Non‐market Social and Political Strategies – New Integrative Approaches and Interdisciplinary Borrowings
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12253 |
| Published date | 01 October 2017 |
| Date | 01 October 2017 |
British Journal of Management, Vol. 28, 559–574 (2017)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12253
Non-market Social and Political
Strategies – New Integrative Approaches
and Interdisciplinary Borrowings
Jedrzej George Frynas, John Child1,2 and Shlomo Y. Tarba1
Roehampton Business School, University of Roehampton, London, UK, 1Birmingham Business School,
University of Birmingham, UK, and 2Plymouth Business School, Plymouth University, UK
Corresponding author email: frynasjg@gmail.com
This paper introduces a special issue of the British Journal of Management on social and
political strategies in the non-market environment.On the one hand, it reviews the extant
research on the possible forms of interaction between Corporate Social Responsibility
(CSR) strategies and Corporate Political Activity (CPA): CSR-CPA complementarity,
CSR-CPAsubstitution and mutual exclusion between CPAand CSR. On the other hand,
the paper provides an overview of the recent contributions of non-business disciplines –
psychology, sociology, economics, politics and history – to nonmarket scholarship and,
above all, the potential future scholarly contributions of these disciplines.
This special issue addresses business strategies in
the non-market environment. By their very defi-
nition, strategies in the non-market environment
stand in contrast to those in the market envi-
ronment. Following Baron’s (California Manage-
ment Review (1995), 37, pp.47−48) definition, ‘the
non-market environmentconsists of the social, po-
litical, and legal arrangements that structure the
firm’s interactions outside of, and in conjunction
with, markets’, whereas ‘the market environment
includes those interactions between the firm and
other parties that are intermediated by markets or
private agreements’. In other words, non-market
strategies are about managing the wider institu-
tional context within which companies operate, as
opposed to the more narrowly economic context
of market competition.
The academic dichotomy between market and
non-market environments is not unproblematic.
Our understanding of markets and of non-market
institutions is socially constructed, and any mar-
The authors are very grateful to ProfessorKamel Mellahi
whose constructive comments have helped us to improve
this paper.
ket transaction is arguably an outcome of the so-
cial, political, cultural and economic forces that
are shaping it (e.g. Abolafia, 1998; Astley, 1985;
Fligstein, 1996). Some business scholars convinc-
ingly assert that, ultimately and for their bene-
fit, companies should analyse and manage their
external −market and non-market −environ-
ments in an integrated fashion (e.g. Baron, 1995;
Holburn and VandenBergh, 2014), just as scholars
of sustainable development and the social respon-
sibilities of business suggest that companies and
financial markets should integrate environmental,
social and governance concerns into their day-to-
day strategic decision-making for the benefit of
the wider society (e.g. Busch, Bauer and Orlitzky,
2016; Elkington, 1994).
While such integrated strategies may be the ul-
timate goal, the study of non-market strategies is
valuable and necessary. Business managers face
a vast array of non-market risks and opportuni-
ties in an increasingly complicated and multi-polar
world (the emergence of a relatively large number
of new power centres globally), as demonstrated
by various business executive surveys and consul-
tancy reports (e.g. PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2016;
© 2017 British Academy of Management. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4
2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.
560 J. G. Frynas, J. Child and S. Y. Tarba
World Economic Forum, 2016). In such a world,
a multinational enterprise (MNE) may face an
increasingly integrated international economy, on
the one hand, and a fragmented non-market en-
vironment on the other (Kobrin, 2015). For exam-
ple, a large MNE maydecide to engage in a merger
with another company to benefit from global mar-
ket opportunities, but the merger deal may need
to be approved by a dozen dierent regulatory
authorities around the world. Likewise, a multi-
national petroleum company may have a global
production system butsuccessful production activ-
ities are dependent on dierent non-market actors
in the dierent countries where the firm operates,
such as dierent national governmentagencies, do-
mestic pressure groups and so on.
Navigating this non-market environment often
requires skill sets that are very dierent from the
more conventional commercial ones, in terms of
both the required political skills and capabilities
(e.g. Frynas, Mellahi and Pigman, 2006; Oliver
and Holzinger, 2008) and social skills and capa-
bilities (e.g. Hart, 1995; Russo and Fouts, 1997);
consequently, the study of non-market environ-
ments may require dierent research approaches
and methods.
Rationale for this special issue
Scholarly interest in non-market strategies has ex-
isted for several decades (for recent reviews see
Boddewyn, 2016; Mellahi et al., 2016). We now
have considerable knowledge of the antecedents
(e.g. Hillman, Keimand Schuler, 2004), the organi-
zational performance outcomes (e.g. Rajwani and
Liedong, 2015) and the contextual diversity (e.g.
¨
Ortenblad, 2016) of non-market strategies. Other
recent studies have explored inter alia investor re-
actions to non-market strategies(Arya and Zhang,
2009; Werner, 2017) and the socially constructed
nature of non-marketstrategies (Gond, Cabantous
and Krikorian, 2017; Orlitzky, 2011) and have
wondered to what extent collective political ac-
tions and private political actions are substitutes
or complements (Jia, 2014).
However, research on non-market strategieshas
suered from two crucial limitations. On the one
hand, the relevant scholarship has been highly
fragmented for a long time and has largely dis-
integrated into separate political and social do-
mains.Two parallel strands of non-marketstrategy
research haveemerged in isolation: one that exam-
ines corporate social responsibility (CSR) (fora re-
view of the CSR literature,see Aguinis and Glavas,
2012) and the other that examines corporate polit-
ical activity (CPA) (for a review of the CPA liter-
ature, see Lawton, McGuire and Rajwani, 2013).
Scholars have long articulated the need for an in-
tegration of these two lines of research (Baron,
2001; McWilliams, van Fleet and Cory, 2002;
Rodriguez et al., 2006), but it was only relatively
recently that they have started to explore this in-
tegration (see Frynas and Stephens, 2015; Mellahi
et al., 2016). The lack of integration of the po-
litical and social/environmental domains of non-
market strategy research manifests itself inter alia
in the failure to understand the substitution eects
between company political and social strategies
or the failure to understand the social impact of
corporate political strategies on other stakeholder
groups outside the organization.
On the other hand, research on non-market
strategies has suered from the failure to in-
tegrate insights and methodologies from disci-
plines outside business studies such as politi-
cal science, legal studies, sociology and history.
While some influential theoretical lenses used in
CSR and CPA scholarship originated from re-
lated disciplines outside business and manage-
ment −including resource dependence theory,
institutional theory and social movement theory
−non-market scholarship largely imitated the
application of these theories to other branches
of business and management research, rather
than developing them for its own purposes (cf.
Suddaby, Hardy and Huy, 2011; Whetten, Fe-
lin and King, 2009). Additionally, in those in-
stances in which borrowing did take place in
non-market scholarship, its quality wassometimes
poor, as notably evidenced by the superficial ap-
plication of Habermasian theories to recent politi-
cal CSR scholarship (see the critique by Whelan,
2012). Given that, by definition, non-market re-
search touches on the political, legal and social as-
pects of company strategies, one would expect and
welcome a much greater cross-fertilization with
non-business disciplines in order to address those
aspects of non-market strategy that are currently
insuciently explained by existing approaches.
Underlying the rationale of this special issue has
been our desire to help,in a modest way, to fill these
two researchgaps. Consequently,we sought papers
that either oer new pathways for the integration
© 2017 British Academy of Management.
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