Reframing Ideological Misalignment in the Multinational Enterprise: A Configurational Theory for a Polarized World

Political ideology has become a consequential force in international business. The dominant treatment positions ideological misalignment between firm and host country as a legitimacy deficit that multinationals should minimize. Documented cases in which multinationals sustain misalignment and accrue strategic returns from it cannot be accommodated within this framing. We argue that the field's variable-centered apparatus, which examines ideology as a unidimensional attribute of executives or institutions, cannot represent the conjunctural conditions under which misalignment operates as a resource rather than as a liability. We develop a configurational theory of multinational political ideology in which three conditions, namely internal ideological coherence, external ideological alignment, and ideological commitment strength, combine into four ideal-type configurations. The signature configuration, ideological missionary, specifies when sustained misalignment produces firm-specific competitive advantage through credible identity signalling to aligned constituencies. A recursive configurational dynamic specifies how multinationals and host-country ideological environments co-evolve over time. The framework reframes how international business scholarship treats ideological misalignment in a polarized world.