Journal Of International Business Studies Research Articles

Paradigms in Qualitative IB Research: Trends, Analysis and Recommendations

This paper examines trends, challenges and opportunities in terms of research methodologies in qualitative IB research. In particular, it examines trends for the dominant (positivism/(post)positivism) paradigm versus alternative paradigms (i.e., social constructivism, critical realism and interpretivism) and provides a comparative analysis of data collection and methods. Using mixed methods to collect and analyze data on qualitative articles published in International Business Review, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of World Business, and Management International Review, we examine trends and differences between the dominant and alternative paradigms and use qualitative content analysis to investigate how alternative paradigm papers are conceptualized and presented. Moreover, we interview authors of non-positivist papers to gain in-depth understanding of the findings. We reveal differences across the paradigms and provide evidence of paradigmatic fit between methods and data collection techniques for the dominant paradigm, but more variation for alternative paradigms. Lastly, we provide prescriptions for IB scholars in terms of methodology diversity and how complex IB phenomena can be pursued vis-a-vis alternative paradigms.

Institutional theory and multinational corporation internationalization strategy: a systematic review and future research agenda

PurposeThis study reviews the literature on institutional theory in international business and examines the institutional factors behind the success or failure of multinational corporations (MNCs) in emerging markets.Design/methodology/approachThis systematic literature review analysed 116 peer-reviewed articles published in leading journals between 2005 and 2022. The R package Bibliometrix and VOSviewer visualization software were used for analysis. A hybrid methodology combining bibliometric and content analyses was utilized to obtain a descriptive evaluation of the publication impact along with a keyword co-occurrence map, context-specific institutional effects and subsidiary strategies.FindingsThe Journal of International Business Studies, along with influential authors such as Mike W. Peng, Klaus Meyer, and Mehmet Demirbag, have taken the lead in advancing institutional theories for MNC internationalization in emerging markets. The clusters from the co-word analysis revealed dominant MNC entry modes, institutional distances and MNC localization strategies. The content analysis highlights how the institutional environment is operationalized across the macro-, micro- and meso-institutional contexts and how the MNC subsidiary responds in emerging markets. Meso-level interactions emphasize the relational aspects of business strategies in emerging markets.Practical implicationsContextualizing subsidiary strategies and institutional forms can help managers align their strategic responses to the dynamic relationship between subsidiaries and the institutional environment. The review findings will enable policymakers to simplify regulatory policies and encourage MNC subsidiary networks with local stakeholders in emerging markets.Social implicationsLegitimacy strategies such as corporate community involvement in emerging markets are crucial for enhancing societal support and removing stakeholders' scepticism for MNC business operations in emerging markets. Moral legitimacy should be implemented by managers, such as lending support to disaster management efforts and humanitarian crises, as they expand to new business environments of emerging markets.Originality/valueThis study is the first to explore institutional diversity and subsidiary strategic responses in a three-layered institutional context. The findings highlight the relevance of contextualizing institutional perspectives for international business scholars and practitioners as they help build context-specific theoretical frameworks and business strategies. Future research recommendations are suggested in the macro-, micro- and meso-institutional contexts.

A Scientometric Analysis of the Social Network Theory on Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs)

Social network theory has been propounded as an important resource base for entrepreneurship and serves as an underlying force for the development of entrepreneur behaviour. However, there is a lack of scientific research that uses CiteSpace to explore the relationship between the social network theory and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The purpose of this study was to gather literature-based information to assess the current status and development trends in social network theory and SME research. A scientometric analysis was undertaken by focusing on published literature, authors, affiliations, and collaborative networks among countries. Additionally, a co-citation dataset was examined, encompassing authorship, articles, and keywords. The results found a total of 441 related studies from 1994 to 2022. Notably, Shu C. L. and Zhao L. emerged as the most influential authors while the Journal of International Business Studies was the most influential journal. Key clusters associated with network star

Going complex or going easy? The impact of research questions on citations

The growing need for academic impact requires researchers to develop and address important ideas. In this paper, we analyze how theory has been framed and operationalized within international business scholarship, which has a long tradition of producing research that accounts jointly for multiple research contexts and levels of analysis. We focus on two key aspects of published articles: the complexity of their research questions and how the research questions are translated into testable hypotheses. We further assess how the complexity and operationalization of research questions have been received by business/management, interdisciplinary, and practice-oriented research audiences. To achieve this, we examine a sample of 423 quantitative articles published in the Journal of International Business Studies between 2005 and 2015, and consider the articles’ citations during 2010–2020. Our paper provides suggestions about how authors might better frame research questions that are both important and impactful.

