Insights into the Emerging Business Dynamics of Post-Soviet Central Asia

For the last two years, it has been our constant endeavour to publish cases covering emerging phenomena that are gaining prominence in mainstream management literature. As the complexity in the world increases, theories on intersectionality—‘the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage’ (Lockwood, 2017)—are steadily demanding due attention. Similarly, as both nationalism and globalization continue to interplay, decolonization practises towards ‘cultural, psychological, and economic freedom for Indigenous people with the goal of achieving Indigenous sovereignty’ (Community-Based Global Learning Collaborative, n.d.) take centre stage. In addition, different facets of entrepreneurship, especially in developing economies, continue to surprise as well as excite us. In the editorial board meetings, we often wondered, ‘Could there be regions that could offer case studies at the intersection of intersectionality, decolonization and emerging economies?’ The discovery and exploratory orientation finally landed us in Central Asia, and we sincerely wished to collaborate with the local scholars and institutes to dive deeper into the phenomenon and identify works that would help our journal offer deeper insights into the phenomenon.

We found Central Asia to be a rich mine for Case Study research. As per Wikipedia:

Central Asia, also known as Middle Asia, is a region of Asia that stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to western China and Mongolia in the east, and from Afghanistan and Iran in the south to Russia in the north. It includes the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, [5] which are colloquially referred to as the ‘-stans’ as the countries all have names ending with the Persian suffix ‘-stan’, meaning ‘land of’. (Wikipedia, 2023)

All five of these countries became independent in 1991, during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although the Soviet legacy continues, the concept of nationalism is gaining prominence in some of the Central Asian countries, such as Kazakhstan. Therefore, the region becomes a rich bed to study the formative moments of decolonization practices. With the return of religion to these countries as well as the multi-ethnic nature of each of the countries, there are considerably freer cross-border movements of people and resources within Central Asia. That, coupled with gender issues and voices, allows scholars to look at intersectionality through newer lenses. Moreover, with rich mineral reserves, strong agro-productions and modern industrial infrastructure, as these countries attempt to get connected to the global economy, the entire region becomes fertile ground for entrepreneurship. Collectively, the novel contexts and emerging phenomena led us to expand the geographical scope of the journal to Central Asia, something that is in line with our vision to become a platform for case studies across the globe.

The South Asian Journal of Business and Management Cases received a warm welcome from several leading universities in Central Asia. In 2020, we got the opportunity to be mentors at the Silk Road Case Center of Narxoz University, Kazakhstan. The collaboration gave us the opportunity to have the first foothold in Central Asia. The platform enabled us to promote the merits of case study research as well as the case method of teaching, something that was largely new to the region. By the end of 2001, our effort had started bearing fruits, as several case studies, primarily from Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, were submitted to our journal and eventually published. For example, a case of a family business in Kazakhstan showed how religion influenced the organization of the family business (Amanbayev et al., 2021). Another case study from Kyrgyzstan offered a new process theory on the venturing of a business family into the Crypto currency sector (Kyzy, 2022). Our collaborative effort also resulted in the development of several teaching case studies by Central Asian scholars that got accepted for publication by leading teaching case journals, for example, Polozhentseva et al. (2022), Moreva et al. (2022).

The success of those case studies attracted the attention of many scholars as well as universities in the region. We have started working closely with some of the leading universities, such as Suleyman Demirel University of Kazakhstan and the American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan. In 2022, we received an invitation from the Nazarbayev University Research Centre for Entrepreneurship (nurce.kz) to become a strategic partner for the Centre’s First International Conference. The conference was such a big success that over 50 cases were selected for presentation at the conference. We attended the conference and identified 10 cases that had merit to be part of the journal’s 2023 issue with a focus on Central Asia.

For over a year, we worked closely with the convenors of the journal—Professor Shumaila Yousafzai, Professor Onazomo Akemu, Professor Atanu Rakshit and Professor Anjan Ghosh—all of them are faculty at the Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Business—and helped the authors of the selected case studies. At the end of the rigorous review process, we finally selected five papers for publication in this issue. The paper explores various facets of entrepreneurship in Central Asia at the intersection of intersectionality, decolonization and emerging economies. Below, we present brief accounts of all the papers selected for publication in this special issue.

In Soviet times, religion was banned. The first paper in this issue by Victoria Fomina shows how an individual during Soviet times used modern art to defy institutional surveillance in expressing his religious beliefs. Such an approach helped the person develop capabilities that he leveraged during post-soviet times to develop a museum, something that made the protagonist a leading figure in cultural entrepreneurship in Kazakhstan. This paper combines the theoretical lenses of decolonization and intersectionality to offer a process model of entrepreneurship in the creative industry.

During Soviet Times, disability didn’t receive due attention in the USSR. It was stigmatized. Madina Kenzhegaranova’s work provides the struggle of a blind female individual who is a single mother of three children. The paper tracks the journey of the central character, who eventually transforms herself from a blind dancer to a cultural entrepreneur. The paper leverages the theories of intersectionality to offer a new process model for the creation and management of a cultural enterprise by a female entrepreneur with a disability.

The next case of this issue, by Nurlykhan Aljanova, Emina Yessekeyeva and Yerkinay Ernst, tried to find the origin of a unique theatre company of Kazakhstan, the Bunker Theatre. The authors tried to understand the origin of such an entrepreneurial concept. The work offers interesting findings: theatre helped the entrepreneur in her childhood to recover from a temporal disability; theatre was something that took her from darkness to light. Her theatre in a Second World War bunker in Almaty, Kazakhstan exposes the darker parts of society through the theatre, making the audience think about it and probably engage in societal reform or rehab. The process model offered in this case study offers childhood shocks as imprints on cultural entrepreneurship.

A case study on Dodo Pizza is a rare case that deploys the Eisenhardt method of comparative case study (Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007). Anchored into the theories on small and medium enterprise (SME) internationalization, the authors compared the performance of Dodo Pizza, a Russian SME, in different countries. Leveraging the concept of ‘distance’ (Ambos & Håkanson, 2014), the authors Alima Buganova, Diptiman Banerji, and Svetlana Buganova propose a 2×2 matrix of distances and map the appropriate SME strategic within.

The disbalance in economic conditions among the Central Asian Countries, combined with other geopolitical reasons, led to voluntary and involuntary migrations. The migrants become marginalized by the host country. The work of Bermet Talasbek kyzy, Talant Asan uulu and Urmat Ryskulov put light on this form of intersectionality and analyzed the struggle of an involuntary migrant in Kyrgyzstan who becomes a successful entrepreneur.

The next case is not from Central Asia; however, it adds value to the literature on SMEs. Under the theoretical foundations of dynamic capabilities, Shahid Latif, Safrul Izani Mohd Salleh, Mazuri Abd. Ghani and Bilal Ahmad investigate the change process in developing management accounting systems to ensure economic sustainability. A single case study design is utilised to investigate the process at a sportswear manufacturing SME in Sialkot, Pakistan.

The last study in this issue comes from Europe, where Henri Teittinen, Jukka Pellinen, and Marko Järvenpää explore the perceptions of a management control system (MCS) in the context of post- acquisition integration using sensemaking and interpretive case study methodology. Business unit managers’ attitudes towards the corporate MCS were explained by sense-making qualities like identity danger and retrospection. Prior production-focused line manager posts in small entrepreneurial enterprises seem to generate coercive MCS perceptions.