پیش بینی های استراتژی غیرمستقیم برای شرکت های خارجی  Nonmarket strategies predictors for foreign firms

1. Introduction Multinational companies (MNCs) operating in different host contexts can face competing and conflicting nonmarket influences and challenges from a plethora of nonmarket institutions such as governments, regulatory agencies, interest groups and media (Ioannou & Serafeim, 2012). These nonmarket influences and challenges affect the performance and competitive position of these firms. For instance, McGuire, Lindeque, and Suder (2012) found that firms engaging in a different nonmarket environment experienced liability of foreignness. To overcome this liability, these firms should adapt to the host environment and should manage the host nonmarket influences to create legitimacy and therefore can achieve a competitive advantage. Aquilera-Caracuel, Aragón-Correa, Hurtado-Torres, and Rugman (2012) also showed that foreign firms need to manage social pressures and priorities to gain legitimacy abroad. Therefore, these firms should go beyond formulating host market strategies and thoroughly consider complementary strategies to encounter complex influences outside the market, to reduce the liability of foreignness and to increase their competitive position in the host environment (Baron, 1995; Bonardi, Hillman, & Keim, 2005; Bonardi, Holburn, & Van den Bergh, 2006; Prakash, 2002). While it is widely understood that in the current international business environment firms should go beyond formulating market strategies and thoroughly consider a complementary sort of stratagems to encounter complex institutional influences outside the market spam, however, to date the studies on nonmarket strategies merely enumerate the preference of firms for a particular type of nonmarket strategy. Many studies about MNCs explored the challenges they face in establishing legitimacy in various nonmarket contexts (Boddewyn, 2016; Kostova & Zaheer, 1999; Rajwani & Liedong, 2015), but the strategies that firms choose in order to participate in the nonmarket process in a host environment have received relatively little attention (Lawton, McGuire, & Rajwani, 2013; Lux, Crook, & Woehr, 2011). Therefore, it is important to increase our insight about the preference of firms to use particular types of strategies to deal with the nonmarket process in a host environment. Different strands of strategy research have examined the actions of firms to manage the nonmarket environment. An influential strand is corporate political strategies (Hillman, Schuler, & Keim, 2004; Mellahi, Frynas, Sun, & Siegel, 2016; Bonardi & Keim, 2005). Although corporate political behavior may be proactive or reactive in general, efforts to participate proactively in nonmarket processes have become essential for most firms in the current competitive international landscape. The corporate political literature emphasizes that firms can proactively participate in the nonmarket environment to achieve their objectives and potential benefits from nonmarket behavior, while reactive actions imply no direct participation in the nonmarket process (Hillman & Hitt, 1999; Weidenbaum, 1980). Reactive actions refer more to factoring nonmarket policies and influences into the planning process of the firm. The proactive approach to nonmarket strategy may entail relational and transactional strategies (Hillman & Hitt, 1999). Relational strategies can be defined as long term and issue spanning relationship, while transactional strategies are more adhoc and issue specific. Hence, foreign firms can develop relational nonmarket strategies that are long term oriented and create a certain in-depth base within the host setting meant to avoid or decrease nonmarket influences on their activities. However, firms can also develop and implement a transactional nonmarket strategy to deal with nonmarket actors and issues in the host country. This type of strategy is based on mainly event-specificity and temporary actions. Hence, firms await the development of an issue or event before building a strategy to affect this issue or event. Various studies showed that the choice of tactics and approaches depend on the resources of firms (see Mellahi et al. (2016) for an overview of the literature). Although the corporate political strategy literature also focuses on MNCs, only a small group of studies investigated the preference of a firm to use a particular type of proactive nonmarket strategy in a host environment depending on the available resources and role of the firm. For instance, Hillman (2003) examined which nonmarket strategy US firms used in host economies. Hansen and Mitchell (2001) showed that firms from different home countries preferred different nonmarket strategies. Hence, foreign firms can formulate and implement proactive nonmarket strategies that capitalize on unique resources of the firm to create legitimacy and therefore to achieve a competitive advantage in the host environment (Hillman, 2003; Wan & Hillman, 2005). These firms can differ in their resources in terms of assessing the risk and impact and managing nonmarket processes (Holburn & Zelner, 2010). The opportunity of the firm to deal with the nonmarket processes depends not only on the resources but also on the role of the firm in the host environment (Ciabuschi, Dellestrand, & Holm, 2012; Meyer, Mudambi, & Narula, 2011). Hence, the aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between resources and role of firms and their preference for a relational or transactional nonmarket strategy to deal with the influences in a host environment. Doh, Lawton, and Rajwani (2012) argue that traditional strategy predictors should also be used for studying non-market strategies especially since nonmarket strategies are complementary to market strategies (Baron, 1995). Therefore, using international business, corporate political strategy, and resource based view literature, we investigate the relationship between the type of proactive nonmarket strategy used by foreign firms in a host environment and the resources and role of these firms.