Management in Emerging, Developing, and Transition Economies: Context, Mechanisms, and Outcomes

Description

Most management research has been developed in Western contexts, leaving significant gaps in understanding leadership and organizational practices in emerging, developing, and transition economies—regions that now generate nearly half of global economic output. These economies operate under distinct institutional conditions where formal institutions are incomplete or unevenly enforced, requiring firms to rely on alternative coordination mechanisms and making context a primary determinant of business strategy and performance.

This special issue addresses this literature gap by centering emerging, developing, and transition economies as objects of theoretical inquiry rather than control variables. It invites studies across governance, entrepreneurship, sustainability, and leadership that examine how management practices evolve, adapt, or are translated when formal rules and infrastructures cannot be taken for granted. The call welcomes quantitative surveys, experiments, qualitative ethnographies, mixed-methods research, and conceptual work, particularly comparative studies spanning regions or contrasting different institutional settings.

Potential topics

• How and with what consequences do firms substitute private or community governance for missing or unreliable formal institutions, and which mechanisms make these substitutes durable or fragile?
• Which configurations of resources, networks, and legitimacy enable opportunity discovery and scaling in thin or nascent markets, and how do founders and top managers navigate uncertainty and institutional gaps across growth stages?
• Under resource constraints and uneven enforcement, what capability bundles allow firms to align environmental initiatives with competitive outcomes, and how do local cultural or state priorities shape these trajectories?
• How do reporting, budgeting, and control systems adapt when enforcement is uneven, and what are the implications for investment, innovation, market signals, and stakeholder trust in emerging markets?
• How do contextual communication and power structures condition the effectiveness of leadership, employee voice, engagement, and performance systems in transition settings, and what are the boundary conditions for transferability?
• How do commitments to learning and open innovation translate into performance when institutions are in flux, and which organisational routines, such as bricolage, mediate these effects?
• How do political ties, state ownership, or party networks shape strategic decision-making, board dynamics, and accountability in firms and hybrid organisations operating under volatile or contested regulatory regimes?
• How do gender, ethnicity, and other social cleavages intersect with institutional voids to shape leadership careers, informal influence, and patterns of inclusion and exclusion inside organisations?
• In conflict-affected, fragile, or post-disaster settings, which leadership practices and governance arrangements enable organisational resilience, continuity of services, and recovery, and what trade-offs do they imply?
• How do regional, cross-border, or diaspora networks among managers, professionals, and researchers mediate the transfer, translation, and contestation of management ideas and leadership models across institutional contexts?