Lessons in nonmarket strategy from Eastern Europe and Central Asia: moving beyond the 'compared to what' question

This chapter examines the transnational periphery through the lens of non-market strategy or corporate political strategies. The non-market strategy literature studying the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA) _ that is, the post-Soviet countries _ is especially sparse. To contribute to reducing this sparsity, the authors contrast the results of their original empirical research in the EECA countries with one specific stream of the nonmarket strategy literature: the theoretical framework explaining corporate political activity, developed by Hillman and Hitt and empirically tested in the Western European context. The most important contribution of these authors was to postulate a threefold taxonomy of corporate political activities, which consists of informational strategies, financial strategies and constituency-based strategies. The chapter demonstrates that this framework is insufficient to adequately explain nonmarket activity in the transitional periphery. The authors thus extend that framework to incorporate the particularities of the EECA institutional context, focusing specifically on two other important types of nonmarket strategies which they term relational strategies and procedural strategies.