International Entrepreneurship
International entrepreneurship is a research domain that has inherently fuzzy and porous borders. As such, it is an area of scholarly inquiry that is varied and receptive to new ideas. We are preparing a JIBS special issue that will illustrate a wide range of international entrepreneurship research perspectives and approaches. Before this issue becomes available, to further help scholars from diverse traditions recognize ways in which they might join conversations about international entrepreneurship, we are pleased to offer this special collection of JIBS articles that represent three important and diverse themes in those conversations.
One theme is an attempt to understand the factors enabling internationalization under resource constraints. Pioneering research highlighted the importance of firm-specific resources and capabilities in allowing very new firms to sell successfully in foreign markets. These ideas have been extended to questions of how firms can overcome the resource constraints of smallness as well as newness, and to the impact of particular market conditions on international behaviors and performance.
An important sub-theme focuses on the role of social networks in the pursuit of international opportunities by resource-constrained firms. A second theme is aimed at shedding light on how firms internationalize under the resource constraints of newness or smallness. This research tends to emphasize the role of experience in explaining internationalization activities over time. The theoretical constructs highlighted include learning, routines, processes and practices. This research also seeks to apply ideas from the entrepreneurship literature – such as uncertainty, opportunity and disequilibria – to understand internationalization processes.
A third theme addresses questions about how entrepreneurship varies internationally. Attention has been focused on understanding how entrepreneurial characteristics, processes and behavior vary across institutional contexts. Given the resource constraints constituting barriers to successful entrepreneurship, scholars are also studying how the decision-making of financial resource providers varies institutionally. Recent research in this area has emphasized the provision of financial resources that support entrepreneurship in developing countries.Articles in this special collection are listed below in reverse chronological order (most recent first). Special collections are by necessity limited in the number of articles they can contain, and we have chosen not to include Decade Award winning papers in the international entrepreneurship area, or the commentaries about them, since these articles are already influential and easily accessible.
Becky Reuber, Area Editor for International Entrepreneurship, Journal of International Business Studies (2016)
Browse articles
2016 (online first)
An institutional perspective on the social outcome of entrepreneurship: Commercial microfinance and inclusive markets
Joshua K. Ault
June/July 2016
***
Explaining the internationalization of ibusiness firms
Keith D. Brouthers, Kim Dung Geisser and Franz Rothlauf
Aug 2015
***
SME internationalization modes in the German biotechnology industry: The influence of imitation, network position, and international experience
Marie Oehme and Suleika Bort
May 2013
***
Consequences of cultural practices for entrepreneurial behaviors
Erkko Autio, Saurav Pathak and Karl Wennberg
Aug 2012
***
Routine microprocesses and capability learning in international new ventures
Shameen Prashantham and Steven W. Floyd
Dec 2011
***
Immigrant remittances and the venture investment environment of developing countries
Paul M. Vaaler
June/July 2011
***
Small firm internationalisation unveiled through phenomenography
Peter Lamb, Jörgen Sandberg & Peter W. Liesch
April 2011
***
Exploring the complementarity between innovation and export for SMEs’ growth
Elena Golovko and Giovanni Valentini
Jan 2011
***
Social ties and international entrepreneurship: Opportunities and constraints affecting firm internationalization
Paul D. Ellis
Dec 2009
***
The Uppsala internationalization process model revisited: From liability of foreignness to liability of outsidership
Jan Johanson and Jan-Erik Vahlne
March 2008
***
International entrepreneurship and geographic location: An empirical examination of new venture internationalization
Stephanie A. Fernhaber, Brett Anitra Gilbert and Patricia P. McDougall
Dec 2007
***
International new ventures: Revisiting the influences behind the ‘born-global’ firm
Terence Fan and Phillip Phan
May 2007
***
The international entrepreneurial dynamics of accelerated internationalisation
John A. Mathews and Ivo Zander
March 2007
***
The survival of international new ventures
Ram Mudambi and Shaker A. Zahra
Sept 2006
***
The network dynamics of international new ventures
Nicole E. Coviello
State Owned Multinationals
State-owned multinationals (SOMNCs) have been recently rediscovered as an interesting type of firm to study, one that challenges some of the arguments of the theories of the multinational. In the 1970s, the initial studies of state-owned firms focused on understanding the logic and internationalization of these companies. However, the implementation of pro-market reforms throughout most of the world in the 1980s and 1990s led to the privatization of many state-owned firms and a diminishing interest in SOMNCs. In the late 2000s, however, there was resurgence of interest on the topic, partly because of the rapid expansion of a new set of emerging market multinationals, some of which were state-owned, and partly because of the appearance of various types of state-owned firms (majority, minority, indirect, sovereign wealth funds, etc.) that had not been studied before.
