Emerging multinational corporations (EMNCs) depend on their dispersed foreign subsidiaries to search, obtain and utilize overseas resources, and subsidiary resilience hence acts as an important premise for their continuous expansion and international competitive advantage, in which headquarter-subsidiary structure (HQS) plays a critical role. Extant research has not reached a consensus on the relationship between HQS structure and subsidiary resilience. It remains to be addressed on how to choose HQS structure to help subsidiaries cope with the conflicting demands between resource slack and operational flexibility. Therefore, this paper introduces loose coupling theory, utilizes the dialectical attributes of responsiveness and distinctiveness contained in this construct, and tries to provide a solution from a new perspective for the resilience construction of foreign subsidiaries in emerging multinationals. Furthermore, the linking-leveraging-learning (LLL) capability view, which is proposed in the context of emerging economies, is further incorporated into the research framework to reveal the internal and external mechanisms and boundary conditions between HQS structure and foreign subsidiary resilience, providing a systematic explanatory framework for EMNCs to manage globally-dispersed subunits, which has important theoretical guidance and practical significance.
