International Business Studies Research Articles

The Liminal Space for Intercultural Learning: an Empirical Study among Undergraduate International Business Students

The field of Intercultural Communication has attracted attention of specialists from various disciplines, including such distant fields of research as linguistics and international business studies. Most authors, however, focus on the scope of knowledge and skills in terms of learning objectives. Students’ own perspectives and various conceptions they construct with ascribed meanings, as well as the “architecture” of their learning process remain under-researched. This study provides an example of a replicable analysis of the Intercultural Communication learning process, based on subjects’ perspectives. Most participants of this study are first- and second-generation immigrants. Serious issues present in a multicultural setting based on the perception of the “Other” emerged, with implications for communication, collaboration and potential conflict. Two main transformation patterns were identified in the intercultural learning process, conditioned by mono- and multiculturalism. This study reveals a range within the self-conception transition framework, as well as the deep ontological aspect of the phenomenon. The findings extrapolated into a wider context should contribute to a more conflict-free environment in multicultural societies in general. The phenomenographic approach, variation theory and the threshold concept were applied to explore the semantics, the syntax of the learning process and the critical aspects of the transformative learning experience. * This research was supported by the Institute for Environmental Sustainability, Mount Royal University (No. 2013–49a). Initial design was inspired and partly supported through collaboration with The Institute for Teaching and Learning at Mount Royal University. There has been no public presentation, nor publication of any part of this analysis. This is not part of a thesis or dissertation.

New institutional economics: contributions to international business studies

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the main contributions of the new institutional economics to the international business (IB) arena. It also intends to show how the NIE is being incorporated to both eclectic paradigm and Uppsala school’s view, and how it is modifying them. Design/methodology/approach A range of IB articles, which contained an institutional view and also discussed the eclectic paradigm or the Uppsala school, provides the background to build a framework. Findings This paper proposes a framework showing the impact of the institutional variables on the internationalization of firms, by addressing both the OLI paradigm and Uppsala school. It also concludes that the institutional theory has been a point of intersection between the OLI paradigm and Uppsala school, since both have been renewed to understand the transaction costs borne by the firms in their international learning process and in the search for less asymmetrical information. Research limitations/implications This paper provided a brief discussion about the institutional components. Practical implications This study is a useful source of information for those who want to discuss the institutional impact in the IB arena and emerging markets. Originality/value This paper summarizes how the OLI paradigm and Uppsala school encompassed the institutional variables. It also presents a framework that allows new study possibilities since the understanding of the influence of institutional variables on the international movements of firms is still cloudy.

Free Trade and Prosperity-How Openness Helps Developing Countries Grow Richer and Combat Poverty by Arvind Panagariya. London:Oxford University Press, 2019

The book free trade and prosperity written by Arvind panagariya summarizes the background and development of International business in the emerging economies of Asia, South America and Africa, the book examines the free trade policies of these developing economies and identifies the macro economic reforms undertaken by them to become global nations, the book focuses to gather the implications of outward orientation policies adopted by such economies for national growth and prosperity, the author claims this as a big literature gap in the international business studies not undertaken so far, a full throated and focused defense of trade openness as applied in the developing countries has not been attempted to be studied before that this book aims to.

Influence of transportation infrastructure on the relationship between institutions and economic performance

Purpose This study aims to analyse the observation that the economics of many countries have boomed after the input of substantial investments into physical and social infrastructures. Design/methodology/approach A structural equation model is formulated to examine the effect of transportation infrastructure on the relationship between institutions and gross domestic product per capita (GDPPC). This study further differentiates between developed and developing economies. Findings The study identifies the different roles of transportation infrastructure in mediating the relationship between institutions and average income in these two types of economy. Institutions and transportation infrastructure positively influence GDPPC, whereas institutions positively influence transportation infrastructure. In addition, the results found indirect influence of institutions on GDPPC via transportation infrastructure. Originality/value This study provides new insights into international business studies based on institutional theory and factor-mobility theory.

