ABSTRACT
Emerging markets, including those in Latin America, have received considerable attention recently as more corporations try to adapt their global strategies and tap into the natural resources and young labor markets of these countries. It is now clear that successful strategies to target these attractive markets differ from the Western style of conducting business. Building global capacities in social embeddedness has been proposed as an alternative to the traditional model of operations (London and Hart, 2004). Understanding the social context, building from the bottom up, and sharing resources across organizational boundaries are seen as key activities that guarantee a “license to operate” and add to their competitive advantage. Human resource departments are active participants in this process, since they are frequently in charge of managing the social demands of companies’ stakeholders (Austin et al., 2007).
