Originally found at Phys.org

Within most countries, businesses operate under the notion that their property rights are stable. A set of operational rules and a political system that protects those rules are firmly entrenched, right?

Not necessarily.

"According to organization and management theory, mostly we assume the external environment—such as a political, economic and social one that we collectively call the institutional environment—is a given," said Jun Ho Lee, assistant professor of strategy and international business at the University of Kansas School of Business.

"Even in daily life we usually say, 'It is what it is.' In this paper, we challenge that conventional wisdom."

His article, titled "The Endogenous Creation of a Property Rights Regime: A Historical Approach to Firm Strategy and Governance Structure," argues that private firms can manipulate this institutional environment by legitimizing an existing one that protects their property rights or by delegitimizing another that threatens their property rights. It appears in the Academy of Management Perspectives.

Co-written by Minyoung Kim, the Frank T. Stockton Professor of Strategic Management at KU, and Marcelo Bucheli of the University of Illinois, the paper observes both recent and historic periods when the institutional environment was affected through political struggles. In such struggles, social actors such as states and firms determined how property rights were defined, allocated, delineated and enforced.

Continue reading the original article at Phys.org.

Read the original research in Academy of Management Perspectives.

Learn more about the AOM Scholars and explore their work:

• Marcelo Bucheli, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Minyoung Kim, University of Kansas
• Jun Ho Lee, University of Kansas