A critical examination of the social impacts of large multinational corporations in the age of globalization

PurposeThis paper aims to offer a critical examination of the social impacts of large multinational corporations (MNCs) in the age of globalization.Design/methodology/approachThe study adopts a multidisciplinary approach and relies on various scholarly resources in several disciplines including international business, international economics, sociology and international relations. The analysis is organized around eight major areas and constituencies of MNCs including the global scene, workers, competitors, entrepreneurs, government and tax payers, social justice, nations/states and natural environment.FindingsGiant MNCs have benefited from favorable conditions in the past three decades and currently dominate the global scene. In general, the rising corporate profits come not to the benefit, but to the detriment of workers. Large MNCs benefit from their immense resources to develop sophisticated competitive advantages against smaller rivals. They impede small entrepreneurs from scaling up their operations and increasing their market shares. Furthermore, large MNCs often take advantage of their power to shape national and international policies in ways that enable them to enhance their profitability. Overall, large MNCs aggravate the rising economic inequality in different ways, thus contributing to social and financial instability. Furthermore, large MNCs erode state sovereignty and enormously contribute to environmental degradation.Originality/valueWhile most international business studies focus on the concept of corporate social responsibility or sustainable development, the originality of this paper resides in adopting an alternative perspective and offering a multidisciplinary and critical examination of the social impacts of large MNCs.

Twenty-five years (1992–2016) of the International Business Review: A bibliometric overview

The International Business Review (IBR) is a leading international academic journal in the field of International Business (IB). Such leadership is reflected in the large number of publications that grow year after year and particularly in the large number of citations received from other journals of high academic prestige. The aim of this study is to conduct a bibliometric overview of the leading trends regarding the journal’s publications and citations since its creation in 1992 until 2016. The work identifies the authors, universities, and countries that publish the most in IBR by mainly using the Scopus database though eventually complemented with Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection. It also analyzes the most cited papers and articles of the journal. Besides, the study graphically maps the bibliographic material by using the visualization of similarities (VOS) viewer software. In order to do so, the work uses co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, and co-occurrence of author keywords. The results show the prominent European profile of the journal where contributors from European universities and countries are the most productive ones in the journal. Particularly, British and Scandinavian universities obtain the most remarkable results. However, mostly scholars from North America, but also from Oceania and East Asia are increasingly and regularly publishing in the journal. In addition, IBR is very well connected to other leading journals in the field, such as the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS) and the Journal of World Business (JWB), as well as with other top management journals, thus demonstrating its core position in IB research conducted worldwide.

Family CEO and board service: Turning the tide for export scope in family SMEs

Adopting the socioemotional wealth perspective, we argue that the presence of a family CEO in family SMEs negatively affects export scope, but that such negative effect is mitigated by board service. We develop and test a model that considers the synergistic combination of family management and another important aspect of family governance in the context of family firm internationalization: the service behavior of the board of directors. The empirical evidence from a sample of 248 Belgian family SMEs shows that governance is crucial to overcoming the problems of family management: family CEOs may negatively influence export scope, but board service is able to turn the tide so that the family CEO effect becomes positive. With such novel findings, we contribute to international business and family business studies

Regional stickiness of novel ideas in the scholarly international business community

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.

Letter from the Editors: Special Issue on Latin America

This special issue of AIB Insights focuses on international business in Latin America. The issue includes “Multilatinas and International Business Studies” by Alvaro Cuervo-Cazurra; “Innovation in Emerging Markets: The Case of Latin America” by Lourdes Casanova, Fernanda Cahen, Anne Miroux, Diego Finchelstein, Anabella Davila, Juana García, Veneta Andonova, Moacir Miranda de Oliveira Jr.; “Corporate Governance in Latin America: Towards Shareholder Democracy” by Ruth V. Aguilera, Rafel Crespí-Cladera, Luiz Ricardo Kabbach de Castro; “The Dominance of Pyramidal Business Groups in Latin America Persists” by Susan Perkins; and “The Importance of Institutional Knowledge for Expats Working in Latin America” by Daniel Friel.

The impact of multidimensional country distances on consumption of specialty products: A case study of inbound tourists to Japan

This study adapts and extends the cultural, administrative, geographic, and economic distance framework. The framework was proposed in the field of international business studies to examine the effect of distances between home and host countries on tourist preference for specialty products. We proposed four hypotheses based on segmentation and distance studies and conducted an empirical analysis of a questionnaire survey of 4474 foreign tourists from 49 different countries and regions visiting Japan. The results suggest that the four dimensions of distance have different impacts on the purchasing behavior of tourists. Moreover, the quadratic model results further suggest the existence of an optimal point of distance. In the discussion, we proposed effective segmentation strategies to increase inbound tourism.

