The antecedents of political capabilities: A study of ownership, cross-border activity and organization at legacy airlines in a deregulatory context

Thomas Lawton, Tazeeb Rajwani and Jonathan Doh

International Business Review, 2013, vol. 22, issue 1, 228-242

Abstract: Governments and ownership structures can both facilitate and constrain organizational value creation. Firm-level political strategy is a frequent response to protect or promote organizational interests. When effectively configured and implemented, these political strategies can become capabilities. This inductive study examines the antecedents of political capabilities in European airlines within the context of cross-border market deregulation. Our central contribution is an understanding of how management teams from non-state and state airlines organize and develop divergent corporate political capabilities in this context. While managers’ actions in response to specific public policy processes can create political capabilities, the outcome is moderated by the nature of corporate ownership and the relative influence of public and private stakeholders on capability formation. Our theoretical contribution is to extend the study of organizational capabilities into the non-market context through analyzing how European flag carrier airlines organized their political capabilities in anticipation of a changing transnational policy context.

Keywords: Air transport; Corporate political activity; Cross-border deregulation; Organizational capabilities; Ownership (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (45)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969593112000479
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: The antecedents of political capabilities: A study of ownership, cross-border activity and organization at legacy airlines in a deregulatory context (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:iburev:v:22:y:2013:i:1:p:228-242

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/133/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... me/133/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.ibusrev.2012.04.001

Access Statistics for this article

International Business Review is currently edited by P. Ghauri

More articles in International Business Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().