Coping with complexity by making trust an important dimension in governance and coordination

Jan-Erik Vahlne and Jan Johanson

International Business Review, 2021, vol. 30, issue 2

Abstract: Multinational business enterprises (MBEs) have created and/or discovered opportunities to improve on their businesses, by engaging in technological change and establishing presence by ownership or cooperation with local parties on foreign markets. This development has increased the level of complexity to managers dramatically. Accordingly, the MBEs have developed governance and coordination means to cope with that growing complexity, mainly by inventing governing modes in between the market and the hierarchy and delegating coordination to network or value-chain parties. To be able to explain this development, the internalization approach has been modernized with assumptions more similar to those of the Uppsala model. Micro-foundational findings support a process approach to trust building and exploitation, making trust an essential ingredient in research on exchange behavior.

Keywords: Complexity; Governance; Coordination; Uppsala model assumptions; Process approach (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969593121000056
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:30:y:2021:i:2:s0969593121000056

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.2021.101798

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 ().