Regional stickiness of novel ideas in the scholarly international business community

Arjen van Witteloostuijn,Richard Franciscus Johannes Haans

doi:10.1108/ccsm-07-2018-0102

Arjen van Witteloostuijn, Richard Franciscus Johannes Haans

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1108/ccsm-07-2018-0102

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Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the geographic dissemination of work in International Business (IB) by investigating the extent to which research topics tend to see mostly local use – with authors from the same geographic region as the article identified by the topic model as the first article in JIBS building on the topic – vs global use – where topics are used by authors across the world.Design/methodology/approachTopic modeling is applied to all articles published in the Journal of International Business Studies between 1970 and 2015. The identified topics are traced from introduction until the end of the sampling period using negative binomial regression. These analyses are supplemented by comparing patterns over time.FindingsThe analyses show strong path dependency between the geographic origin of topics and their spread across the world. This suggests the existence of geographically narrow mental maps in the field, which the authors find have remained constant in North America, widened yet are still present in East Asia, and disappeared in Europe and other regions of the world over time. These results contribute to the study of globalization in the field of IB, and suggest that neither a true globalization nor North American hegemony has occurred in recent decades.Originality/valueThe application of topic modeling allows investigation of deeper cognitive structures and patterns underpinning the field, as compared to alternative methodologies.

Highlights

The academic world has gone through an impressive internationalization process (Cantwell et al, 2014, 2016; Cantwell and Brannen, 2016)
European scholars do not exhibit such general geographic patterns in their topic usage. Investigating how these tendencies have changed over time, we find evidence of a widening of the mental maps of authors in East Asia, Europe and countries outside the three major regions, but that the regional use of North American research topics is essentially unchanged over time
Topic modeling mental maps of authors and topics in International Business (IB) As we are interested in studying the globalization of mental maps of IB scholars, we focused our sampling and coding efforts on one of the main outlets in the field that has been argued to be representative of ongoing research in the field, as well as being an integrator of IB research: JIBS (Cantwell and Brannen, 2016)

Summary

Introduction

The academic world has gone through an impressive internationalization process (Cantwell et al, 2014, 2016; Cantwell and Brannen, 2016). More and more author teams consist of researchers from different countries, with the field of International Business (IB) leading the forefront in this regard (Cantwell et al, 2016). The IB field has an especially high proportion of scholars with experience in multiple disciplines and countries (Cantwell and Brannen, 2011). The field of IB is a prime candidate to be a leading force in creating an international, global scholarly community. 685) have argued that the field “must continue to expand its geographical horizons and define new frontiers for research.

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