Journal of International Management最新文献

This editorial delves into the evolving context of doing business in Africa, tracing its journey from being dubbed the “hopeless continent” to becoming a beacon of hope and opportunity. Drawing on a wealth of scholarly research, it highlights Africa's increasing attractiveness for global investments, underscored by rising FDI inflows and the emergence of a vibrant middle class. Despite these promising trends, the editorial also sheds light on the persistent challenges, including institutional fragility and political instability, coupled with limited representation in the existing international business discourse. We advance a more nuanced understanding of Africa's business environment, emphasizing the need for responsible growth, improved governance, and sustainable development. Thus, the Special Issue offers insights into the complexities and challenges of doing business in Africa, as well as the paradoxes and potential for fostering competitiveness and inclusive growth on the global stage.

The Covid-19 Pandemic, along with its consequent and other parallel occurrences and crises across the socio-economic spectrum, has, indeed, become a game changer in international business (IB) and global strategy management research and practice. Most agree on that, but few agree on the ‘how’. To address this knowledge gap, this paper employs a critical review methodology, analyzing the extant literature on IB and other conjoint fields of research published within the last decade, and identifies, reflects on and delineates seven specific contexts and twenty-five corresponding issues that influence the future directions of IB research and practice for global strategy management. We argue that exploring and explaining these twenty-five issues related to these seven contexts, is instrumental for global strategy evolution, devolution or revolution, in the age of disruptions to globalization. Therefore, we invite colleagues from IB and other conjoint research fields to join the debate and contribute to the inexorable progress of IB and global strategy research and practice.

Sustainability transitions within global interorganizational systems, such as supply chains, networks, or industries, often face various knotted tensions. These include both sustainability tensions and global-local tensions that multinational enterprises (MNEs) and their business partners, often small and medium enterprises (SMEs), must navigate. Particularly, the tension between global strategies and local contexts challenges MNEs' proactive approaches to managing sustainability emerges. We apply a paradox lens to understand how MNEs address sustainability tensions within global interorganizational systems. Our study focuses on an interorganizational system operating in Europe and China, directed by four MNEs within the food packaging industry, as it transitions to using bio-based plastics. Our findings reveal that while the MNEs adopt a global approach to sustainability, their efforts are often hampered by local circumstances, stalling the sustainability transition. This study contributes to the literature in two ways: (1) We conceptualize tensions as potential breaking points in sustainability transitions within interorganizational systems, arguing that MNEs can effectively address these tensions by adopting a glocal approach to paradox management. (2) We demonstrate that tensions within interorganizational systems often form part of complex, knotted chains that MNEs and their business partners must collaboratively address.

In this study, we consider war-related disruptions (and the continuing political isolation) as a catalyst for the global connectivity of national entrepreneurial ecosystems. We examine 771 Israeli early-stage start-ups to evaluate the relevance of the founding team structure to the internationalization process of startups and the success of internationally oriented new ventures. We consolidate and apply conceptual perspectives from Upper Echelon, Resource-Based View, and Human Capital theories to exemplify the critical role of the founding team composition in the development of effective governance structures in start-ups, particularly those with international commercial aspirations. We also contribute to the ongoing debate in the entrepreneurship literature regarding the control-related benefits of sole ownership versus the skill-related advantages of founding teams.

In strategic domains characterized by high public scrutiny, such as corporate social responsibility (CSR), multinational enterprises (MNEs) typically strive to maintain consistent performance levels across their subsidiary networks to cope with institutional pressures and minimize reputation damage and legitimacy risks. However, extant research has thus far focused on the influence of institutional pressures on the CSR performance of either the MNE as a whole or individual subsidiaries, revealing little about CSR performance differences within the MNE. We adopt an institutional logics lens to argue that within-MNE CSR performance differences are a function of home- and host-country logic multiplicity, because logic multiplicity causes ambiguity about the prioritization of CSR. Further, we argue that these effects are amplified by institutional distance. Analysis of 122 headquarter-subsidiary dyads over 12 years shows that home- and host-country logic multiplicity are associated with greater subsidiary CSR underperformance relative to headquarters, and that institutional distance between the home and host country amplifies the direct effect of host-country logic multiplicity. This study generates important implications for research on international strategy, institutional logics, and international CSR.

