Revisiting the concepts of liability of foreignness and liability of outsidership from foreign subsidiary management perspective

Abstract

The concepts of liability of foreignness and liability of outsidership have been central in international business research. The Uppsala model explains that firms often face obstacles and opportunities in management practices in a host market when internationalizing abroad. International business scholars discussed these concepts redundantly but vaguely in the literature. Only a few literature sources defined and utilized the concepts clearly over the last decade, however, it has not been demonstrated how the key constructs help to explain firms’ foreign subsidiary management. Therefore, the study reconsiders the concepts and identifies a proper utilization of the concepts in the texts drawing on an intensive systematic literature review in the leading international business and strategy journals from 2011 to 2021. The study also analyzes the articles in which the authors find ambiguous and overlapping use of the concepts by clarifying key constructs as identifiers. The study integrates defensive and offensive options for overcoming liability of foreignness and liability of outsidership into our conceptual model of operational structures from the foreign subsidiary management perspectives. The study contributes by providing a novel intensive literature review of the concepts over the last decade; by clarifying the key identifiers to distinguish the concepts in the leading international business and strategy journals; by proposing newly integrated conceptual models of defensive and offensive options from foreign subsidiary management perspectives with the focus on intra-organizational structures for operational aspects.