GVC and strategic/international management: Towards an interdisciplinary effort

Research on global value chains and strategic/international management has to a large extent been operating in parallel.
Specifically:

• Global value chains:
• Governance structure and industry differences.
• Linkage, firm- and industry-level chain governance.
• Three main elements:, governance, power and institutions.
• Trends in network location, architecture, and actors.
• Shifts in the institutional and policy environment.

• Strategy and international business:
• Resource heterogeneity as source of firm competitiveness.
• The relationship between location and the organization of economic activity: firm-advantages relating to ownership, location and internalization
• How firms facilitate the exploitation of knowledge assets between locations: market seeking, resource seeking, and efficiency seeking.

This workshop will explore convergence and divergence between these two research traditions with the intent of agreeing on a framework that will, in not unify, make the intellectual resources of each tradition more easily assessable to the other.

More ambitiously, can we devise a new research program that leverages new data resources related to globalization to address the research questions posed by GVCs and IB researchers?

• What's the proper level of analysis?
• What are the key questions and variables and how can we measure them?
• What specific research projects can be envisioned?

The purpose of this workshop is therefore to explore and discuss the potential for further cross-fertilization between the two fields with the aim to explore ideas and potential initiatives at their intersection. Specifically, we foresee an invitational-only 1-day workshop organized around three keynote speeches with following plenum discussions:
 
1: Global value chains
• Keynote: Tim Sturgeon, Senior Research Affiliate MIT
• Plenum discussion: Moderated by Stefano Ponte

o How does firms’ organizational characteristics relate to their geographical characteristics?
 While IB has focused on the firm-level strategies and motivations related to the location of economic activities, the understanding of ‘space’ remains relatively underdeveloped (i.e. countries are typical unit of analysis). The GVC literature has been more open to issues of cluster formation, regionalization, and institutional and social characteristics of locations, etc. Based on this, a better understanding of what an optimal locational decision may constitute can be derived.
o Linkages
 How do notions of value chain linkages from the GVC literature relate (or not) to notions of firm strategy and behavior as developed in the IB literature?
o Normative basis
 The goals of GVC research (tools for characterizing globalization processes) are often different than the goals of IB research (lead firm globalization strategy).  What scope is there for bringing these goals, and the normative elements, into alignment?

2: Data issues
• Keynote: Peter Bøegh Nielsen, Head of division for business statistics in Statistics Denmark

o What is the appropriate unit of analysis? Industry, firm, business functions, sub-components (goods, products, occupations)?
o How can we use existing data to understand firm strategy/behavior in global value chains?
o Identifying data gabs and proposals to overcome these gabs (possible future co-operation between national statistical institutes and researchers)

3: Strategic/international management
• Keynote: Prof. Torben Pedersen, Copenhagen Business School
• Plenum discussion: Moderated by Marcus M. Larsen

o How do we understand the firm in global value chains?
 Literature on strategic and international management has advanced knowledge on theories of the firm, strategic management, and organizational structure and design. How can the GVC approach benefit from this perspective?
o The case of offshoring to understand the firm in a global value chain
 The multinational firm: What are the antecedent/strategic drivers, processes and consequences of value chain activity disaggregation and relocation?
 What happens with linkages when firms offshore and outsource activities? What are the strategic implications of different GVC linkages? How do firms most effectively govern and coordinate globally dispersed activities?
o Task interdependencies?
 What is the relationship between the task interdependency that we know from the organizational design literature and value chain linkages from the GVC literature?