About ManGeo Research | CFP

The Management Geography (ManGeo) Research Group is an international and multidisciplinary network founded in 2007 as the Spaces of International Economy and Management Research Group (国際経済経営地理学研究グループ). Since then, the group has regularly organized sessions and research meetings within the Association of Japanese Geographers (AJG).

Our research seeks to understand the changing spaces of global business in an increasingly interconnected and knowledge-based economy. Through journal articles, books, working papers, conferences, and international research collaborations, the group has contributed to establishing Management Geography as an emerging field at the intersection of economic geography (EG), international business (IB), and management studies.

Management Geography examines how managerial decisions and practices shape—and are shaped by—economic, social, institutional, and cognitive spaces. It investigates multi-scalar configurations ranging from workplaces and organizations to cities, regions, global production networks, and transnational institutional environments. Particular attention is given to how spatial concentration, interaction, perception, and embeddedness influence corporate performance and regional development.

A central concern is the role of managerial action modes, including compliance, commitment, intervention, and leadership, as well as the organizational and regional nodes through which managerial action is enacted. These action modes help explain how managers interpret local conditions, mobilize resources, bridge institutional boundaries, and contribute to organizational and regional change.

The group also develops the concept of Corporate Spatial Responsibility (CSpR). CSpR extends conventional corporate social responsibility by examining how firms assume responsibility for the places, communities, networks, and institutional environments in which they operate. This perspective helps reveal how managerial agency can strengthen local embeddedness, organizational and regional resilience, sustainable development, and innovation.

Management Geography further highlights several topics traditionally associated with international business that deserve greater consideration in economic geography. These include interculturality, boundary-spanning leadership, knowledge transfer, hybridization, trust-building, and synergy creation within culturally diverse organizations and business environments. Such processes are essential for understanding how multinational enterprises adapt to particular places while simultaneously transforming them.

ManGeo members have developed methodologies such as the Preference, Interaction and Performance (PIP) model to examine the socioeconomic and cognitive-spatial behaviour of managerial actors. We welcome the development of further qualitative, quantitative, comparative, and mixed-method approaches that connect managerial practices with their geographical contexts.

The ManGeo Research Group invites scholars and practitioners to collaborate with us in the following areas:

• Theorizing managerial practices in geographical space, including leadership, international human resource management, intercultural management and communication, corporate governance, CSR and CSpR, communities of practice, innovation, manufacturing and service transformation, global production networks, and managerial action modes.

• Developing new methodologies for investigating managerial mobility, spatial preferences, interactions, networks, decision-making, and organizational practices across private, public, and hybrid organizations.

• Providing empirical evidence on knowledge transfer, managerial embeddedness, resilience, innovation, sustainable IHRM, intercultural synergy creation, strategic coupling, and the localization and globalization of managerial practices.

• Examining how firms shape places, particularly through their relationships with regional institutions, communities, suppliers, employees, and other stakeholders.

• Developing practical and policy implications for strengthening international social capital, regional resilience, responsible corporate behaviour, and sustainable development in Asia, Europe, and Green Economy also in other parts of the world.

By connecting managerial agency with spatial and institutional contexts, ManGeo seeks to strengthen dialogue between economic geography and international business—and to make greater space for management within geographical research.

We look forward to receiving contributions that help advance Management Geography and make place and space more visible in management research.

ManGeo Working Paper Series – ISSN 2436-3855

Learn more about our publications with ManGeo Working Paper Series and submit your working paper here.