Institutional Strategies in Emerging Markets

Abstract

We review and integrate a wide range of literature that has examined the strategies by which organizations navigate institutionally diverse settings and capture rents outside of the marketplace. We synthesize this body of research under the umbrella term institutional strategies, which we define as the comprehensive set of plans and actions directed at leveraging and shaping socio-political and cultural institutions to obtain or retain competitive advantage. Our review of institutional strategies is focused on emerging market contexts, settings that are characterized by weak capital market and regulatory infrastructures and fast-paced turbulent change. Under such challenging conditions, strategies aimed at shaping the institutional environment may be especially critical to an organization's performance and long-term survival. Our review reveals that organizations engage in three specific and identifiable sets of institutional strategies, which we term relational, infrastructure-building, and socio-cultural bridging. We conclude by highlighting fruitful avenues for cross-disciplinary dialogue in the hope of promoting future research on emerging markets and defining the next frontier of institutional theory in organizational analysis.

Acknowledgements

We greatly appreciate the comments and suggestions of Associate Editor Forrest Briscoe and Editor Sim Sitkin, and also thank Olga Hawn, Shon Hiatt, Nan Jia, Rajiv Kozhikode, Michael Lounsbury, Yadong Luo, Johanna Mair, Ilya Okhmatovskiy, Mike Peng, Andras Tilcsik, Danqinq Wang, Meng Zhao and Enying Zheng for their comments on prior versions of this paper.

Notes

1. The BRICS are Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa; CIVITS are Columbia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey, and South Africa; EAGLES are Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, Taiwan, and Turkey.