International Business Review最新文献

This study investigates the effects of international investment agreements (IIAs) on the internationalization decisions of emerging market multinationals (EMNEs). Drawing on the POLI advantage framework, we argue that bilateral investment treaties (BITs) add to the political and institutional capabilities of EMNEs, enhancing their OLI advantages in host countries. We identify two mechanisms through which BITs facilitate EMNEs’ internationalization: by offsetting political risk and by mitigating the informational asymmetries and transaction costs associated with investing in unfamiliar destinations. We probe the plausibility of our claims with data from an original survey of firms in four emerging economies and a larger sample of bilateral FDI flows from UNCTAD’s FDI/MNEs database. Our findings show a positive association between BITs and FDI from the South, especially in politically unstable and unfamiliar contexts. Apart from adding to the International Business literature on EMNEs, this study contributes to International Political Economy scholarship on FDI by highlighting the growing relevance of South-South IIAs.

Prior research shows that in multilingual teams, using a foreign language may adversely affect various work processes and outcomes, resulting in a language barrier. Using a qualitative interview-study approach, this study explores whether such barrier effects of foreign language use (FLU) also apply to team creative processes. The results show that FLU-induced barrier effects may extend to team creative processes and can hinder them—especially if language skills are lacking—due to reduced comprehension, increased workload and complexity, and foreign language anxiety. In addition, extending prior research, this study documents unexpected positive springboard effects of FLU on team creative processes. At the individual level, FLU may prompt linguistic detours, multiplicity of meanings, and alternative (e.g., acoustic, visual) associations. At the team level, spillover effects from the language domain may effectuate a generally more error-tolerant and less time-pressured team environment. Overall, this study enriches literature on language in international business by uncovering counterintuitive springboard effects of FLU and by integrating it with literature on collective creativity. It adds to research on collective creativity by advancing FLU—a characteristic central to international business—as a boundary condition of team-level creative synthesis, thereby illustrating the potential for cross-fertilization of these largely separate research fields. Finally, we highlight implications for international business practice.

Previous research has delved into both economic and non-economic determinants influencing foreign exits, yet the role of socioemotional wealth (SEW) in this strategic decision of family firms has been underexplored. Our study addresses this oversight by examining three principal dimensions from the FIBER SEW framework: family control (F), binding social ties (B), and the renewal of family bonds (R). We utilise a probit model to analyse data from Chinese listed family multinational corporations spanning 2008 to 2019. Our analysis yields two primary insights. Firstly, the presence of family directors and international experience collectively diminish the probability of foreign exits. Secondly, our findings do not indicate gender differences among successors as influencing foreign exits. Notably, the association between poor performance and foreign exits becomes attenuated with an increase in the number of family directors and their international experience, and in scenarios involving male successors. These insights significantly enrich our theoretical comprehension of how SEW dimensions inform strategic decision-making regarding foreign exits in family enterprises.

Burgeoning complexity and variability in the political and social contexts in which multinational enterprises (MNEs) operate has led to increased research on MNE nonmarket strategy. This focus is enhanced by ethical concerns about the nonmarket practices of big business, particularly in institutionally fragile or nascent market contexts. In this introduction to our special issue on the complexities and varieties of nonmarket strategy, we review the extant research on MNE nonmarket strategy, specifically on corporate political activity and corporate social responsibility. Our review suggests that to address the complexities related to nonmarket strategy in a changing international context, corporate stewardship is inadequate and MNEs must adopt a more authentic and culturally embedded values-based nonmarket strategy approach, which can contribute to long-term advantage. Subsequently, we introduce and synthesize the papers in our special issue and present a research agenda for furthering scholarship on values-based nonmarket strategy.

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.