Klaus Meyer

Research on Business Strategies: Overview

My research focuses on the strategies of multinational enterprises operating in emerging economies. I am in particular investigating how firms adapt their entry and growth strategies to the specific local context they encounter in for example Eastern Europe, China or Vietnam.

My ongoing work covers broadly three related areas. 

Adaptation of Business Strategies to Local Context: My empirical work investigates foreign investor's choice of entry mode and foreign acquisitions in transition economies, taking into consideration aspects of the local institutional environment.

I have recently led two major research projects that have generated two books (Estrin and Meyer, 2004; Meyer and Estrin, 2007) and a stream of scholarly articles. The first project in collaboration with London Business School covers Egypt, India, South Africa and Vietnam; the second has been based at Copenhagen Business School and covers Hungary, Poland and Lithuania. The main theme in this research has been the interaction of local institutions and strategies of foreign investors.

Early work developed from my PhD thesis on foreign direct investment (FDI) in Central and Eastern Europe, and explored the link between institution building during economic transition, transaction costs and the choice of foreign entry mode (Meyer, 1998; Meyer, 2001a). In parallel, I have looked at privatization-related FDI (Meyer, 2002) and the subsequent restructuring of acquired firms (Meyer & Møller, 1998; Meyer & Lieb-Dóczy, 2003), as well as restructuring and governance issues in firms without foreign involvement (Uhlenbruck, Meyer & Hitt, 2003; Meyer 2003; Meyer, 2004b; Dixon, Meyer & Day, 2007). I also wrote reviews of the international business literature on Eastern Europe in view of region-specific issues (Meyer 2001b) and the implications for theory development (Meyer & Peng, 2005). As part of this research we assembled a bibliography that provides good starting points for other scholars wishing to study business in Central and Eastern Europe.

Recently, my work has broadened to include emerging economies in Asia and Africa, while focusing on the subtleties how foreign direct investors adapt their strategies and operations to the peculiarities of local institutional frameworks. A major line of work concerns the adaptation of entry modes to local contexts, notably the interaction between institutional development and resource acquisition (Meyer, Estrin, Bhaumik & Peng, 2008), provincial institutions (Meyer and Nguyen, 2005), and institutional distance (Estrin, Baghdasaryan & Meyer, 2009) and the varying effects of experience across contexts (Li and Meyer, 2009). Key theoretical issues in this work concern the merits of institutional theory perspectives developed in economic and sociology (Gelbuda, Meyer and Delios, 2008).

Related qualitative work has explored the variations of entry modes in emerging economies outlining for example a resource-based classification of entry modes at its antecedents (Meyer, Wright and Pruthi, 2009), the features of modes such as brownfield acquisitions (Meyer and Estrin, 2001, Estrin and Meyer, 2009), staged acquisitions and multiple acquisitions (Meyer and Tran, 2006), and partial acquisitions (Meyer and Jakobsen 2008, 2007). This work aims to provide new perspectives on entry strategies as a concept beyond entry mode choice (Meyer 2008a, 2008b). Moreover, recent work explores the development of foreign investments subsequent to the initial entry, thus linking the initial mode of entry with subsidiary growth (Bhaumik, Estrin and Meyer, 2006) and subsidiary exports (Estrin, Meyer, Wright & Foliano, 2008).

On a more methodological level, I have become involved in a debate over the future of Asian management research in the Asia Pacific Journal of Management, arguing for careful considerations of contextual influences in empirical research (Meyer, 2006b; Meyer, 2007a; Meyer 2007b).

Global Strategy: This stream of research focuses on the global strategies that brings multinational enterprises into emerging economies in the first place. Globalization is changing the institutional contexts such as to diminish the value of resources that can be exploited by domestic diversification, while facilitating international growth in core lines of business. I thus coined the term 'globalfocusing' to describe the phenomenon of many firms converting from diversified conglomerates to specialists in a niche market with global supply chains and market presence.

This work is progressing towards developing a neo-Penrosian theory of the growth of the firm. First ideas have been developed from case research on Danish multinationals Danisco and GN Great Northern (Meyer, 2006, 2009), and this work currently deepened in study on business groups in Taiwan (Tan and Meyer, 2007), with future work encompassing large European businesses and German 'Hidden Champions' (Venohr and Meyer, 2009).

The Role of Multinational Enterprises in Society: I am interested in the impact of foreign investors on the economic transition and development of the host economies, for instance in the context of privatization-related acquisitions or in terms of technology spillovers. I have written two survey papers on the issue (Meyer, 2004a; Meyer, 2005), edited a collection of readings (Meyer, ed. 2008) and collaborated with a former PhD student for a meta-analysis of the spillover literature (Meyer and Sinani, 2009) as well as a study on spillovers from FDI in Estonia (Sinani and Meyer, 2004).