The state-business relations and the foreign investment decisions of Russian firms

Abstract

The present thesis strives to explore and comprehend the propensity of the firms from a major EM country, namely Russia, to expand their operations and boundaries beyond the domestic market and transit of multinationality. The prime aim and motivation of the endearvoured investigation lies in embedding the FDI behaviour of Russian firms in a novel context of the evolution of state business relations and the dynamics of organisational genesis, observed in the Russian state over the turbulent years of the neo-liberal and catching-up reforms. To attain a better level of comprehension of the heterogeneous FDI behaviour of the EM firms than conventionally offered in the IB theories, the present study takes a different path and elaborates a framework that adequately conceptualises the novelties of the empirical context by drawing upon network economics and political science. The suggested comceptual framework relates the drastic shifts in relational powers amid the major forces in the Russian economy and co-evolving political and economic networks to the FDI behaviour of the Russian firms, and also disentagles the FDI outcomes across the novel organisational forms reconstucted or newly-emerging during the three distinct periods of the state-business relations, commonly overlooked amid IB studies. Besides rigorously testing the importance of conventional firm's attributes for the initial transition of the Russian firms to multnationality and the subsequent expansion of their networks of foreign subsidiaries, the developed tim-continuous FDI transtion models disentangle the relational mechanisms of domination and influence within the hybrid intra-state networks founded by Russian firms.