We propose a private-government principals-principals approach to understand corporate governance of state-owned multinationals. We explain how the conflicts between large government and private blockholders may affect managerial decisions in the propensity of completing a cross-border acquisition and its dollar value. We argue that conflicts among different blockholders make it difficult to pursue large-scale, cross-border deals because such conflicts may lead to a less coherent objective function and to a rejection of deals that do not satisfy these groups’ conflicting objectives. Finally, we show that such blockholder conflicts are moderated by the salience of the government’s “dual influence” on the firm in question, related to a state’s soft budget constraint and/or diplomatic advantages in countries where the host and the home markets do not enjoy a bilateral investment treaty. Empirically, we found highly supportive evidence based on a global sample of 7,564 cross-border acquisitions between 2004 and 2013.

Within the boundary of scientific knowledge for management, we discuss the divergence between practical demand for knowledge integration to solve complex problems and scientific fragmentation of academic knowledge for simplicity. We suggest the current incentives underlying elite scientific journals in management cause unintended knowledge fragmentation both between management and foundation disciplines, and within management. In the context of the overall management knowledge ecosystem, we recommend addressing three major constraints that limit our ability to reduce these fragmentations: First, new technologies could be introduced to assist researchers and editors in the development of a complete review of existing theories and evidence. Second, new publication outlets could be designed to serve as information technology–enabled, web-based knowledge synthesis platforms. Third, business schools could develop new incentive systems to enable and promote the use of these new initiatives. We suggest several limitations of our recommendations and discuss extensions into the yet untheorized/untested knowledge domain.

This article presents a state-of-the-art system to extract and synthesize causal statements from company reports into a directed causal graph. The extracted information is organized by its relevance to different stakeholder group benefits (customers, employees, investors, and the community/environment). The presented method of synthesizing extracted data into a knowledge graph comprises a framework that can be used for similar tasks in other domains, e.g., medical information. The current work addresses the problem of finding, organizing, and synthesizing a view of the cause-and-effect relationships based on textual data in order to inform and even prescribe the best actions that may affect target business outcomes related to the benefits for different stakeholders (customers, employees, investors, and the community/environment).

The alignment among multiple stakeholder benefits is a valuable performance indicator for the benefits generated by a firm for various stakeholders. Our research seeks to augment stakeholder-agency theory with an institutional perspective to analyze how national institutions affect stakeholder benefit alignment. We suggest that the current development of stakeholder-agency theory has overlooked the alignment of different stakeholders’ benefits and the external institutional contexts as critical determinants in ensuring such alignment. We conceptualize stakeholder benefit alignment as a positive relationship between different stakeholder groups’ benefits, and propose an institutional framework grounded in relative stakeholder salience. Using this framework, we argue that stakeholder benefits are better aligned when national institutions enhance the ease of withdrawal, legal protection, and private enforcement for intrinsically less salient stakeholders, and when a long-term oriented culture characterizes a society. We found supportive evidence by employing a meta-analytic approach based on 530 correlations from 94 primary studies representing 23 economies. Our study adds new insights to the stakeholder-agency literature by conceptualizing and quantitatively examining the degree of alignment across different stakeholder benefit dimensions, focusing on national formal and informal institutions as boundary conditions.