The Role of the Subsidiary in International Business

responsibility-oriented. Within the resource- and configuration-oriented research, functional responsibilities of a subsidiary constitute a background issue to a study's main focus, and thus these groups are analyzed together while taking into account the chronological order of particular studies. At the same time, responsibility-oriented subsidiary role studies are discussed in a separate section, with a particular focus on methodological issues (main purpose of the study, classification dimensions, sample size, etc.) and perspectives applied toward functional responsibilities of a subsidiary. The final section of this chapter focuses on a specific type of responsibility-oriented subsidiary role study that operationalizes the strategic role of a subsidiary (Dzikowska & Andersson, 2018), and then advocates for its use. This study is of particular importance because it gathers all crucial aspects highlighted in the previous research and presents the first operationalization of a subsidiary strategic role, which comprehensively represents functional responsibilities of a subsidiary, allows observations of their shifts, and conduction of a comparison among subsidiaries. The operationalization of the concept is then applied in the empirical part of the book.

Chapter 4 focuses on two aspects of the empirical study: the model of determinants of subsidiaries' functional responsibilities and the study's methodology. The model is developed based on the literature's findings on subsidiary evolution and subsidiary roles. Particularly, it considers aspects such as a subsidiary's competences, initiative, and internal and external embeddedness. Importantly, different from the previous studies focusing on determinants of widely understood subsidiary roles, the developed model focuses on functional responsibilities of a subsidiary. Furthermore, the chapter discusses the data collection process and describes the sample, as well as presents the operationalization of the variables.

Chapter 5 presents the results of the empirical study conducted on a sample of foreign subsidiaries in the manufacturing industry in Poland. The chapter presents the scope of differences in terms of the functional responsibilities fulfilled by subsidiaries and changes in those responsibilities that occurred during 2012-2016. Additionally, it presents the results of the structural equation models that verify the hypotheses developed in Chapter 4 and discusses those results. Finally, the chapter notes the limitations of the study and outlines possible directions for future research on the roles of subsidiaries within the value creation processes of MNEs.