International Business Review最新文献

The knowledge-based view (KBV) has been particularly influential for developing and shaping the international business (IB) field. IB scholars have used the KBV to explain a wide range of IB phenomena. However, to date, there has been no systematic review of the literature on the KBV in IB. This study aims to fill this gap. To this purpose, we identified and analyzed 124 articles published at the intersection of the KBV and the IB field in 40 academic journals from 1999 to 2021. Drawing on our findings, we reveal the current state of the KBV in IB and identify the knowledge types and processes required for firms to navigate the global environment, as portrayed by the studies included in our review. We then highlight promising future research directions to advance the KBV and the IB field.

The current study contributes to the ongoing discourse in the extant literature concerning the performance effects of the commitment-inducement and the compliance-enforcement approaches to the management of people and work. We expand on two research studies conducted in China to assess if the finding that commitment-inducement and compliance-enforcement result in higher organization financial and operational performance generalizes to corporate social responsibility performance and to countries and cultures across the globe. Using the current study’s large global multi-source sample, our findings illuminate that compliance-enforcement explained significant incremental variance in both organization financial and operational performance and organization corporate social responsibility performance beyond that of the commitment-inducement approach alone. Moreover, the highest levels of both performance outcomes were obtained by organizations that simultaneously used both commitment-inducement and compliance-enforcement; that is, hybrid governance. Compliance-enforcement was also found to have a more substantive relative effect on organization financial and operational performance while commitment-inducement was found to have a more substantive relative effect on organization corporate social responsibility performance. Furthermore, as hypothesized, at the between country-level, the relationship between the commitment-inducement approach of managing people and work and corporate social responsibility performance was found to be more negative both for a high individualism than a low individualism culture and for a high uncertainty avoidance than a low uncertainty avoidance culture, respectively. Whereas, the relationship between the compliance-enforcement approach and corporate social responsibility performance was found to be more positive for a high uncertainty avoidance than a low uncertainty avoidance culture. Finally, as hypothesized, at the between country-level, commitment-inducement and compliance-enforcement were found to be substitutes and have a negative synergistic effect on corporate social responsibility performance. Implications, limitations, and avenues for future research are discussed.

This study analyzes the relationship between institutions and ownership in cross-border acquisitions. First, this research contributes to the existing literature by considering the relative position of cities of origin and destination in this relationship and examining the asymmetric effects of institutional distance. Furthermore, we contribute by taking the concept of global cities and analyzing the influence of these locations on ownership decisions in cross-border acquisitions. Using a database with multiple home and host-cities and adopting a binary logistic analysis, the results indicate that MNCs hold a higher stake in the equity of an acquiree located in a developed country, and their commitment of resources to acquisitions in global cities is higher than it is in other cities. These findings suggest that analyzing distance direction is essential, and brings new insights when examined at the subnational level.

This paper examines the location change of emerging digital cross-border mergers and acquisitions (DCBMAs). Based on a country-pair-year sample in 2013–2019 and newly constructed TIMG index, we find evidence that a country’s development level of digital economy has become new location advantage to attract DCBMAs. The possibility and scale of DCBMAs will increase in countries with developed digital infrastructure, digital market, and digital technology. We extend a new distance dimension and find that digital distance may impede DCBMAs between two countries. Further evidence suggests that the relationship of digital location advantages with DCBMAs is also affected by the differences in the income level of acquiring country, the attribute of investors and the characteristics of the digital industry.

We draw from the composition-based view of firms to develop and test a framework of the influence of adaptive governance and resilience on the performance of a sample (n = 292) of Bangladeshi suppliers embedded in apparel global value chains (GVCs) at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Results confirm that adaptive governance provides the necessary conditions for suppliers to strengthen their resilience and sustain their performance during exogenous shocks. Results also show that suppliers disruption orientation and resource reconfiguration capabilities play important contingency roles on the extent to which resilience transforms adaptive governance into performance. The implications of our findings and directions for future research on GVC governance and performance in the context of exogenous shocks are fully discussed.

While skilled migrants (SMs) are increasingly valuable human resources in organizations, little is known about their cultural identity threats and work in multinational corporations (MNCs). This study draws on the identity work perspective and interviews with 163 SMs to examine how and why SMs use identity work to cope with encountered cultural identity threats and what types of SMs’ identity work can be identified in MNCs. Our analysis shows that SMs respond to identity threats in the forms of cultural tightness, value conflict, and stigmatization by protective identity work (i.e., differentiating, detaching, distancing, and rejecting) or adaptive identity work (i.e., shifting, revising, extending, and suppressing).

This study explores how political connections help firms promote innovation in emerging markets by facilitating the acquisition of required resources and knowledge and establishing collaborative relationships with external partners. Further, we emphasize that reconfiguration and acquisition of resources and knowledge are critical for firms to seize the opportunities by focusing on the role of human resource (HR) slack and state ownership in the innovation process. By specifying the HR slack based on the accumulated knowledge and experience of employees, we explain that the way firms integrate the resources and knowledge from political connections with an appropriate type of HR slack critically affects firm innovation. We also argue that state ownership strengthens the capabilities of politically connected firms to acquire resources and knowledge for firm innovation because political connections and state ownership enable firms to establish a dual pathway to access resources and knowledge. Based on data from 3229 Chinese listed firms over a decade, our findings show the importance of highly-skilled HR slack to adequately allocate and absorb the resources and knowledge from political connections to foster firm innovation. The results also highlight the significance of state ownership in promoting innovation within politically connected firms.

Previous research on cross-border investments has shown the importance of choosing the right focal market—a target country in which a firm invests. International business scholars have also noted that cross-border investments frequently concentrate in regions. However, the factors affecting investment agglomeration within a region have yet to be determined. Building on theoretical insights from the Uppsala internationalization model, we propose two effects that can significantly impact investment agglomeration within a region: (1) the focal effect, linked to cumulative investment experience in a focal market, and (2) the neighborhood effect, related to cumulative investment experience in the region where a focal market is located. We also examine how the size of these effects is moderated by cross-national distance. To test our theoretical arguments, we use a dataset of private equity firms that made investments in three emerging market regions—Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe—from 1996 to 2011. The results support all our hypotheses. We contribute to the literature on regional internationalization by providing new insights that complement the Uppsala internationalization model.