The study of state-owned multinationals connects several fields – economics and political economy and their study of state ownership of firms, and international business and its study of the internationalization of firms – that can provide new insights via cross-fertilization. These firms pose interesting challenges to the usual explanations for the existence of state-owned firms: one is rooted in economics and explains the existence of state-owned firms as a solution to market imperfections, and another in rooted in political economy and explains the existence of these firms as a result of the ideology of some governments in maintaining control over the economy. Foreign direct investments by state-owned firms seem to challenge both arguments, providing the foundation for developing new insights by analyzing these firms. Moreover, the state ownership of SOMNCs also poses challenges to the usual explanations of the behavior of multinational companies in international business, given that the government may impose non-business objectives on the companies that result in unusual patterns of internationalization not well explained in theories of the multinational.
As a result of the rediscovery of SOMNCs as an interesting research topic, and in view of the changes in the types of influence of the state on firms, we recently organized a special issue of JIBS on state-owned multinationals. This collection of JIBS articles complements that special issue by providing additional background for those interested in going deeper in the topic, with the articles presented in chronological order to facilitate a better understanding of how the study of SOMNCs has progressed.
Alvaro Cuervo-Cazurra, Reviewing Editor, Journal of International Business Studies (2016)
Browse articles
The International Aspects of State-Owned Enterprises
Raymond Vernon
***
European Government-Controlled Enterprises: Explaining International Strategic and Policy Decisions
Renato Mazzolini
***
European Government-Controlled Enterprises: An Organizational Political View
Renato Mazzolini
***
Exploring the role of government involvement in outward FDI from emerging economies
Chengqi Wang, Junjie Hong, Mario Kafouros and Mike Wright
***
State ownership effect on firms' FDI ownership decisions under institutional pressure: a study of Chinese outward-investing firms
Lin Cui and Fuming Jiang
***
Prithwiraj Choudhury & Tarun Khanna: Toward resource independence – Why state-owned entities become multinationals: An empirical study of India's public R&D laboratories
Alvaro Cuervo-Cazurra, Andrew Inkpen, Aldo Musacchio & Kannan Ramaswamy
***
Resource security: Competition for global resources, strategic intent, and governments as owners
A Erin Bass & Subrata Chakrabarty
***
Varieties in state capitalism: Outward FDI strategies of central and local state-owned enterprises from emerging economy countries
Ming Hua Li, Lin Cui & Jiangyong Lu
***
Overcoming distrust: How state-owned enterprises adapt their foreign entries to institutional pressures abroad
Klaus E Meyer, Yuan Ding, Jing Li & Hua Zhang
***
Firms' FDI ownership: The influence of government ownership and legislative connections
Yigang Pan, Lefa Teng, Atipol Bhanich Supapol, Xiongwen Lu, Dan Huang & Zhennan Wang
***
State-owned MNCs and host country expropriation risk: The role of home state soft power and economic gunboat diplomacy
Jing-Lin Duanmu
Language
Language in its various forms including national, corporate, technical, electronic, official, unofficial, lies at the heart of international business activities. Its features and functions define hierarchies and power relations sometimes facilitating sometimes hindering key IB processes such as integration and knowledge sharing across contexts. Understanding the complex interplay between the multiple facets of language and how they affect day-to-day business operations is becoming increasingly critical to global effectiveness.
