Journal of World Business最新文献

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) are increasingly expected to make their global operations sustainable, while overcoming important obstacles in a rugged global landscape. In this perspective article, we argue that a focus on their corporate governance (CG) actors – i.e., owners, directors, and executives – is key for understanding the premises of MNEs’ sustainable value creation. We develop an actor-centered perspective on MNEs whereby factors inherent to and surrounding CG actors – e.g., their cognition, personality, and values, as well as their interactions and governance – will determine the pervasiveness of their bounded rationality and bounded reliability, thus influencing whether, how, and under what conditions these key actors will contribute through their decisions to sustainable value creation. Our perspective advances nascent actor-centered research on MNEs’ non-market strategies, including corporate social responsibility and sustainability. Exploring the underlying mechanisms at the source of individual-level variation (next to firm-, industry-, and country-level variation) related to sustainable value creation may support theory development that can ultimately break new ground in explaining the strategic behavior and sustainable performance of MNEs. We formulate future research suggestions toward that end.

In this paper, using institutional and organizational learning theories, we argue that institutional fragility within India impacts the internationalization of Indian firms such that firms from more fragile regions are likely to have lower internationalization levels. We also suggest that this effect is moderated by inward (industry-level) foreign direct investment (FDI) and inward (firm-level) linkages with foreign firms. We test our hypotheses based on the analysis of 707 Indian firms over the period 2008–2018. Our study contributes to the literature examining the complexity, and the speed and consistency of institutional progress in emerging economies, and its impact on firms’ internationalization.

To ‘escape the rut’ of narrowly focusing on expatriate adjustment as a psychological state, we look to the literature on the adjustment of organizational newcomers. From this perspective, we extend theoretical and empirical concepts regarding dynamic social and proactive development processes into the study of expatriate adjustment. Our integrative review of both literatures provides the basis for a new, dynamic research framework as well as promising avenues for future research on expatriate adjustment and insights for the organizational newcomer literature. We aim to enrich expatriate management research and to contribute to cross-fertilization between the two disciplines.

We introduce this Journal of World Business special issue on methodological advances in international business (IB) research. Due to technological advances and the availability of bigger, deeper, and multi-level data, there is a need to reconsider, refashion, and reconceptualize IB research methodology. To do so, we discuss ethnography, multilevel modeling, textual analysis and multimodal data, visual methods, machine learning, accommodating multiplicity in qualitative research, and crowdsourcing. The future is bright for the field of IB because there are almost unlimited contributions that it can make to organizations and societies. But, to continue to do so, we must adapt and rethink our “research business model:” The way we think, conduct research, and report results to make meaningful contributions and impact both IB theory and practice.

This study examines how collaboration within top management teams (TMTs) composed of family owner-managers (FOMs) and nonfamily managers (NFMs) influences internationalization decisions. Based on a qualitative multi-case study, we identify four roles taken by TMT members: drivers (typically FOMs), experts (both FOMs and NFMs), boundary spanners (typically NFMs), and administrators (typically NFMs). We theorize how congruence regarding roles, emotional attachment, and risk perception fosters internationalization decisions, whereas frictions arise in case of incongruence and hinder decision-making. The study contributes to research on family firm internationalization and to emerging research on TMT structure.

Exogenous shocks have long been a feature of the global economy, yet they have become particularly salient in recent years. This Special Issue of the Journal of World Business addresses the shift to a New Normal characterized by frequent events that disrupt the international business context, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict. In this Introduction to the Special Issue, we discuss how the IB literature has treated exogenous shocks. We posit that important lessons can be learned from history, and from the experience of MNEs in the countries of the Global South. We also suggest future research avenues centered around exogenous shocks, international business, and multinational enterprises.

We theorize that linguistic grammar structures related to gender, pronoun use, and politeness distinctions influence individuals’ cultural values toward diversity, including masculinity, collectivism, and power distance, respectively. Based on first-handed data collected from a large sample of individuals (N = 9,058) who speak various native languages, our analysis shows that languages require speakers to arrange words according to linguistic grammar structures that govern how team members perceive equity, diversity, and inclusion. Our study suggests that language is a salient source of diversity that can shape belief systems toward diversity, even after controlling for more commonly studied diversity dimensions.

The benefits of having an internationally diverse alliance portfolio are well known. However, the challenges remain overlooked, especially the potential to curb firms’ international expansion beyond such alliances. Building on global connectivity literature, we study how firms’ international footprint through their foreign subsidiaries is affected by the geographical spread of their international alliances. Using data on a sample of U.S. high-tech firms, we find that this relationship follows a U-shaped pattern and is contingent on alliance portfolio geographic distance and firms’ absorptive capacity for internationalization. Deviations from the optimal international footprint lower firms’ innovation and financial performance.

Inclusion is an important consideration for international firms to fully realize their strategic human resources, yet there is limited research on how international business competencies relate to perceived inclusion. This study proposes and tests a social identity-based framework about how cultural intelligence relates to perceived inclusion through the mediating effects of synchrony preference and perceived workgroup similarity (in work styles and cultures/ethnicities). Support was found for this model based on data from a three-wave time-lagged study of working professionals. These findings offer theoretical contributions to several literatures and provide international organizations with practical knowledge about perceived inclusion in diverse workgroups.

Methodological developments are critical for driving theoretical advancements in international business (IB) due to the field's diversity regarding disciplinary, theoretical, and conceptual bases. We provide an accessible introduction to two methodological approaches—one related to design and one to analysis—that are currently underutilized in IB despite their great potential: (a) field and quasi experiments, and (b) text-based analysis. We describe each method and provide examples of how they can be used to make advancements in several IB domains and theories including internationalization process theory; ownership, location, internalization (OLI) paradigm; knowledge-based view of multinational enterprises; dynamic capability theory; and international entrepreneurship.