP) and at the Top of the Pyramid (TOP), and analyze their implications for multinational enterprises (MNEs). We first identify the specificities of BOP environments in terms of competitive environment and institutions. Building on this analysis, we develop a series of propositions regarding the impact of these specificities on the structural characteristics of BOP networks, their boundaries, the characteristics of their ties, the diversity of their partners, and their evolution over time, as compared to TOP networks. Our analysis suggests that major differences exist between both types of networks along all dimensions and that these differences have important implications for MNEs active in BOP environments.

Between Commonweal and Competition: Understanding the Governance of Public–Private Partnerships

The authors leverage insights and theories from the extensive interfirm (business-to-business, or B2B) alliance literature to explore the effect of the sectors of the partners on the governance of infrastructure public–private partnerships (PPPs) as compared with B2B alliances. Their analysis suggests that the sectors of the partners have an important impact on PPP governance, not only because the sector constrains the availability of some governance mechanisms but also because it makes alternative mechanisms available or relevant to the partners. Specifically, the authors predict that PPPs will avoid equity structures and will rely, instead, on less complete and more complex alliance contracts; a restricted scope of activities; and nonequity hostages, such as metagovernance mechanisms or stakeholder involvement. Contrasting with B2B alliances, their analysis also suggests that trust-based governance mechanisms will play a minimal role in the governance of PPPs.

The State of Research on Africa in Business and Management Insights From a Systematic Review of Key International Journals

Aiming at a better understanding of the extent to which Africa-focused research has helped develop context-bound, context-specific, and context-free knowledge, the authors present the findings from a literature review of journal articles with an African context. A systematic search resulted in 271 articles with African data and 139 Africa-focused articles published in 63 top business journals and related (sub)disciplines from 2010 onwards. The sample included all journals belonging to the University of Texas (UT) Dallas and Financial Times research rankings, as well as the main international business, and business and society outlets. An in-depth analysis of the 139 Africa-focused articles shows an important imbalance in terms of publication patterns, topics covered, theoretical groundings, types of contributions, approaches to the African contexts, and empirics. Building on this exhaustive literature review, the authors provide specific suggestions regarding potential data sources and empirical strategies in African contexts, propose avenues for future research, and introduce four recent studies included in the special issue.

Leaving a Social Venture: Social Entrepreneurial Exit among the Maasai in Northern Tanzania

Arguing that the exit of social ventures is likely to follow specific patterns, due the uniqueness of a social entrepreneur’s goals, the social venture’s emphasis on the provision of public goods, and its relationship to stakeholders, we conduct a qualitative analysis of the entrepreneurial exit of a Dutch social venture in Northern Tanzania. Our analysis suggests that the choice of exit and the potential exit routes are indeed specific to social ventures, as the original social goals of the venture influence the decision to exit and its implementation. Specifically, we find that the goal of leaving a sustainable venture after the exit and the preference for the transfer of ownership to local community members was paramount for the social entrepreneur. Our results also highlight the difficulties associated with the unique role of stakeholders in social ventures, due to different perceptions and interests about the meaning and implementation of entrepreneurial exit.

Bottom-of-the-pyramid strategies and networks

The Handbook provides an impressive state-of-the-art overview of the international strategic management field as an area of scholarly inquiry. The great strength of the work is the thoughtfulness of the messages conveyed by the expert team of authors.