Introduction to the Virtual Special Issue: Strategy Science’s Contributions to Doctoral Reading Lists

Introduction to the Virtual Special Issue: <i>Strategy Science</i>’s Contributions to Doctoral Reading Lists

Four Decades of Challenges by Culture to Mainstream Psychology: Finding Ways Forward

Over 5 days at the Nag’s Head Conference Center, USA in 1987, social and cross-cultural psychologists discussed what would be required if research relating to culture were to gain greater attention from psychology in general, and in particular from what was perceived at the time as its mainstream. The criteria for gaining greater credibility laid down by three leading social psychologists proved daunting in relation to the cross-cultural work presented at the meeting but subsequently inspired cross-culturalists to “raise their game.” In this paper, we describe these crucial challenges and how they have been addressed more recently by cross-cultural psychologists. We assess the extent to which studies focused on cultural differences are now thoughtfully represented in social, personality, and organizational psychology by briefly surveying the content of a single year’s issues of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of International Business Studies, and the Journal of Personality in relation to the concurrent content of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. We identify the perils of assimilation to psychology in general by diluting the concept of culture and by tyrannizing research with over-specified criteria of statistical rectitude. We also identify studies published in top-rated journals that have nonetheless advanced our field. We reiterate the need for defensible measures of cultural difference and methods for identifying and examining them as a basis for multi-level explanations of cultural effects and cultural change. We conclude by proposing a gold standard for assaying cross-cultural studies of psychological processes and outcomes.

Time in Qualitative International Business Research (WITHDRAWN)

Qualitative research play an important role for theory building, and so does time. In fact, time is central for understanding many International Business (IB) related phenomena. In spite of this methodological understanding on the role of time in theorizing for qualitative research is limited. To address this lacuna, in this paper we analyze articles published in Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of World Business as well as the Academy of Management Journal and Journal of Management Studies from 1999 until 2020. We find four temporal theorizing styles, namely temporal variation, temporal accumulation, temporal evolution, and temporal story. Our discussion on these pluralistic styles of temporal theorizing will allow us to contribute to a better understanding on how time can be leveraged in IB for theorizing in qualitative research.

Understanding time in qualitative international business research: Towards four styles of temporal theorizing

Time plays an integral role in understanding International Business (IB) phenomena, and so does qualitative inquiry. Despite this, time has received little attention in qualitative IB research. To rectify this, we engage in a qualitative content analysis of qualitative articles published from 1999 until 2020 in the Journal of World Business, Journal of International Business Studies, as well as the Academy of Management Journal, and Journal of Management Studies. Our findings suggest four temporal theorizing styles, namely temporal variation, temporal accumulation, temporal evolution, and temporal story. We add further granularity by distinguishing for each how time (i.e., snapshots, incremental, evolutionary, discursive), and context (detached context, descriptive context, contextual specificity, intertwined context), generate different theorizing outputs (variation, staged process, evolutionary process, (process) story). Our paper contributes by offering researchers a rich vocabulary and conceptual building blocks to engage with different temporal theorizing styles in qualitative IB research.

Advancing the pursuit of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Initiatives of selected publicly listed companies in the Philippines

Advancing the pursuit of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Initiatives of selected publicly listed companies in the Philippines

Fifty-One Years of International Business: A Bibliometric Overview of the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS)

The Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS) is the main means of scientific communication within international business. It has been published since 1970 and is a world reference. The main objective of this work is to develop a bibliometric analysis of the characteristics of JIBS publications from 1970 to 2020. To achieve this aim, a bibliometric performance analysis was carried out in a database with 1,697 articles published during the first 51 years of JIBS. Some of the main bibliometric indicators were extracted from the articles, and the 25 most-cited articles in JIBS were identified. Likewise, for a better analysis, the ATLAS.ti software was used, through which a word cloud and a network of codes were generated. The results of the bibliometric performance analysis indicate that the JIBS has increased its level of citation, as well as the number of articles and that the authors from the United States have published the most in the journal. The largest number of articles are related to the code “cross-border,” which is related to the different activities of the company.

