Business in Political Transitions: Strategies and Stakeholder Management

Political transitions are shaped by major reconfigurations of business-stakeholder relations. This panel poses the question how businesses have historically navigated and exploited such times of political disruption. The three papers take a process view of multinational companies during political transitions. The speakers set out to jointly explore which strategies businesspeople employed to manage political transitions and possibly improve their competitive positioning as foreign companies. In line with Neil Rollings' recent BHC presidential address, in which he commented on the relative lack of research on Business & Politics, these papers argue that corporate political activity (CPA) is more diverse and more complex than the process of mitigating political risks and highlight in particular proactive strategies of stakeholder management. Together they explore tactics from creating or reframing narratives, building partnerships with political elites, and “geopolitical jockeying” understood as actions to delegitimize competitors. All three papers combine insights from business history and international business. They complement each other by taking a theoretical (Decker) and empirical (Lubinski, Duran/Bucheli) perspective and by comparing and contrasting experiences from major world regions (India, Colombia).