Traditionally linked with communication or seen as an artifact of national culture in IB research, language has recently enjoyed a focus in its own right from multidisciplinary perspectives to render the field more sensitive to the existence and influence of languages and language use in the global corporate context.
Embracing different conceptual trajectories to inform their work, researchers have taken a variety of distinct focuses on language including understanding the effects of language on knowledge-sharing and innovation, the effect of English as a lingua franca in MNCs and the alternatives of a multi-lingua franca, the influences of language requirements on job performance, opportunities for promotion, as well as training and development, bilingualism and the role of biculturals in global teams.
To catalyze and set a course for the development of language as a new domain in IB scholarship, we recently ran a JIBS special issue on the theme of The Multifaceted Role of Language in International Business. To encourage the further articulation and theorization of language as a key construct in international business, we are pleased to offer this special Collection of JIBS articles concerned with understanding the forms, functions and features of language as they relate to IB.
Mary Yoko Brannen Deputy Editor, Journal of International Business Studies (2015)
Browse articles
The multinational corporation as a multilingual community: Language and organization in a global context
Yadong Luo & Oded Shenkar
***
Data equivalence in cross-cultural international business research: assessment and guidelines
G Tomas M Hult, David J Ketchen Jr, David A Griffith, Carol A Finnegan, Tracy Gonzalez-Padron, Nukhet Harmancioglu, Ying Huang, M Berk Talay and S Tamer Cavusgil
***
Do foreign investors exhibit a corporate governance disadvantage? An information asymmetry perspective
Jun-Koo Kang and Jin-Mo Kim
***
Language policies and practices in wholly owned foreign subsidiaries: A recontextualization perspective
Vesa Peltokorpi and Eero Vaara
***
Language as a lightning rod: Power contests, emotion regulation, and subgroup dynamics in global teams
Pamela J Hinds,Tsedal B Neeley & Catherine Durnell Cramton
***
The impact of language barriers on trust formation in multinational teams
Helene Tenzer, Markus Pudelko & Anne-Wil Harzing
***
Cultural and language skills as resources for boundary spanning within the MNC
Wilhelm Barner-Rasmussen, Mats Ehrnrooth, Alexei Koveshnikov & Kristiina Mäkelä
***
Employees’ willingness to adopt a foreign functional language in multilingual organizations: The role of linguistic identity
Sarbari Bordia & Prashant Bordia
***
Translation in cross-language international business research: Beyond equivalence
Agnieszka Chidlow, Emmanuella Plakoyiannaki & Catherine Welch
***
Re-considering language within a cosmopolitan understanding: Toward a multilingual franca approach in international business studies
Maddy Janssens & Chris Steyaert
***
“Understanding the words of relationships”: Language as an essential tool to manage CSR in communities of place
W Travis Selmier II, Aloysius Newenham-Kahindi & Chang Hoon Oh
***
Why and how does shared language affect subsidiary knowledge inflows? A social identity perspective
B Sebastian Reiche, Anne-Wil Harzing & Markus Pudelko
The Eclectic Paradigm
A major aim of this JIBS Collection is to enable scholars coming to the International Business (IB) field from a cognate discipline, perhaps for the first time, to be able to connect their own way of thinking about IB issues to a framework for IB analysis that is already established in our field. It is also hoped that the Collection will help to remind mainstream IB scholars of how the framework of the eclectic paradigm has emerged and developed, and of the contribution that JIBS has played in this development. As is well known among IB scholars, the eclectic paradigm was first incarnated as the eclectic theory (by John Dunning in 1977), but rather quickly metamorphosed into a paradigm, or a meta-framework for the conduct of IB analysis and IB concept or theory building.
