Existing research interprets the rise of consulting firms in intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) primarily as evidence of the global spread of managerialism. We highlight that consultants are not merely carriers of business-like world cultural norms, but also part of contentious IGO politics...

Internationalization is a strong challenge that firms have to face today. However, small and medium-sized family firms internationalize their business after consolidating their position in domestic markets. Family SMEs approach international markets usually through export activities....

The burgeoning literature on informal governance has shed new light on the workings of international organizations and the hidden rules of the game. The common thrust of these studies is that informal governance is the result of an implicit agreement among states that, in order to sustain...

This article uses the informal governance framework to elucidate the connection between regime transition and participation in regional international organizations (IOs). In particular, this study focuses on non-democratic regional IOs and examines the empirical case of the Commonwealth of...

The renaissance in the theoretical analysis of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) has focused on formal IGOs (FIGOs), but many IGOs are subject to no formal treaty and/or have no permanent secretariat. Important examples of informal IGOs (IIGOs) include the G-groups that are the locus of...

Trust is an informal mechanism of governance that seems to work in family businesses differently from other types of companies. This conceptual paper analyzes the impact of internal trust on the competitiveness of firms over time. To this end, we introduce different modes of intra-firm trust,...