Geopolitics as a Silent Stakeholder in SME Coordination
Course Essay at Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology LUT - A350AJ700 Sustainability and Impact in Business Research
Assignment: Reflection paper 3/5 — How does my research connect to different geopolitical regimes? Is business research free from global power politics?
In this assignment, I’m drawing explicitly on Mearsheimer (2019) and Belhoste & Dimitrova (2024), and I’m also using the course video as a live “regime logic in action” lens (Centre for Independent Studies, 2026).
To answer the question, I start in the field: During a bank meeting, a high-performing SME is rejected for growth capital because the bank can’t “read” the firm's real risk-prevention engine. I frame this as a measurement blind spot: applied economics models outcomes, but rarely instruments the invisible infrastructure that produces them, the enacted agreement layer that governs how work gets done, and how value flows across ecosystems. My unit of analysis is SMEs embedded in stakeholder ecosystems, and my core claim is practical: fragility appears first as “agreement debt”. That is where geopolitical regimes matter.
If Mearsheimer is right that the international system is increasingly organized around bounded orders where security trumps economics, then the “external environment” is not a neutral backdrop for SME coordination. It becomes an active constraint on what agreements are feasible, which dependencies are allowed, what counts as compliance, and which risks are tolerated or amplified. In that world, my focus on agreement infrastructures connects directly to regime logics because agreements are the micro-mechanisms through which macro constraints hit the shop floor: which suppliers can be used, which data can cross borders, which technologies are permissible, which clients become politically sensitive, and how quickly an SME can reconfigure when rules change.
Belhoste & Dimitrova push the same connection from a different angle: firms are not merely economic agents responding to markets; they are political actors entangled in representations of space, techno-nationalism, standards wars, and contested legitimacy. The practical implication for my research is that “legibility” is not only a technical problem (better metrics for better lending). It is also political: what becomes legible to banks, regulators, and partners can be shaped by regime priorities, sometimes rewarding alignment more than operational resilience. Belhoste & Dimitrova make this vivid: an SME with excellent internal coordination can still be collateral damage when chokepoints are weaponized; conversely, a strategically sound but internally fragile firm may still receive financing and protection.
This leads to the assignment’s second question: Is business research free from global power politics? My answer is no! Not if the research aims to travel into real decision contexts. Even when I am “just” measuring agreement quality, I am operationalizing concepts (e.g., transparency, negotiability, accountability, learning loops) that can carry implicit assumptions about enforceability, rule-of-law stability, and who is allowed to challenge whom. My own spine explicitly tries to avoid reducing “culture” to opinion by using agreement footprints, observable residues of enacted agreements, and an integrity measure (E³: Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day) to quantify the gap between claims and lived practice. But regime context shapes what can be enacted “everywhere, every day,” and what should be visible versus intentionally compartmentalized. So the most defensible positioning is not “my research is politically neutral,” but: my research is a disciplined way to detect early coordination risk (before financial events) by triangulating signals into evidence through my methodology (signal → multi-role coverage → trace checks → footprint patterns → working explanation → conservative translation into risk/performance language).
What is not neutral are the boundary conditions and the uptake: which agreement patterns are feasible, which are rewarded, and which are punished, depends on geopolitical regimes. In a bounded-order world, agreement infrastructures become more important, not less, because SMEs can’t control geopolitics but can control how quickly they sense disruption, renegotiate commitments, re-route dependencies, and prevent internal coordination collapse. The research contribution, then, is to make that invisible infrastructure measurable, while explicitly treating the geopolitical regime as a silent stakeholder at the table, shaping what “anti-fragility” and “regenerative capacity” can realistically mean.
References
Belhoste, N., & Dimitrova, A. (2024). Developing critical geopolitical awareness in management education. Management Learning, 55(4), 617–640. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505076231185970
Centre for Independent Studies. (2026). Has China won? John Mearsheimer & Kishore Mahbubani [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/rcWPk8271OE
Mearsheimer, J. J. (2019). Bound to fail: The rise and fall of the liberal international order. International Security, 43(4), 7–50. https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00342