Video Case Studies in IB Teaching: An Empirical Comparison of Academic and Student Perceptions and Expectations

ABSTRACTThe use of film material has a long tradition in management education and calls for dedicated video case studies date back more than 30 years. Against this backdrop and an incoming student generation that has grown up with digital technology, we assess the current use of stand-alone video case studies in international business (IB) teaching. Using survey data from IB scholars and students, we examine the usefulness of video case studies, the main barriers for and the (un)exploited potential of video case studies. While we find relatively modest use of video case studies in IB teaching to date, we also find strong interest by lecturers and students to expand their use. In particular, there seems to be a student preference and need for real-life, manager-led, and problem-solving video cases.

Proactive government intervention, board gender balance, and stakeholder engagement in China and Europe

This study assesses the management quality and corporate social performance of firms supervised according to three distinctly different governance regimes. The differences relate to protocols and interventions on board gender balance. Sweden and Norway serve as our strongly gender-inclusive (SGI) benchmarks, with the UK and China as our respective moderately (MGI) and weakly gender-inclusive (WGI) domains. Our evidence shows that corporate social performance ratings have risen appreciably between 2010 and 2015 in each of China, the UK, Sweden and Norway. Moreover, corporate social responsibility (CSR) ratings in Sweden, Norway and the UK appear broadly comparable. In extending Ahern and Dittmar’s (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 127, 137–197, 2012) evidence of a quota’s initial deleterious effect on managerial quality, we observe improvement in Norwegian firms’ directors’ educational profiles as quotas become more entrenched. Average director age (experience) also rose in such firms over the study period. Our results suggest some degree of adaptation in the application of board quotas. Additionally, variation in female board participation exerts minimal (strong) influence on CSR ratings for SGI- (MGI- & WGI-) domain entities. Findings on this issue for China and the UK strongly support a critical mass theory (CMT; Konrad, Kramer, & Erkut, Organizational Dynamics, 37(2), 145–164, 2008) conception of corporate social-engagement. Finally, results reveal a non-uniform relation between corporate social and financial returns. Overall, we add new context to institutional theory narratives on stakeholder-engagement (Campbell, Academy of Management Review, 32(3), 946–967, 2007; Young & Makhija, Journal of International Business Studies, 45, 670–698, 2014).

Identifying the ‘knowledge base’ or ‘intellectual structure’ of research on international business, 2000–2015: A citation/co-citation analysis of JIBS

The purpose of this study consists in analyzing the existing literature on international business from all the research papers published in Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS) during the period of time comprised between 2000 and 2015. The authors apply bibliometric methods to that end –in particular, document citation and co-citation analyses (DCAs)– so that they can try and identify the main research lines within the aforementioned scientific field or domain; in other words, the ‘intellectual structure’ of the discipline examined. Social networks analysis was also used to carry out the representation or visualization of such structure or knowledge base. The highly interdisciplinary nature of the research undertaken, since the study field still keeps its characteristic diversity and interdisciplinarity or the need to integrate a variety of theoretical frameworks or approaches into the development of a widely-accepted theory about the field under study become evident. Amongst these theories would be the new institutional theory, the strategic theory or perspective or others such as the transaction cost theory or the agency theory, applied to the context of internationalization and to the field of international business, on whose integration the future development of this field may largely depend.

Twenty-five years of business systems research and lessons for international business studies

Since 1992, the national business systems (NBS) approach has been increasingly used to analyse not only firm characteristics, structures and strategies within NBS, but also the nature of international business and its interactions with both national and transnational institutions. In reviewing 25 years of NBS literature, we heed calls in IB journals urging researchers to use NBS notions and findings in IB research. Our systematic review of 96 articles analyses the patterns and contributions of NBS literature, revealing four thematic junctures: (1) comparative business systems, (2) firm internationalisation and the management/organisation inside MNCs, (3) the role of internationalisation in the development of organisational capabilities and innovation and (4) the emergence of transnational communities in and across firms and societies. Themes are described in terms of (a) the research questions (RQ) they focus on, (b) how NBS approach investigates the RQ and what are the major findings, (c) how IB frames and approaches the same RQ, (d) how does the NBS approach extend the perspectives of IB and (e) what are the problems faced by NBS in terms of developing further insights into the RQ. Our review contributes to the recent endeavour of IB research to institutionalism, encouraging a productive dialogue between IB and NBS research.

