Journal of World Business最新文献

This study investigates whether a digital business model helps firms internationalize faster. It tests the hypothesis that a digital business model accelerates the rate of internationalization because economies of scale enabled by digitalization exceed those offered by a non-digital business model. Based on analysis of foreign digital and non-digital entrants in the U.S. financial advice industry, the study found that while digital entrants scaled faster than their non-digital counterparts, a diverse product portfolio harmed digital entrants even when it benefited non-digital entrants. The contrast between scale and scope highlights that digitalization only conditionally benefits internationalization.

Literature provides insights into various mechanisms for achieving legitimacy via adaptation. Yet we know little about how internationalizing firms can break away from existing legitimacy conventions and still achieve congruence. We investigate how internationalizing firms selectively reconstruct meanings of market categories as sources of legitimacy. We qualitatively examine internationalizing craft beer industry across four countries (Australia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, and New Zealand) and find that breweries engage in stretching, corroborating, and molding market category meanings. We extend current theorizing on legitimacy by demonstrating how actors orchestrate cultural codes of their market categories to conform to legitimacy prescriptions that matter.

Time has significant implications for the functioning of international strategic alliances. Drawing on a systematic review (1943–2022), we consolidate the literature around types of time (i.e., clock, event, cyclical, and life-cycle) and time facets (e.g., duration and speed) in international strategic alliances. This review's findings aid us in developing a temporal-relational framework that intends to advance the study of how partners’ similar as well as dissimilar perspectives about time can engender either friction or enrichment. This framework supports a research agenda that emphasizes subjective time to advance theory about international strategic alliances.

The extant literature highlights a threshold productivity level firms are required to attain ex-ante in order to successfully undertake FDI. The current paper extends this framework by modelling a threshold productivity range which is below the required threshold productivity level. Firms in this range can successfully venture abroad when learning allows these firms to rise above that threshold productivity level, ex-post. Theoretical models which predict negative profitability for firms which undertake FDI when below the required threshold productivity level are extended to incorporate learning, and negative profits during the transition path turn positive once productivity increases above the threshold productivity level. The hypotheses developed are tested using panel data on firms operating in Canada over the period 2000 to 2014. These firm-level data include measures of productivity, firm size, R&D intensity, and when firms undertake outward FDI. We demonstrate that firms which venture abroad while in the threshold productivity range and also have sufficiently high levels of absorptive capacity, proxied by R&D intensity, are able to learn from their foreign experience, and hence increase their productivity levels, ex-post.

Recently there has been greater interest among international business researchers in studying processes and their temporal dimensions. We examine one such dimension by problematizing when processes are deemed to commence or end. Reperiodizing the start and end points of a process under study affects the theoretical conclusions about the process itself. We develop a methodology for reperiodization and apply it to an empirical study into the internationalization process of a type of new venture: the spinoff firm. Our conclusions specify the theoretical insights gained through reperiodization, demonstrating how this research strategy can be used to study processes in international business.

The cross-border transfer of practices lies at the heart of how multinational enterprises (MNEs) coordinate their international business activities. Research on transfer has increased substantially over the last three decades and now constitutes a well-established literature. For a systematic analysis, we review a sample of 167 articles published in 18 top journals. We structure these past contributions in a ‘Practice Transfer Framework.’ Our mapping reveals some limitations and blind spots in existing theoretical and methodological approaches. Beyond more conventional extensions, we offer several ideas that could qualitatively elevate research on transfer, commensurate with the paradigms of 21^st century global business.

Taking an identity perspective from the organizational ecology literature, we re-examine foreign subsidiary survival in a transition economy. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) with a socialist identity and privately owned enterprises (POEs) with a market identity exert different influences on foreign-owned enterprises (FOEs). SOEs and POEs affect the survival of FOEs primarily through the cognitive legitimation process. SOEs tend to crowd out FOEs due to identity conflict. Owing to identity overlap, POEs tend to increase the survival chances of FOEs. The level of socialist legacy in regions where FOEs are located affects the sociopolitical legitimacy of FOEs’ market identity, thus moderating the relationships between SOE and POE density and the survival of foreign subsidiaries.

While positive psychological capital (PsyCap) is a significant antecedent of favorable work outcomes, it is unclear whether this is true for global employees during an exogenous shock. Applying conservation of resources theory, we found that, under conditions of crisis-induced role novelty, global employees leveraged PsyCap to follow a resource-gain route to job satisfaction, whereas their ability to mitigate resource loss was limited. We differentiate among global employees, finding that role novelty compensated for lower PsyCap in motivating job engagement for those with higher travel obligations. Our results stress the importance of PsyCap in international human resource management scholarship and practice.

We analyze the determinants of firm-based inventors’ collaborations with universities abroad, comparing them with collaborations with national universities. We propose a micro-founded theoretical framework that introduces the role of personal linkages and global organizational pipelines as drivers of international academic collaborations, and we empirically investigate collaborations with national and international universities in a sample of inventors in Italy. We find that in general international collaborations depend positively on inventors working for multinational enterprises (MNEs). Instead for collaborations with national universities, the personal local linkages of the inventors play a large role. However, we also find that for collaborations with very distant universities abroad, such as US ones, working for an MNE is less crucial and the personal linkages of inventors become more important. In this case being an inventor with a network of foreign colleagues and with greater acquaintance with the norms of open science facilitates the interaction. This applies also to inventors who work for MNEs. The results point to a hybrid model of global linkages in the case of collaborations between firms and universities, in which both the personal international linkages of the inventors and the global organizational pipelines of MNEs play an important role.

What influences foreign plaintiffs’ likelihood of winning intellectual property rights (IPR) lawsuits in an emerging economy such as China? From an institution-based view, prior scholarly debate presents two competing perspectives on the evolving IPR regime in China, focusing on the incentives of internal development and the pressures of external legitimacy respectively. We integrate these two perspectives to examine the effects of regional research and development (R&D) investment on the likelihood of foreign plaintiffs winning IPR lawsuits. We identify a direct effect reflecting the evolving economic incentives of host regions, and two mediating pathways that correspond to the legal strategies employed by foreign plaintiffs to apply external legitimacy pressure on host region legal institutions. Our analyses of a sample of 1103 IPR disputes between foreign plaintiffs and local defendants in Chinese courts from 2008 to 2017 provide support to our arguments.