While Dunning had initially been caught up in the enthusiasm of the early days of the genesis of the IB field to suggest a 'general theory' of the multinational enterprise (MNE) and the international production that MNEs organize around the world, he soon appreciated that the synthesis he proposed was instead a means by which the various relevant theories of international business could be identified (according to which question was being asked), and then suitably combined or compared as appropriate. The different theories of international business at that time, and subsequently, can be characterized as addressing selected aspects of the ownership (O), location (L) and internalization (I) advantages that are necessary for the emergence, growth and evolution of international production under common control across borders. Hence, the eclectic paradigm is also known as the OLI paradigm, and it provides a structure for bringing together and applying various kinds of theories of IB. The eclectic paradigm distinguishes between influences on IB activities associated with the nationality of ownership (O) or origin of firms engaged in IB, the extent of the internalization (I) of markets which affects the boundaries of the MNE, and the characteristics of the host location(s) (L) in which IB activities are sited. In other words, the eclectic paradigm is essentially about how to appropriately combine issues of firm and home country network-derived capabilities (O), transaction costs (I), and the resources, capabilities and institutions of locations as host production sites (L).
This analytical structure has laid a common foundation for a progressive conversation between different perspectives on IB that enables an increasing interchange to be conducted across various streams of research that might otherwise have found it difficult to relate to one another. While originally the eclectic paradigm helped us to bring together and compare mainly economic theories of IB, today its greater value is as a framework that has the potential to enable us to relate to one another IB theories derived from ideas taken from different disciplines and constructed at different levels of analysis. To help to promote a greater conversation between those interested in the theoretical explanation of IB activities from various different backgrounds or starting points, we are pleased to offer this special Collection of JIBS articles that concern the foundations and the application of the eclectic paradigm.
John Cantwell Editor-in-Chief, Journal of International Business Studies (2014)
Browse Articles
David J Teece: A dynamic capabilities-based entrepreneurial theory of the multinational enterprise Open
***
***
Peter J Buckley & Niron Hashai: Formalizing internationalization in the eclectic paradigm
***
***
***
***
John H. Dunning: Reappraising the Eclectic Paradigm in an Age of Alliance Capitalism
***
Masahiko Itaki: A Critical Assessment of the Eclectic Theory of the Multinational Enterprise
***
Jean J. Boddewyn: Political Aspects of MNE Theory
***
***
John H. Dunning: Toward an Eclectic Theory of International Production: Some Empirical Tests
Location
In recent years an extensive range of new research has been revisiting the topic of the location of international business activities, from a variety of different perspectives and background interests. This work has been inspired in part by two apparently quite different but actually related contemporary trends: on the one hand, an emergence or revitalization of clusters of activities co-located in or around selected global city regions or fast growing metropolitan areas; and on the other hand, an increased global dispersion of activities conducted within the value chains managed or coordinated by many large multinational enterprises and their business partners.
The former trend has given rise to discussions of how the elite of the cultural-cognitive economy of the 21st century (in Allen Scott's terminology) or the creative class (Richard Florida's term) are now being drawn or brought back to major urban centers; while the latter trend is associated with debates over outsourcing, and the economic and social consequences of shifts in the ownership and location of distinct nodes of value chains once production systems become more fragmented and the component parts of such systems become more geographically dispersed.
An increased interest in the subject of international business location has been shown by scholars in Strategic Management, in Economic Geography, and in Regional Science, as well as in our own interdisciplinary field of International Business Studies. However, as is often the case in academic research communities, these bodies of scholarship have tended to develop at something of a distance from one another, each conversing internally more than they have with one another.
To help encourage a more direct exchange between these communities with a common interest in International Business Location, we recently ran a JIBS special issue on the theme of the Multinational in Geographic Space. To further help to promote a greater conversation between those interested in the topic of Location from various different backgrounds or starting points, we are pleased to offer this special Collection of JIBS articles that concern issues in the Location of International Business activities.
John Cantwell Editor-in-Chief, Journal of International Business Studies (2013)
Browse Articles
***
John H Dunning: Location and the multinational enterprise: A neglected factor?
***
Edward E. Leamer and Michael Storper: The Economic Geography of the Internet Age
***
***
***
***
***
John Cantwell: Location and the multinational enterprise
