Management of Regulatory Influences on Corporate Strategy and Structure

Sebastian Frankenberger analyses how regulatory actors influence corporate strategies and structures and how corporations may proactively manage regulatory involvement. He presents a theoretical framework that integrates market and political strategies and shows how corporations may influence institutional processes that impact their scope of operations. He also suggests options how management can navigate their business within institutional boundaries and how market and political strategies may be coordinated.

Foreword In recent years regulation and deregulation issues grew into a major concern of corpo rate management. Asked about their biggest pain points, managers from different businesses, not only network-based industries like telecommunications, transportation, and energy, but also chemicals or food and beverages, mentioned uncertainty resulting from regulation. Despite this fact, strategic management has so far widely neglected the interactions and inter-dependencies between corporate and regulatory actors. With this dissertation, the author aims at closing this gap through a better integration of external, regulatory actors into the strategy formation process. More specifically, he asks how regulatory actors impact corporate strategy and structure and how corporate management can proactively manage this type of external involvement. Based on an extensive literature review, the author shows that extant models of the strategy formation process focus almost exclusively on actors internal to the firm; ex ternal actors are widely neglected. In general, they have been condensed under rather abstract conditions of the environment (such as uncertainty or complexity). If explic itly considered, only selected elements (e. g. , innovativeness, diversification, or organ izational design) have been analyzed in primarily content-based, quantitative, cro- secfional studies. A broader understanding of the complex inter-dependencies and mu tual influences between corporate and external actors remains lacking.

Theoretical background. - Research framework. - Research setting. - Methodology. - Results. - Managing regulatory involvement towards an integrative framework. - Discussion and implications. - Conclusions.