I am an assistant professor in management at the Institute of Innovation Research at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, Japan. A recurring theme in my research is how organizations challenge unwritten rules and codes of behavior, often across national borders.

For my doctoral dissertation, I conducted over 100 hours of interviews to explore and explain how foreign subsidiaries of multinational enterprises balance and reconciliate conflicting expectations from corporate headquarters and local stakeholders. In recent research, I complement interviews with natural language processing to analyze large amounts of text such as meeting minutes, social media posts and news articles.

My research and reviewing have received several awards, including the 2020 Grigor McClelland Doctoral Dissertation Award. My dissertation was also a finalist for the Academy of Management International Management Division D'Amore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University Dissertation Award and the ISPIM Innovation Management Dissertation Award.

I do not use social media but am more than open to discuss opportunities for joint research, visiting positions, student supervision, corporate presentations, societal outreach, etc. through E-mail at padron@iir.hit-u.ac.jp.

Research themes, articles and ideas

Institutional management of multinational corporations: How global firms actively challenge and respond to societal pressures in international markets.

• How Should Multinational Firms Navigate Local Rules? With Patrick Regnér. Published online 2024 at Harvard Business Review.

• One MNC, three approaches: differentiated co-evolution in plastic bottle recycling. With Ricardo Azambuja. Final write-up underway.

• A typology of tactics in-between global standardization and local adaptation. With Patrick Regnér. Final write-up underway.

• Covering the moat: non-market defense and mimicry in incumbent strategy. With Masahiro Kotosaka. Data collection underway.

• Institutional capabilities in the gray zone: the international spread of online casinos. Exploratory data collection underway.

• River revisited: two-sided change dynamics in second-try market entry. Ideation underway.

Intra-firm influence of foreign subsidiaries: How subsidiaries within multinational corporations exert influence within the firm to alter organizational outcomes.

• MNE subsidiaries and international strategy. With Patrick Regnér. Revise and resubmit (2nd round) at Q1 Strategy and Management journal.

• Avoidance and involvement: how MNE subsidiaries leverage local institutions to gain influence in international strategy. Revise and resubmit at Q1 Strategy and Management journal.

• Unmotivated senders in knowledge transfer. With Eloïse Germain, Magnus Klofsten, Adis Murtic and Emre Yildiz. Data analysis underway.

Category innovation: How organizations maintain and challenge labels and classifications.

• Antecedents of sustainable menu item introductions in fast food. With Yoshikatsu Shinozawa. Data analysis underway.

• International competitive dynamics in commitment to category-defiant products. With Mariko Nakagawa. Data collection underway.

• Varieties of entomophagy in Japan. With Thomas Calvard and Dawn Chow. Data collection underway.

Logics management: How organizations handle multiple conflicting frameworks of social order.

• Strategic choice before and after national custodianship. With Takahiro Endo. Data collection underway.

• Synarchic authenticity work at copycat competitors. Exploratory data collection underway.

• Differentiated origins in the internationalization of green tea. With Lei Yu. Exploratory data collection underway.

• Purposes of orphan drug development. With Cole Short. Ideation underway.

News discourse of trade agreements: Natural text analysis of Japanese news reporting on the EU-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement. One-off project funded by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation.

• Food matters in the the EU-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement. With Tine Walravens. Accepted for publication in Asia Europe Journal.

• Subnational GDP and media sentiment in trade agreements. Data analysis underway.

Miscellaneous research

Other projects not tied to any broader research agenda.

• Home country influence in cross-border mergers and acquisitions by emerging market firms: A systematic review. With Geer He. Published 2024 in Multinational Business Review [Download here].

• Attachment and adjustment in expatriate reactions to the 2011 Tohoku disasters. Published 2024 in Journal of Asia Business Studies [Download here].

• Examining the generalizability of research findings from archival data. With Andrew Delios, Elena Giulia Clemente, Tao Wu, Hongbin Tan, Yong Wang, Michael Gordon, Domenico Viganola, Zhaowei Chen, Anna Dreber, Magnus Johannesson, Thomas Pfeiffer, and Eric Luis Uhlmann (Part of Generalizability Tests Forecasting Collaboration, listed as author). Published 2022 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.