Call for Proposals
Latin America’s Burgeoning Strategic Role In Global Development
The Strategic Management Society (SMS) is pleased to announce a special conference in Brazil. The SMS brings together scholars, executives, and innovative policymakers in advancing state of the art research and practice in a unique special conference organized for the first time in Brazil.
Recent events have led to major changes in the world economy, with emerging markets gaining interest amongst global strategy scholars, business consultants, and managers. However, a review of publications on firms from emerging markets in top management journals reveals that the vast majority of recent work in this area has tended to focus on firms in Asia and transition economies. While China is the top emerging market destination of foreign direct investment (United Nations, 2009), other emerging markets provide important growth opportunities and offer distinct economic, political, and social challenges critical to the development of a more complete understanding of strategy issues which will shape the global economy for years to come.
This conference seeks to contribute to this understanding by creating a scholarly forum for the study of Latin America companies, industries, trade and investment. Latin America is demonstrating increasing strategic connections to other emerging markets and to the developed world. The Latin American region has gained prominence as an FDI destination – particularly for North American firms with close ties to the region as well as for European firms (and particularly Spanish companies), and as a source of imports (particularly to China). The “wide ranging trade liberalization, deregulation and privatization policies that took place throughout the region in the 1990s” have encouraged many Latin American countries to increase their outward foreign direct investment and other internationalization activities (United Nations, 2006: 132). Unfortunately, despite the importance of the region and its distinctive development process, the strategic management literature can provide limited recommendations to managers of firms from this region or entering the region due to the lack of Latin America-focused research.
This special conference will focus on the Latin America region, broadly defined to cover the countries in the Americas that were colonized by France, Portugal or Spain, and its role within both emerging market strategy studies and global development generally. The goal is to build on previous SMS Special Conferences that covered single country settings to allow discussion of the diversity of activities in the region. Accordingly, we call for contributions examining strategies for Latin America and Latin America’s new strategic role in broader emerging market and globalization studies. We particularly hope to encourage research collaboration between Latin America scholars and scholars from other regions of the world.
Potential topics include (but are not limited to):
- Unique characteristics of Latin American MNCs and Multilatinas
- Applicability of core strategy theories (i.e., the resource based view, organizational economics, strategic group theory, agency theory, institutional theory) to this region
- Differences between Multilatina strategies and those of other emerging/developing market MNCs
- The corporation’s role in society
- The importance of business groups in emerging markets
- Trade and foreign direct investment between Latin America and other markets
- Strategic alliances and mergers and acquisitions involving Latin American MNCs
- The institutional environment in Latin America and its relationship to foreign direct investment
- Exemplars or best practices of successful emerging market firms
- Successful strategies for sustainable practices (e.g., green energy) in Latin America
Submission Guidelines And Requirements
Invited are proposals (5-7 pages, for paper and panel sessions) relating to the conference theme. Only original, unpublished work is sought. Deadline for Submission of Proposals: October 15, 2010.