Journal of World Business最新文献

Research at the subnational level typically uses borders which are politically determined or arbitrary, and hence not necessarily based on the markets which foreign firms target in their international business strategies. The current paper extends the international business literature at the subnational level by using markets identified through the profit maximizing lens of a host-country retailer, which is a conceptually more appealing methodological approach for firms wishing to enter a local market through exports. Evidence of home bias reversals at the catchment area level provides important insights for more refined market entry strategies, which may be missed at other subnational units of analysis. This study therefore establishes the importance of subnational analysis at the catchment area level and uses the reversal of domestic-country bias effects as an example to prove the importance of this methodological approach. The benefits of such an approach are tested using the sale of domestic and imported alcohol across catchment areas for a multi-location retailer in the province of Ontario.

The sudden COVID-19 pandemic sent shockwaves through international markets. This paper studies the relation between multinationality and risk. While IB literature agrees that internationalization, in times of relative stability, increases systematic risk, we argue that internationalization also improves resilience against exogenous shocks. Leveraging the sequential COVID-waves as a unique empirical laboratory, we show that although multinationality causes liability of foreignness that increases systematic risk, it also generates an asset of multinationality that enhances shock resilience. Yet this advantage of internationalized firms gradually erodes as less internationalized firms learn about the shock and investors adapt their valuations to the post-shock reality.

By drawing upon imitation research, this study addresses the role peers play in rapid internationalization by emerging market firms (EMFs). We argue that imitation of industry peers’ international expansion accelerates EMFs’ internationalization speed through two mutually reinforcing mechanisms: information-based imitation, which legitimizes similar operations and conveys valuable information; and rivalry-based imitation, which exerts considerable competitive pressure. We find that industry peers’ international expansion is positively related to EMFs’ internationalization speed. Such positive effect is stronger when EMFs lack prior international experience and when industry competitive intensity is strong.

This study aims to open the black box of heterogeneous responses to violent conflicts by focusing on subsidiaries’ operational exposure to violent conflict and their decisions to exit host countries. Drawing on real options theory, we propose a viable approach multinational enterprises can take when they encounter violent conflicts in their operating locations. Our analysis of 3,479 foreign subsidiaries operating in 11 countries over 26 years suggests that the exit decision of any given subsidiary located in a conflict-affected country depends on its operational scope. However, this effect depends on the characteristics of the operations the subsidiary undertakes, specifically, whether the subsidiary conducts natural resource-seeking operations and the degree of operational overlap with the same-parent affiliates.

Historical research represents an alternative understanding of temporality that can contribute to greater methodological and theoretical plurality in international business (IB) research. Historians focus on the importance of events within their historical context and structure their accounts through periodisation, assume that the temporal distance between the past and present determines the temporal positionality of researchers, and seek to reconstruct past events through historical sources, which require critical interpretation. Historical research provides an alternative methodological approach to temporality, context, and distance with relevance to a range of IB theories.

This paper investigates how sharing economy platform multinational corporations (SEP-MNCs) orchestrate ecosystem resources to drive sustainable growth in a different country, through a dynamic capability perspective. Based on a multiple-case design, we offer a process perspective that identifies three sets of distinct integrative capabilities that come to the fore at different stages of the SEP-MNC's ecosystem development in a different country. By arguing that dynamic capabilities need to be co-created, we posit that, ultimately, the platform ecosystem value creation requires collective engagements of both internal and external resources of the platform ecosystem in building and preserving the collaborative action that amplified their individual resources to identify new and novel opportunities. We therefore re-conceptualizing dynamic capabilities of SEP-MNCs resides at the ecosystem level where the capabilities become an emergent and highly integrated property, with recurrent patterns that only become apparent from continuous interactions with their ecosystem partners. We also contribute to the IB literature by offering a holistic view that infuses dynamic capabilities with the themes of interdependence, sub-national network coordination, and data intelligence; themes that are yet to be fully incorporated into IB scholarship.

By integrating the boundary-spanning perspective with the expatriate staffing literature, we explore why and how temporal boundaries between multinational enterprise (MNE) parent and subsidiary locations affect MNEs’ deployment of expatriates in foreign subsidiaries. Temporal boundaries, defined as local work-time schedule differences, delimit the degree of work-time overlap between two locations. A lack of work-time overlap between MNE parent and subsidiary locations creates significant barriers in day-to-day, remote real-time communication, resulting in increased deployment of expatriates as intermediaries by parents to overcome these barriers. Conversely, greater parent–subsidiary work-time overlap enables more remote real-time communication via digital technologies, altering the cost–benefit analysis of deploying expatriates over local nationals, consequently reducing parents’ reliance on expatriates as intermediaries. Therefore, we posit a negative relationship between parent–subsidiary work-time overlap and the expatriate ratio in a subsidiary. Further, we posit that the negative relationship is weakened by home – host country distance in terms of information and communication technology development and linguistics because technological and semantic boundaries can reduce the effectiveness of parent–subsidiary real-time communication. Empirical analyses of 22,556 subsidiaries established by 5,912 Japanese MNEs operating in 31 host countries between 1990 and 2018 support our theorizing.

This paper contributes to process-oriented international business research by showing how three distinct historical approaches can enrich theoretical understanding concerning temporality in firm de-internationalization. First, we show how comparative historical analysis unleashes the causal structure of the process and provides explanatory understanding of the temporal grounding of the mechanisms driving the process. Second, we explicate how interpretive history reveals the embeddedness of de-internationalization in the prevailing spirit of the time. Finally, we consider how poststructuralist history enables us to focus on the strong subjectivity of individuals in which multiple temporalities come together in a chaotic combination underlying behavior.

This paper applies the institutional work perspective to elucidate how and why dysfunctional effects are reproduced by HRM practices. Our analysis of headhunter-assisted recruitment of local employees in foreign subsidiaries demonstrates how mutual dependence, self-interests, and a stratified labor market lead to specific candidate search criteria and limit the scope of search. It also shows how these practices result in limited positive effects from the key actors’ perspective, but in the long run reproduce voluntary turnover, communication-competence misalignment, and limited use of local talent pools. However, because these practices have become commonly used, the actors are unwilling and/or unable to change the system.