Journal of International Business Studies最新文献

Living up to the expectations of the JIBS Decade Award, Goerzen, Asmussen, and Nielsen’s 2013 paper not only introduced the literature on global cities to the international business (IB) community but continues to be generative. In their “Retrospective and a Looking Forward” paper 10 years later, the authors highlight megatrends about people, places and things, and new contexts and alternative perspectives, and they encourage further new ways of thinking about global cities and IB. This commentary expands upon their framework of three overlapping circles of global issues, global organizations, and global locations, by drawing especially from recent experiences in the U.S. and research in economic geography and allied fields. Facing global issues of climate change, human rights, health, housing, and the impacts of digital technologies on work, cities offer prospects of responding to these challenges, a context for multinational enterprises (MNEs) to consider. Against the backdrop of large-scale global migrations of unskilled, mostly contract, workers to global cities in developed economies, recruitment agencies and advocacy groups for migrants are global organizations as important as MNEs. Finally, the fluidity of physical boundaries, as illustrated by city-regions, world regions beyond traditional Western-centric perspectives, and intra-national variations, is key to analyzing global locations.

Abstract

Goerzen et al. (J Int Bus Stud 44:427–450, 2013) became influential because it generated a broader view of the international business (IB) domain. The paper broke new ground by going beyond the country and regional levels to analyze MNE location choices, a novel approach that revealed the importance of global cities. The original argument suggested that global connectedness, cosmopolitanism, and advanced producer services mitigated the liability of foreignness, thereby highlighting the complexity of MNE location decisions. It also drew attention to the need for IB research to take a more nuanced view of MNE behavior. Developments since 2013, however, have rendered a very different world. Our goal in this commentary, therefore, is to challenge the IB community to think more deeply about the future of global cities specifically and about IB more generally. We do this by re-evaluating the role of cities as micro-locations against the emergence of megatrends that are shaping our future, including demographic shift and an increase in social awareness, the changing natural environment and an increase in sustainability concerns, and the rise in capability and application of digital technologies. We conclude by suggesting that IB research must connect more deeply with interdisciplinary theories and methodologies to produce generative IB research.

Studies on multi-stakeholder processes and cross-sector partnerships have demonstrated that multiple stakeholders across different sectors can resolve sustainable development issues when they combine their complementary resources and capacities. These studies have highlighted the role of multinational enterprises (MNEs), considering their requisite resources and capacities to implement intervention strategies. However, MNEs’ role remains largely underexplored in the context of non-state cultural regions where state governance is entirely lacking. Drawing on the findings of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Golden Triangle region near Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos borders, this study investigates how multiple stakeholders’ collective interventions transformed the illicit drug-based economy of the region into an alternative sustainable economy. The region once supplied 60% of the illicit drugs distributed worldwide, yet a series of cross-sector interventions transformed the region into a sustainable economy over the past 60 years. The findings show that the foreign subsidiaries of MNEs proactively explored the unknown region and shared knowledge with other actors, which helped participating stakeholders effectively address regional sustainable development issues. The resulting process model sheds light on MNEs’ central roles at various stages of the multi-stakeholder process, offering new insights into informal institutions and intercultural studies in the field of international business.

We study how collectivism, religion-tradition, thriftiness, and status/materialist consumption values jointly shape consumption preferences in seven Asian markets. These markets are diverse but relatively small, so identifying similarities should help companies implement standardized marketing strategies. Using data from 3000+ consumers, we find the effects to be largely similar. Collectivistic values directly and indirectly increase both religious and thriftiness values, both of which negatively affect status consumption values. However, the direct positive effect of collectivistic values on status consumption values is so strong that it dominates all of these countervailing negative effects, which explains the paradoxical affinity of Asian consumers towards luxury consumption while endorsing the moral virtues of thriftiness. We identify the effects these values have on preference towards symbolic (style, prestige, overseas origin) and utilitarian (durability, and value for price) attributes. Our results have implications for international marketing theory by highlighting the role of values in Asian consumption, and for practice by helping marketers arrive at more informed standardized brand/product strategies in these rapidly growing Asian markets. In particular, they support earlier findings that high and increasing luxury consumption in Asia may not be due to increasing individualism nor Westernization, but because collectivists have their own reasons for valuing status consumption.

We study how misbehavior in a multinational’s value network, not only in subsidiaries but also in suppliers, affects its corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. Combining the network perspective of multinationals with the risk management view of CSR, we argue that major misbehavior in subsidiaries and independent suppliers leads to CSR performance improvements. The reason is that in response to the misbehavior, the multinational not only addresses the specific problem with the misbehaving party but also refines network-wide practices to rebuild its reputation and social contract with stakeholders, leading to better CSR performance. Additionally, we argue that home-country CSR mandates enhance this relationship. The reason is that the regulatory mandates heighten the multinational’s sensitivity to the costs of value network partners’ misbehavior, strengthening its response. Analyses of 1262 multinationals from 35 home countries in 2008–2018 support these ideas. They also reveal that while major subsidiary misbehavior leads to higher internal CSR performance, major supplier misbehavior results in higher external CSR performance. These ideas and findings introduce and highlight how managers can use CSR as an ex-post strategic tool for addressing reputational damage caused by misbehavior in their global value networks, complementing the use of CSR as a source of competitive advantage.