Corporate social responsibility in international business literature: results from text data mining of the Journal of International Business Studies

Corporate social responsibility has been an important theme in management at least since the 1960s. International business became a recognized subfield in management around the same time. Logically, there might have been much dialogue about corporate social responsibility in international business research and publication, yet previous reviews of the literature indicate relatively little such research. This study complements previous literature reviews by employing text data mining to analyze a sample of 1188 articles published from 2000 to 2018 in the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS). Results show that from 2000 to 2018 only 35 CSR focused articles appeared. CSR research has increased over time, highly influenced by editorial specification of special issues. These documents can be grouped into seven CSR topics, with corruption and embeddedness being the most salient. Strategies are suggested for increasing research on CSR in international business.

International business studies: Are we really so uniquely complex?

Articles in Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS) and elsewhere have argued that international business (IB) is a uniquely complex field. We offer an alternative perspective and evidence that IB is not so uniquely complex compared to organizational behavior, strategic management studies, and entrepreneurship. We argue that viewing IB as uniquely complex is likely a result of what a vast body of social psychology research has uncovered and labeled false uniqueness bias: the tendency for people to believe that they are unique compared to others. We discuss selective accessibility and focalism as underlying psychological mechanisms of this bias. We acknowledge advantages of claiming uniqueness, but argue that it is now more beneficial and realistic to highlight similarities. Doing so will allow IB to import and export theories and methods and thereby make IB borders even more permeable. In turn, increased permeability is likely to lead to further theoretical progress that will benefit IB research, practice, and its positive impact on organizations and society even further. To illustrate advantages of not exaggerating IB’s uniqueness, we use JIBS Decade Award winners as exemplars of studies that are admired and impactful precisely because of their focus on similarities rather than unique complexity.

The declining share of primary data and the neglect of the individual level in international business research

Complementing Nielsen and colleagues’ (2020) analysis of methodological trends in the Journal of International Business Studies over the past 50 years, we examine similar data on methods published in a wider range of leading international business (IB) journals. Our analysis shows a clear decline of studies based on primary data relative to secondary data, and a persistently low level of individual-level studies among the growing body of research using secondary data across all IB journals considered. We discuss the main mechanisms driving these trends and identify the problems of IB’s increasing exposure to the risks inherent in secondary data. We also discuss the implications related to neglecting individual-level data for theory advancement in IB, such as a disregard for novel secondary data opportunities at the individual level and the risk of reduced theoretical pluralism. In doing so, we substantially extend the debate initiated by Nielsen and colleagues (2020).

Imposing versus Enacting Commitments for the Long‐Term Energy Transition: Perspectives from the Firm

Imposing versus Enacting Commitments for the Long‐Term Energy Transition: Perspectives from the Firm

International business education: What we know and what we have yet to develop

International business education (IBE) scholarship is extensive and is continuously growing. Nevertheless, to date there is no systems perspective overview of the literature dedicated to this topic. Using latest advancements in scientometric analysis, this study structures and visualizes the entire IBE scholarship, which allows to identify gaps in research and propose a number of future research directions. Data extracted from 894 peer-reviewed documents made available through the Scopus database allows to map the scholarship across five identified research directions in IBE – IB, political economy environment, and education; student learning and experience; the lingua franca and communication; interrelationship of IBE and the ecosystem; and business school curricula and internationalization. The scholarship was also compared to the Academy of Management Learning and Education and to the Journal of International Business Studies together with the Journal of World Business journal scholarships to recommend further prospective directions for the future development of IBE.

Dealing with dynamic endogeneity in international business research

Dynamic endogeneity occurs when the current values of a study’s independent variables are affected by the past values of the dependent variables, which can lead to biased estimates. Our analysis of 80 empirical papers published in the Journal of International Business Studies uncovers cases of inappropriate treatment of dynamic endogeneity. Our simulations reveal factors that lead to bias in a fixed effects estimator and highlight the advantages and disadvantages of the system generalized method of moments estimator. We demonstrate our points with an empirical study of the impact of the international experience of managers and board members on firm internationalization. We show how using a fixed effects estimator rather than a generalized method of moments estimator can lead to differences in regression results. We also show the proper use of a generalized method of moments estimator.

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.

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.

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.