Managing favors in a global economy

Abstract

Managers engaged in the global economy continually encounter circumstances inwhichtheywishtoaskforortheythemselvesareapproachedforafavortoaccomplish business objectives. Favors are also important in personal relationships,but the focus of this Special Issue is on their use in business activities, includingfavors that spill over from a manager’s personal relationships into the business arena.Despite their importance in business, the use of favors has been an understudiedphenomenon in the field of management and international business. Favors span anumber of issues such as corporate growth strategies, foreign direct investment, jointventures and other alliances, multinational headquarters-subsidiary relations, knowl-edge transfer, human resources management, and business ethics. Thus, this SpecialIssue contributes to the development of this nascent field in those arenas, although werealize that the topic has been a prominent one for decades in other fields, particularlyanthropology (Malinowsky, 1922; Mauss, 1990/1950), sociology (Blau, 1964; Burt,1992; Homans, 1958; Scott, 2008), and economics (North, 1990; Polanyi, 1957).Additionally some management authors have addressed the topic of favors eitherdirectly (Flynn, 2003), or by discussing practices that would be considered favors.Examples would be work on guanxi in China (Luo, 2007), blat/sviazi in Russia(Ledeneva, 1998, 2006), jeito in Brazil (Amado & Brasil, 1991), and favors in India(Schuster, 2006), as well as the use of favors in all the BRIC countries (Puffer,McCarthy, Jaeger, & Dunlap, 2013).