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Our commentary returns to the conundrum of how institutions matter in international business (IB) by revisiting the 2018 JIBS Decade Award article by Jackson and Deeg (2008) on Comparing Capitalisms. We first synthesize their main insights around institutional diversity and track its significant impact within IB and other management fields. We then suggest three main takeaways that could move Jackson and Deeg’s agenda further in terms of developing a more nuanced approach to institutions in IB. We close with suggestions for future research and urge IB scholars to be more cautious when drawing on different strands of institutions theory.

We review four decades of research about the corporate governance of multinational corporations (MNCs), which we label International Corporate Governance (ICG). We identify and discuss three main streams of research that draw on different conceptualizations and theoretical lenses of (corporate) governance. After synthesizing their respective findings, we propose several avenues for future research that integrate these three streams of research with the goal of developing a more nuanced understanding of ICG. We hope this review article will inspire international business scholars to continue examining how corporate governance can be an effective tool for MNC success.

This study examines corporate stakeholder orientation (CSO) across industries and over time prior to the introduction of mandatory CSR. We argue that CSO is a legitimacy signal consciously employed by firms to demonstrate their shareholder and specific non-shareholder orientations in the midst of institutional pressures emerging from country and industry contexts. Using a 7-code index of CSO on CEO-shareholder communications from India, we find that in general large firms in India exhibit a predominant, significant and rising trend of pro-shareholder orientation in the six-year period immediately preceding the CSR law. Yet, we uncover significant industry differences in CSO potentially driven by four key factors: the degree of competitive dynamics, nature of products and services, extent of negative externalities and social activism, and exposure to international markets. Our findings support the view that while some minimum threshold of regulatory intervention is required to balance the interests of business with society, legislation raises questions in relation to the usefulness of a uniform one-size-fits-all CSR across all industries.

This paper develops an organizational approach to corporate governance and assesses the effectiveness of corporate governance and implications for policy. Most corporate governance research focuses on a universal link between corporate governance practices (e.g., board structure, shareholder activism) and performance outcomes, but neglects how interdependencies between the organization and diverse environments lead to variations in the effectiveness of different governance practices. In contrast to such closed systems approaches, we propose a framework based on open systems approaches to organizations, which examines these organizational interdependencies in terms of the costs, contingencies, and complementarities of different corporate governance practices. These three sets of organizational factors are useful in analyzing the effectiveness of corporate governance in diverse organizational environments. We also explore the impact of costs, contingencies, and complementarities on the effectiveness of different governance aspects through the use of stylized cases and discuss the implications for different approaches to policy such as soft law or hard law .

We develop a contingency approach to explain how firm ownership influences the monitoring function of the board—measured as the magnitude of external audit fees contracted by the board—by extending agency theory to incorporate the resource dependence notion that boards have distinct incentives and abilities to monitor management. Analyses of data on Continental European companies reveal that while board independence and audit services are complementary when ownership is dispersed, this is not the case when ownership is concentrated—suggesting that ownership concentration and board composition become substitutes in terms of monitoring management. Additional analysis shows that the relationship between board composition and external audit fees is also contingent upon the type of the controlling shareholder.

Ten countries have established quotas for female representation on publicly traded corporate and/or state-owned enterprise boards of directors, ranging from 33 to 50 %, with various sanctions. Fifteen other countries have introduced non-binding gender quotas in their corporate governance codes enforcing a \"comply or explain\" principle. Countless other countries' leaders and policy groups are in the process of debating, developing, and approving legislation around gender quotas in boards. Taken together, gender quota legislation significantly impacts the composition of boards of directors and thus the strategic direction of these publicly traded and state-owned enterprises. This article outlines an integrated model of three institutional factors that explain the establishment of board of directors gender quota legislation based on the premise that the country's institutional environment co-evolves with gender corporate policies. We argue that these three key institutional factors are female labor market and gendered welfare state provisions, left-leaning political government coalitions, and path-dependent policy initiatives for gender equality, both in the public realm as well as in the corporate domain. We discuss implications of our conceptual model and empirical findings for theory, practice, policy, and future research. These include the adoption and penalty design of board diversity practices into corporate practices, bottom-up approaches from firm to country-level gender board initiatives, hard versus soft regulation, the leading role of Norway and its isomorphic effects, the likelihood of engaging in decoupling, the role of business leaders, and the transnational and international reaction to board diversity initiatives.

In this paper we examine foreign location choices of the top 100 US multinational corporations (MNCs) in 1980 and 2000. We first ask whether there has been a change in MNC foreign location choice in this two-decade period. Second, we explore the underlying reasons of location change by focusing on country-level factors, accounting for firm-, industry- and regional-level explanations. Our findings suggest, first, that the extent of MNCs' activities around the globe is more extensive than assumed by regionalists' arguments and well beyond Ohmae's TRIAD, but still less widespread than claimed by the globalists - the two main traditions within the globalization-regionalization debate. Second, we uncover an interesting de-location pattern in this period. Third, we develop an integrative framework where both economic and institutional-cultural arguments are shown to influence MNCs' foreign location choice in different ways. We conclude with a discussion of our findings, and provide suggestions for future research.

Within the backdrop of comparative corporate governance research, we draw on the managerial reporting and impression management literatures to examine how the type, level, and nature of foreign shareholders, infused with their own governance logic, influence initial managerial earnings optimism and how foreign ownership shapes earnings guidance in a stakeholder-oriented setting. Drawing on Japanese data, and addressing endogeneity concerns, our results show that under the presence of foreign owners, managers are more optimistic in their initial earnings forecasts, but that in subsequent revisions they are more likely to provide timely adjustments of their earnings forecast and avoid making last-minute adjustments. This research illustrates how foreign practices travel across borders and contributes to understanding triggers to governance and strategic changes.

We seek to bridge the macro concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) with micro research in organizational justice. A theoretical model is presented whereby employees' perceptions of CSR impact their subsequent emotions, attitudes, and behaviors, mediated by instrumental, relational, and deontic motives/needs, as well as moderated by organizations' social accounts.

International business (IB) researchers have been slow to embrace a configurational approach in hypothesis formulation and empirical analysis. Yet, much of what IB scholars study is inherently configurational: various explanatory factors and their interplay simultaneously determine the outcome(s) studied, such as governance choice or firm-level performance. The mismatch between the nature of the empirical phenomena studied on the one hand, and hypothesis formulation and empirical methods deployed on the other, explains why many quantitative empirical studies in IB are overly reductionist, relying on hypotheses that assume linear (or simple, curvilinear), unifinal, and symmetrical effects. In this Editorial, we introduce IB scholars to contemporary configurational thinking and its analytical tool, fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). We discuss this tool’s main tenets, advantages, and disadvantages. We review the limited prior IB research using this approach and present a wide range of IB phenomena where it could be usefully applied. We propose that contemporary configurational thinking and fsQCA can help scholars produce insights more closely aligned with the complex realities of international business than conventional research approaches.