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Untangling Legitimacy Complexity: Huawei’s Engagement with Government and Media

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Huawei Goes Global

Abstract

Despite its phenomenal success in China and beyond, Huawei has encountered serious and prolonged legitimization challenges in some prominent Western countries. We explore a cross-border stakeholder engagement perspective and elaborate that Huawei has had trouble coping with the governments and media in developed Western countries due to its stakeholder engagement deficiencies and local negative national stereotyping it faces. We discuss some possible adaptation approaches such as negotiation and defensive strategies and conclude with scholarly and managerial implications.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Our working definition of developed Western countries is consistent with Huang et al. (2017) who refer to the countries such as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, U.K., and U.S.

  2. 2.

    The use of this term resembles “competence deficiencies” by Luo and Rui (2009).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nottingham University Business School China, Ningbo, China

    Lei Li

  2. University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA, USA

    Sunny Li Sun

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  1. Lei Li
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  1. Rollins College, Winter Park, FL, USA

    Wenxian Zhang

  2. University of Adger, Kristiansand, Norway

    Ilan Alon

  3. Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany

    Christoph Lattemann

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Li, L., Sun, S.L. (2020). Untangling Legitimacy Complexity: Huawei’s Engagement with Government and Media. In: Zhang, W., Alon, I., Lattemann, C. (eds) Huawei Goes Global. Palgrave Studies of Internationalization in Emerging Markets. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47579-6_12

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