Journal of International Management最新文献

A distinctive feature of many international acquisitions of firms with technology resources is the extreme uncertainty about the value of the target's resources. Such uncertainty increases the complexity of ownership decisions in target firms. Drawing from signaling theory, we articulate how international acquirers perceive the pre-emptive power of target firms' patent portfolio as a positive signal, increasing their confidence in target firms' technology and leading them to seek a higher level of equity. We further argue that the strength of the target firm's home country's patent system also acts as a positive signal that encourages investors to acquire a higher level of equity in cross-border acquisitions. However, it also weakens then impact of the pre-emptive power signal. Our findings have implications for scholars, policymakers, and managers.

Employer branding is an important process in marketing to ensure the smooth delivery of branding strategies. Nevertheless, research focusing on the process of employer branding within international subsidiaries is scant. Thus, this research explores the process of developing employer branding for international subsidiaries to suit the multinational company (MNC) hotels' branding strategies. In particular, the current study examines the critical factors that could support and forestall employer branding within MNC hotel subsidiaries in Indonesia. Using a qualitative approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with three different actors (i.e., expatriate manager, local manager, and regional executives). The results reveal that the company employer branding process is being influenced by several factors that exist only in the country of the MNC hotel subsidiaries. This study is important to explain the contextual factors of stakeholder preferences in the management of internal marketing within international MNC subsidiaries.

In this paper, we propose a concept of grassroots socio-political risk (SPR) and provide a measure for it that is based on individual-level Google Trends data that captures issue salience. Our concept provides a bottom-up complement to established measures that focus more on political and institutional players and the institutional constraints they face. Our grassroots SPR index attempts to capture public pressure to initiate institutional change in a country. In contrast to existing measures, our Google Trends–based measure captures issue salience directly among individuals rather than media or analyst reports. As such, it is uniquely representative of socio-political sentiment, timely, and widely available. Our concept and measure offer international business (IB) researchers novel opportunities. In addition to developing the index, we scrutinize its validity and provide an illustrative empirical application in the IB context by showing that differences between internal and external assessments of grassroots SPR are contingent on psychic distance.

Advancing our understanding of political risks is crucial for international management (IM) research and practice. This study addresses how multiple institutional logics that govern multinational enterprises (MNEs), as latent tensions of political risks, may work together for superior or inferior performance. Methodologically, we adopt a configurational approach to predict how varying state logic and market logic combinations affect performance in the context of internationalization among Chinese financial services firms. Employing fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), we identify a specific taxonomy of four political risk prototypes that lead to different performance outcomes. Overall, this study provides novel insights into political risk variations of internationalizing firms and links different institutional logic configurations with performance outcomes.

In this paper, we advance recent calls to deliver a novel lobbying data source through which researchers can analyze national and international sociopolitical environments and their impact on foreign firms. Our focus is mainly on lobbying activities by foreign firms in the US. The lobbying activities by foreign firms in the US have increased tremendously in the last two decades. However, due to data challenges, empirical examinations by researchers have been limited on this topic. Limited studies that have examined lobbying activities by foreign firms in the US have studied it at an aggregate level. In this paper, we provide lobbying information for all foreign firms in the US since 1998; empirically validate the data by conducting theory-driven hypotheses testing; and suggest future research ideas.

This study aims to identify the causal relationship between innovation ambidexterity and multinational enterprises' (MNEs) sustainable performance. It emphasizes how innovation ambidexterity driven by dynamic capabilities can allow MNE subsidiaries to achieve social and environmental performances. Additionally, we asserted the moderating impacts of host governments' pressures on the association between dynamic capability and innovation ambidexterity. We evaluated our hypotheses using a dataset consisting of 228 MNE manufacturing subsidiaries in China using partial least square-structural equation modeling. Utilizing dynamic capability and ambidexterity theories, our research contributes to the ongoing sustainable performance literature by addressing a growing call to understand how MNE subsidiaries may achieve long-term sustainability when conducting business abroad.

The composition-based view explains how emerging market firms creatively adopt compositional investment, compositional offerings, and compositional capabilities to gain a competitive advantage in the global marketplace. How the composition-based international strategy contributes to organizational resilience under the de-globalization world remains unclear. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, we explore how emerging market firms reconfigure compositional elements and the crucial role of firm heterogeneity in determining organizational resilience. Our analysis of 250 Chinese manufacturing firms revealed five distinct international compositional strategies and asymmetric outcomes. Multiple configurations of composition-based international strategies and firm heterogeneity were found to be related to high and low organizational resilience. Our findings confirm that emerging market firms must reconfigure their compositional elements to achieve sustained and resilient performance throughout the pandemic. Our findings extend the composition-based view by elucidating the multiple pathways and boundary conditions of compositional strategies leading to organizational resilience.

While nationalistic political rhetoric has become a critical concern for international business, the research in this area has lagged because of the unavailability of a representative measure. In this study, I introduce a largely unexplored source of data for international business research: Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT), and explain how GDELT can be used to operationalize politicians' use of nationalistic rhetoric across the world. After discussing the data and the operationalization of the measure, I offer some preliminary insights. They reveal that the rise of nationalistic political rhetoric is not a recent phenomenon but a consistent theme over the last three decades. Contrary to suggestions in the literature, it is not low-income or less developed environments but countries with higher income and well-developed institutions where nationalistic rhetoric is more visible and where it strongly deters FDI. The measure advanced in this study offers a renewed understanding of global sociopolitical risks. It also contributes to institutional theory by explicating how politicians use non-bureaucratic influence to affect informal institutions.

Socio-political risks (SPRs) are important drivers of firm-level risk. Beyond unexpected variation in socio-political environments over time, the difference between home and host country socio-political contexts induces risk as it increases the difficulty to understand a foreign environment. This risk is specifically important for internationally active firms, as they need to gather and interpret information stemming from different socio-political environments to manage their international operations. However, existing literature lacks both concept and measure to capture such information asymmetry. In this paper, we explain how cross-national distance is related to SPRs through information asymmetry, and develop a reflective measure of cross-national distance based on information theory, signal analysis, and financial market information. Conceptual and empirical evaluations and applications of the concept and measure proposed provide support for our approach.

Our qualitative case study explores how Kirin Beer Zhuhai (KBZ), a China based subsidiary of a Japanese multinational corporation, under a mandate from the HQ, changed from embracing corporate social responsibility (CSR) to adopting creating shared value (CSV). This entailed some movement away from projects that were deemed to be about CSR, where there had been an exclusive focus on social rather than economic goals. There were corresponding attempts to adopt projects about CSV, addressing both social and economic goals. Faced with trade-offs between economic and social goals, managers at KBZ appeared to be adopting a temporal form of policy-practice decoupling. Under this, some CSV projects were targeting temporally proximal economic goals along with temporally distal social goals, while other CSV projects were targeting temporally proximal social goals along with temporally distal economic goals. Our main contribution is developing the concept of temporal decoupling as a tool for analyzing dilemmas (e.g., local versus global demands) and resolving trade-offs (e.g., social versus economic goals). Temporal decoupling enabled KBZ to progress toward CSV without resource transfers from the headquarters, with yin-yang balancing as the mechanism, under which competing goals were temporarily traded-off through partial separation, while achieving some synergy through partial integration.