Abstract
A firm’s international operations are often failure-prone. It is not unusual for a firm to reduce or reorganize its international operations, for example by exiting foreign markets. The dominant view on international market exit (IME) sees it as an isolated event, rather than as an inherent part of the firm’s international strategy, and is dominated by a headquarters-centric perspective, ignoring the MNE’s subsidiaries, often even relegating them to mere bystanders. Based on a qualitative meta-analysis of 29 case studies of international market exits, we propose four common IME-process models: ‘Local Struggle’, ‘Lonely Drift’, ‘Engaged Interference’, and ‘Programmed Decline’, which can be categorized along the two dimensions of ‘Strategic Response’, and ‘Locus of control’. Our study makes two main contribution to the literature. First, we offer a process view of IME, differentiating the current unitary IME conceptualization of IME along four different IME-process types. Second, we identify and further substantiate the role of the subsidiary in IME.
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