Journal of International Business Studies最新文献

Despite the volume of research and significant advancements in the country-of-origin (CO) area, the topic remains contentious in two key areas. One area is the presence of tensions and contradictions associated with origin-related research. The second relates to an over-reliance on relatively narrow theories that can neither address disparities nor capture a range of CO ecosystem considerations critical to the effective use of results in addressing firm-level planning and outcomes. Our examination of the business-to-consumer CO literature details the characteristics of published work and highlights the substantive contributions of the 50 most influential publications, with the overarching goal of accommodating meaningful future research. We examine 417 journal articles (551 studies) published from 1962 to 2022 to extract important granular characteristics of the literature and to summarize the findings of the most influential CO contributions. We also report the results of two surveys of academic researchers and US exporters and importers examining CO’s role in research and practice. Finally, we propose a theoretical lens, the paradox theory, as a basis for considering and framing competing aspects of the CO ecosystem and recommend the use of multilevel modeling to link future studies to marketing strategy and performance outcomes, thus advancing CO research.

Abstract

Migration is one of the most pressing global issues of our time. However, relatively little is known about the factors and mechanisms that govern the post-migration experiences of skilled migrants. We adopt an acculturation- and social identity-based approach to examine how differences between institutional characteristics in the destination and origin country, as well as migrants’ experiences with formal and informal institutions shape their identification with the destination and origin country and contribute to their community and career embeddedness. Our study of 1709 highly skilled migrants from 48 origin countries in 12 destination countries reveals that the institutional environment migrants encounter provides both sources of opportunity (potential for human development and value-congruent societal practices) and sources of disadvantage (experienced ethnocentrism and downgrading). These contrasting dynamics affect migrants’ destination-country identification, their origin-country identification and, ultimately, their embeddedness in the destination country. Our results have important implications for multinational enterprises and policy makers that can contribute to enhancing skilled migrants’ community and career embeddedness. For example, these actors may nurture a work environment and provide supportive policies that buffer against the institutional sources of disadvantage we identified in this study, while helping migrants to leverage the opportunities available in the destination country.

Status is an important intangible asset, yet when firms enter new countries, they lack standing in new social hierarchies as outsiders. Conventional wisdom suggests embeddedness in host-country networks can alleviate newcomers’ liability of outsidership. We complement this with insights from status signaling theory: Newcomers in host countries can address their liability of outsidership through the visual display of social affiliations. We utilize a novel visual qualitative research approach that analyzes annual report photographs of an emerging-market family business, depicting the firm’s leaders with high-status alters. Complementing the international business literature, which emphasizes strong ties to host-country business partners, we identify three signaling mechanisms that are more circuitous: bypass (host-country affiliations beyond the firm’s industry), allusion (global affiliations beyond the host country and industry, often celebrities), and aspiration (global industry affiliations). We also suggest that such diffuse status signaling mechanisms may be especially salient in emerging-market family firms investing in developed markets, which are accorded low status in many developed markets. These firms feature firm/owner identity overlaps, long leader tenures, and a tendency to build reputation through prosocial behavior, facilitating the activation of status signaling tactics through ephemeral affiliations with high-status actors situated in world society.

Cultural industries help build creativity-based economies and stimulate worldwide cultural interchanges, but this process faces constraints. One such constraint is unequal treatment of genders. When female artists export cultural products, they face a “liability of gender”, defined as gender specific difficulties in overcoming the liability of foreignness. Both audiences’ gendered expectations and artists’ lack of information about foreign markets will lower women artists’ probability of successfully exporting cultural products, relative to their male counterparts. Differences in education and social network connections strengthen this effect. To investigate this relation and discover how it can be counteracted, we study Korean artists from 2000 to 2015. We document that female artists have more difficulty exhibiting in foreign galleries than males, yet these negative effects can be mitigated by elite education and by participation in art residency programs. Residency programs help female artists to develop networks from their interactions with female peers, but these benefits erode quickly relative to the benefits of education. These findings help us understand how to create a level playing field across genders in worldwide cultural exchanges and suggest that network building institutions such as the art residency programs can effectively reduce gender inequality.

