Journal of World Business最新文献

We explore multinationals’ de-internationalization at the onset of the 2022 Russia/Ukraine crisis, based on their CEO's political ideology. Using motivated cognition logic, we propose that the differences between conservative- and liberal-leaning CEOs regarding their attitudes toward change and social justice influence their receptivity to stakeholders’ demands regarding divestment. Using a sample of US MNCs, we find support for our arguments. This research is of scholarly importance as this crisis may intensify the terrains of contestation which multinationals represent for stakeholders that are making claims over their location decisions, often perceived as a sign of acceptance into a country's political actions.

Building on the mixed gamble perspective, we examine family versus nonfamily firms’ propensity to increase or decrease their internationalization in response to different sources of risk. Our framework explains how a firm's mixed gamble calculus of internationalization can change as it adjusts to business, industry, and institutional circumstances. Using an unbalanced panel of 1031 publicly traded firms from 11 European countries over a 15-year period, our study offers unique insight on why firms, depending on their degree of family ownership, calculate the mixed gamble of internationalization differently and why they vary in their decisions to expand or withdraw from internationalization. Our study makes an important step toward a better understanding of internationalization strategy in family firms, clarifying the mechanisms behind whether they choose to protect and ‘fight’ for their domestic market thereby reducing their internationalization scale or prefer to escape from the uncertainty and turbulence and ‘flee’ toward international markets.

Inpatriation experience (i.e., working at headquarters) for host-country national (HCN) subsidiary managers is supposed to be beneficial for foreign subsidiaries’ knowledge transfer and financial performance. Applying upper echelons theory, we investigate whether HCN subsidiary CEOs with inpatriation experience promote knowledge transfer from multinational corporation (MNC) headquarters to their subsidiaries via the formation of social ties at MNC headquarters to drive subsidiary performance. Moreover, we theorize and investigate if HCN subsidiary CEOs’ motivational cultural intelligence can amplify the positive effect of inpatriation experience. Combining survey and archival data from 289 subsidiaries of MNCs in South Korea, our results partially support our theoretical model. Our findings offer important implications for expatriate staffing, inpatriation assignments, and subsidiary management.

Based on insights from the spillover, international business, and knowledge management literatures, we study factors that enhance multinational enterprise (MNE) scaling and growth. Viewing MNEs and their employees as potentially rich knowledge sources, we draw attention to MNE-to-MNE knowledge spillover which fuel MNE scaling throughout organizations and employ panel data spanning 44,256 foreign and 21,246 domestic MNEs during 2004-2017. Our results show that (a) foreign MNEs benefit from depth and breadth of organizational knowledge spillover available in a geographic region, (b) domestic MNEs benefit from the depth of human capital knowledge spillover, and surprisingly, (c) domestic ownership hampers MNE scaling.

Exogenous shocks have become more frequent in recent years. Responses to one major crisis have often been discussed though there has been little research on now firms can handle multiple shocks, sometimes back-to-back ones. Using Lebanon as a strategic research site, we explore how MNEs’ CSR practice helps them to adapt to multiple exogenous shocks over a period of time. First, employing a process model, this paper shows the generative capacity in MNEs’ ‘people, process and structures’ in developing the capabilities to respond to multiple shocks. Second, a phenomenon of imprinting and imbrication is highlighted as firms leverage new and existing capabilities to address a current crisis and to prepare for subsequent ones. Third, we introduce a new capability, termed here as “exigent capacity,” which enables firms to drive humanitarian aid in crises. Exigent capacity culminates from the preceding capabilities developed, specifically, creative reflexivity and multidexterity.

Disasters – natural or manmade – are on the rise with far-reaching implications for international business (IB) actors and transactions. While the Covid-19 pandemic has generated much academic interest for its impact on business in general, little effort has been made to consolidate the fragmented research on disasters more broadly in the field of international business. Therefore, it is important and urgent to consolidate the existing knowledge to provide a solid basis for future research. We systematically review 132 articles published between 1991 and 2022 and critically evaluate the nascent but rapidly growing literature at the intersection of disasters and IB. Our examination of the different types of disasters (natural and manmade) shows two separate streams: (1) a dominant MNE-centric stream of strategic IB research which regards disaster as an exogenous shock impacting MNE strategies, responses, and resilience, and (2) an emergent stream which places disaster as a more central, embedded phenomenon of investigation impacted by MNEs and other global actors. Our systematic review highlights the gaps in this literature and concludes with a discussion of the intersection of IB-disasters in relation to the 17 United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to suggest directions for future research.

A limited idea of what ethnography involves, and dominant disciplinary ideas of rigour and validity stand in the way of International Business studies engaging more deeply with ethnography. For higher managerial and scholarly relevance, we propose the use of “reflexive engagement”. Reflexive engagement involves the researcher (ethnographer), the research subjects (actors) and those reading the study report (audience) in the “ethnographic triangle”. We outline the principles of reflexive ethnographic engagement with all three sides of the ethnographic triangle. We provide ethnographers in International Business studies with concrete research and writing advice regarding the three criteria of ‘excellent’ ethnography, namely positionality, plausibility and intersubjectivity.

Building on emerging debates on the ‘dark’ and ‘bright’ side of digital globalization, and calls for considering its environmental and social implications in more detail, this perspective article seeks to ‘unravel’ these components of ‘the digital age’ for International Business (IB). Inspired by the affordance perspective developed in Information Systems research, we offer IB scholars a new approach to ‘zoom in’ on the (potential) role of individual novel technologies in addressing specific sustainable development issues. Three examples illustrate the relevance of this approach for multinationals and for developing innovative research avenues in IB, which extend existing insights on digital globalization.

Deploying small world representation logic, we examine the context-specific factors that inform managerial decision-making in conflict-torn countries. Drawing on insights from thirty-one managers, we spotlight nine higher-order heuristics that commonly inform MNEs’ mental representations and their managers’ decision to exit or stay. These heuristics were identified by categorising the commonalities arising from our respondents’ accounts on what information they search for (discovery heuristics) and how it was evaluated (evaluation heuristics). We discovered that information accessibility, conditioned by firms’ in-country experiences, is paramount. Furthermore, since employees are strategy shapers, they can undermine the resilience-enhancing benefits of operational flexibility in conflict-torn countries.

Corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) can occur in the multinational enterprise's (MNE) domestic and international markets, thereby risking corporate reputation. However, are corporate reputations differentially influenced by the location of CSI events? Drawing on the ethnocentric bias perspective, we examine how CSI affects corporate reputations according to whether CSI emerges in the MNE's home or international markets. We theorize that, when CSI occurs in an international host market, the negative relationship between CSI and corporate reputation is generally weaker. Conversely, when CSI arises within the home location, home country-located CSI has the strongest negative relationship to corporate reputation. Our findings generally reflect the core argument of the paper: home-country based CSI incidents may be more consequential to an MNE's corporate reputation compared to those CSI incidents which unfold in certain host countries. Our longitudinal analysis, comprising of 2,401 CSI events, involving 465 MNEs, confirms our theorizing. Among our principal contributions, this study adds to the growing and important literature on the dark side of international business (IB).