Location strategy in cluster networks

This article investigates the location strategies of Canadian and Chinese multisite firms in international and domestic investment decisions at the metropolitan level. By integrating research from international business studies and economic geography, we combine knowledge-based understandings of multinational corporations and industrial clusters to develop propositions regarding the location strategies of multisite firms in cluster networks. It is argued that firms from clusters are more likely to adopt knowledge strategies than firms from other areas and that they tend to choose cluster locations that are specialized in the same or similar industries to achieve their knowledge goals – both in domestic and international investment decisions. We establish and analyze a database of 3500 investment cases within and between Canada and China to test our propositions. The results show that firms in knowledge-intensive industrial environments with substantial business experience are especially inclined to direct their investments to clusters. Consistent with our emphasis of the subnational as opposed to the national scale, we find that cluster-of-origin effects are more important than country-of-origin effects in explaining firms’ investment choices in clusters. These findings support the idea that multisite firms, particularly MNEs, leverage local knowledge pools by strategically locating affiliates across clusters.

Third-Country Partnering: A New Syndication Strategy in Cross-Border Venture Capital Investments

The international business studies have broadly recognized that partnering with local firms will help offset liability of foreignness. However, high environmental uncertainty increases the difficulty of partnering with local VCs and thus decreases the likelihood of such partnership. To deal with the constraint and pursue business opportunities in such environment, we suggest that foreign firms may partner with firms from a third country which shares shorter institutional distance than the host country. These partners not only render lower partner-level uncertainty than local partners, but also since they usually have rich host country experience they may play similar or even better roles as local partners. Using the data of foreign venture capital firms investing in China during 1997-2008, we find support for the proposition. This study contributes to the literature on using partnering to manage uncertainty in the environment by suggesting that when facing environmental uncertainty (in this study province-level legal uncertainty in China) foreigners may collaborate with certain firms with lower partner-level uncertainty.

A review of the internationalization of Chinese enterprises

This article reviews the scholarly research on the internationalization of Chinese enterprises (ICE) through bibliometric citation analysis. We do so through a data visualization technique and analysis of 206 articles which are authored by 382 scholars in 72 different journals published between 2003 and 2016. The results reveal four research streams in the context of ICE: (1) testing traditional FDI theory, (2) location choice, (3) entry mode choice, and (4) drivers and motivations of internationalization. While international business (IB) journals, such as the Journal of World Business, the Journal of International Business Studies, and International Business Review, have taken a lead role in pushing the ICE literature stream forward, geographically focused general management journals, such as the Asia Pacific Journal of Management and Management & Organization Review, have also made a singular contribution. The impact of perspective, in terms of author and institution affiliation, on the literature set is also examined. Finally, issues related to data, methodological rigor and theoretical underpinnings are highlighted. To advance the ICE literature, we proposed a holistic framework of drivers and motivations of Chinese outward FDI and present some promising future research areas.

The selection, use, and reporting of control variables in international business research: A review and recommendations

This study explores the selection, use, and reporting of control variables in studies published in the leading international business (IB) research journals. We review a sample of 246 empirical studies published in the top five IB journals over the period 2012–2015 with particular emphasis on selection, use, and reporting of controls. Approximately 83% of studies included only half of what we consider Minimum Standard of Practice with regards to controls, whereas only 38% of the studies met the 75% threshold. We provide recommendations on how to effectively identify, use and report controls in IB studies.

Corporate governance of a multinational enterprise: Firm, industry and institutional perspectives

We introduce the topic of this Special Issue of the Journal of Corporate Finance on corporate governance of a multinational enterprise with a particular emphasis on the theoretical and empirical gaps in prior finance and international business studies associated with corporate governance problems and the effectiveness of governance solutions in the context of diverse institutional settings. We integrate analysis of the accepted articles with existing research on international corporate governance and global strategy. Overall, the work in this area continues to emphasize the importance of institutions, legal environment and culture in all aspects of global enterprises. We conclude the article with suggestions for future research in this rapidly expanding and important area of global business.

International Expansion of SMEs: The Inducascos Case

ABSTRACTWhile small and medium enterprises contribute to gross domestic product, generate crucial employment, and improve socio-economic development, unfortunately the literature on the internationalization processes of these companies remains timid and inconsistent. The following study seeks to analyze the international expansion of the Colombian company Inducascos. The research follows the structure of a case study including literature analysis and secondary data of the Colombian industrial market and Inducascos. Challenges, opportunities and learning process of the organization related to its international expansion and set out, seeking to contribute to the existing studies in international business.