Despite extensive research on international corporations, there is still a lack of understanding about the factors that influence the composition of their board and its impact on their market value. This study aims to investigate how internationalisation influences the diversity of a firm's board, particularly regarding gender and culture. Additionally, the study also explores whether the board's diversity can enhance the impact of internationalisation on a firm's value. We analysed data from 25,436 international companies and found that as companies become more international, they tend to have fewer women on their boards but more board members from other countries. Interestingly, having a more diverse gender composition on the board helps to increase a company's value when it becomes more international, but having a more diverse cultural composition on the board seems to have the opposite effect. This information is helpful for international companies who want to make sure they have the best composition on their boards to achieve their global goals. These findings suggest that there may be a difference between what international corporations want in their board members and what their shareholders expect. Ultimately, this study can help international companies choose the right board members to maximize their success.

A call in the international management literature asks scholars to follow inclusivity and national representation for the field to move forward (Arikan and Shenkar, 2021). Despite the increased interest in doing business on the African continent, research on leadership in Africa is still in its infancy. To fill this gap, this study reports the results from a large-scale sample (N = 699) in seven African countries on the perceptions of leadership effectiveness and its relationship to cultural factors. The findings identified both similarities and differences in preferences regarding leadership effectiveness across the African countries. Respondents described effective leaders in similar terms to those found in Western literature (e.g. visionary and charismatic) and they also placed importance on Africa-centric variables (e.g. communal and ubuntu). Different cultural dimensions were also found to relate to certain leadership preferences. For example, individuals from African cultures high on uncertainty avoidance, collectivism, paternalism, and femininity were more likely to view an ubuntu leadership style as effective. The results provide a basis for further research and practical guidance for managers in African countries, where investment in African countries is growing and the importance of effective leadership is seen as critical to sustainable development.

International Market Selection (IMS) is a strategic and complex decision by which firms choose the markets in which to be present. Despite the undisputed academic and managerial relevance of IMS, extant reviews do not include the most recent empirical literature, do not consider different perspectives linked to alternative units of analysis and research domains, and ignore important changes in the international business environment. This research aims to carry out a holistic and systematic assessment of recent IMS empirical research, propose an IMS framework, and provide directions for future research. We contribute to the international business and management literature by updating and upgrading our understanding of IMS, by expanding the IMS conceptualization, proposing an integrative conceptual framework, and developing research propositions, and by suggesting a comprehensive, updated, and radically original research agenda.

The stability of multinational corporations is under threat due to the intensifying turbulence of global competition, which prevents intellectual capital from actively promoting performance. To meet the challenges brought by diverse and tumultuous environmental contexts, multinationals urgently need to develop new approaches that will resolve risks at headquarters and mitigate the adverse effects of the crisis on cross-border business operations. Building on the resource-based theory and dynamic capabilities theory, this research aims to seek possible solutions that would optimize the structure of intellectual capital in various subsidiary regions so as to maximize their effectiveness in sustaining parent company performance in the presence of turmoil. Taking listed multinational corporations (MNCs) as the research subject, this paper explored the impact of intellectual capital of foreign subsidiaries on their parent company performance through the mediating and moderating dynamics of slack resources and institutional distance respectively. Furthermore, we explored the above mechanism by comparing a developed-economy MNC and a developing-economy MNC contexts. Through investigating a dataset of 1237 listed foreign subsidiaries during the period 2012 to 2021, we found that foreign subsidiaries' intellectual capital behaved in largely different mechanisms comparing developed and developing economies such that, subsidiaries' intellectual capital in developed economies was found to be contributing to parent company performance, whereas, subsidiaries' intellectual capital in developing economies fail to play a positive role on parent company performance. Meanwhile, the results showed that, absorbed slack played an indirect-only mediating role on the relationship between subsidiaries' intellectual capital and parent company performance in developing countries, and unabsorbed slack resources played a competitive mediating role for the full sample. Whereas, institutional distance fails to play moderate role in the effect of foreign subsidiaries' intellectual capital on parent company performance. Our study has implications for MNCs in the post-COVID era. It can help them minimize external threat and develop strategies and measures to maximize the structure of intellectual capital in different host locations, thereby enhancing their multinational performance.

3D printing is a relatively new digital technology which can transform the way firms organize their innovation and production operations locally and globally. While 3D printing is being adopted by diverse organizations worldwide, empirical academic research on investment in early-stage 3D printing technology firms is still limited. In this paper, we consider the geography of the 3D printing ecosystem to illuminate the financing of investment into early state firms developing innovation in this technology. Using a hand-collected dataset of 500 firm-level investments, we hypothesize 3D printing investment is drawn to countries with greater innovative capacity, countries with greater human capital competencies, and countries with higher wages. We find that larger investments tend to benefit companies developing 3D printing technology in higher wage locations and in countries with higher innovative capacity level, suggesting that investments in the 3D printing ecosystems take places mostly in locations that already have an ecosystem in place. Our study is one of the first to examine detailed patterns of global investment in a new digital technology ecosystem - 3D printing, an increasingly important technology for innovation.