Global employee mobility is a very important concern for multinational enterprises (MNEs), as such individuals are critical strategic human capital resources for MNEs. Ensuring that expatriates (one type of globally mobile employees) maintain high organizational commitment and assignment completion intentions (“attachment” to international posting) is a critical consideration for MNEs’ human resources management. However, we have a very limited understanding of how the configurations of structures (decentralization, formalization, and global knowledge integration) – practices set in place to control and coordinate foreign subsidiaries by MNEs – influence expatriates’ attachments during international assignments. We address this research question by adopting the structural contingency theory and extending it to examine the impact of structural configurations on expatriate managers’ outcomes. We develop and test a set of hypotheses using survey data obtained from 192 expatriate general managers employed by nine American global hotel chains. We find that these three structural characteristics create various configurations differing in their effectiveness in retaining expatriates’ attachment outcomes. Our findings highlight the importance of examining configurations of structural characteristics, which underscores the difficulties of managing expatriate managers for MNEs as well as providing further insights into the complexities associated with structural configurations necessary to manage them well.

This research employs a difference-in-differences framework to study the impact of major board reforms on the performance of mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Using an international sample of board reforms implemented in 61 countries from 1985 to 2021, we document a drastic redistribution of wealth from target shareholders to acquirer shareholders after the board reforms in target countries. This effect is most pronounced in M&A transactions that involve the sale of controlling shares, thereby supporting the hypothesis that corporate board reforms mitigate the private benefits of control in the target firm. Furthermore, these reforms increase expected deal synergies, in that deal-level announcement returns are higher after the implementation of the reforms. When country-level institutional quality and legal protection of shareholders are greater, it reinforces the reform effects. Overall M&A activity remains unchanged following the reforms, yet financial bidders complete fewer transactions, implying a reform-induced squeeze-out of financial bidders from the M&A market in the target country. Collectively, these international results are consistent with the predictions of the private benefits of control theory and underscore the role of institutional quality and investor protection in reinforcing the effects of board reforms worldwide.

Recognizing the dearth of attention afforded to global cities in the international business and management journals, Goerzen et al. (J Int Bus Stud 44(5):427–450, 2013) chanced their hand at becoming pioneers. Their gamble paid off. Taking geographic scale down to the city level, questioning why multinationals choose to locate subsidiaries inside or outside of global cities, they jump-started their own conversation, sugaring the pill with the IB staple—liability of foreignness. So well was their inquiry crafted and executed that their insights into the way global connectedness attracts investment into these cities remains instructive. Since then, global cities and firms have undergone a transition. We visualize increasingly multifaceted cities interacting with firms accelerating towards adopting an “ecosystem approach”—characterized by extensive non-equity collaborations and partnerships. We explain why investigation à la Goerzen et al. (J Int Bus Stud 44(5):427–450, 2013) today must grasp multinationals’ diverse relationships to revivify theoretical insights from economic geography for a world of tensions heightened by geopolitics, but above all grappling with the sustainability agenda. We conclude that within an ecosystem of feedback effects, multinationals’ agency can be part of the solution. To deliver, IB must harness emerging novel geographic—“big”—data and techniques to match, in the spirit of the imaginative fusion a decade earlier.

While there is substantial literature on global mobility, roles in the global integration of multinationals are not limited to internationally mobile staff. We focus on ‘globalizing actors’, defined as those within multinationals who are involved in global norm-making. Using interview-based qualitative data, we categorize individuals’ involvement in global norm-making according to the function within norm formation in which they are involved, their source of influence, and their geographical and organizational reach. We identify nine distinct types of globalizing actors. We demonstrate that many individuals play important roles in global norm-making without having formal hierarchical authority or being globally mobile. Our approach draws attention to the ways in which many globalizing actors use ‘social skill’ to further their aims. Our categorization of such ‘forgotten globalizing actors’ facilitates future research by allowing a fuller understanding of the ways in which individuals across multinationals contribute to global integration.

The crucial role and fragility of global supply chains highlight the need for deeper insights into the factors that can promote the establishment of global supply chain relations. We examine the impact of financial statement comparability on firms’ establishment of global supply chain relations. Using a large sample of supply chain relations from 49 non-U.S. economies over the period 2003–2020, we find that non-U.S. firms are more likely to establish and maintain more supply chain relations with U.S. firms when their financial statements are more comparable to industry peers in the U.S. To address endogeneity concerns, we show that our findings are robust to identification strategies exploring the exogenous changes in financial statement comparability associated with IFRS adoption or PCAOB international inspections. Moreover, we find that the effect of financial statement comparability on cross-border supply chain relations is more pronounced when the information barrier is higher between non-U.S. economies and the U.S. Overall, our study provides new insights into the impact of financial statement comparability on firms’ establishment of cross-border supply chain relations and sheds lights on the role of financial statement comparability in promoting international trade.