Reconceptualizing international strategy and organization

Abstract

Relatively little gets written about international strategy.1 According to one survey, 6 percent of the articles published in the top 20 academic management journals in 1996–2000 had specifically international content and, of that subset, 6 percent focused on the strategies and policies of multinationals (MNCs). The author of the survey concluded that: ‘Other than strategic alliances and entry mode strategies there is very little research on MNC strategies’ (Werner, 2002). An attempt to update the study for the period 2002–6 leads to broadly similar conclusions: just 5 percent of the articles published in the top 20 journals had specifically international content. MNCs’ strategies and policies accounted for a little more of that subset than before (12 percent), but continued to trail research on international joint ventures and alliances (15 percent) and on internationalization (14 percent) (or more specifically, measurements, antecedents and consequences thereof) and was closely followed by research on timing, motivation, location and consequences of foreign direct investment, and on knowledge transfer, with 11 percent apiece (Pisani, 2007). Such classifications, while subjective, do suggest a dearth of research on issues related to international strategy. To some extent, this dearth may reflect the lack of data that would facilitate large-sample analysis of strategic hypotheses: the last major data collection effort, Raymond Vernon’s Multinational Enterprise Project at Harvard Business School, was concluded 30 years ago.2 Remedying this constraint is complicated by the differences that arise at national borders, and that impede not only crossborder economic activity but also the assembly of data to better understand cross-border issues, as discussed further in the concluding section of this essay. International strategy has also experienced some indirect pressure from the surge of research on culture, starting in the 1980s and driven by the work of Hofstede (Ferreira et al., 2002). However, perhaps the most direct efforts at displacement have been those made by scholars broadly interested in international organization and management. Consider the most prominent book in this vein, Bartlett and Ghoshal’s Managing across Borders (1989), based on a study of nine MNCs in three industries/sectors: STRATEGIC ORGANIZATION Vol 6(2): 195–206 DOI: 10.1177/1476127008090010 Copyright ©2008 Sage Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) http://so.sagepub.com