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The growth of outward foreign direct investment from emerging markets has led to increased scholarly attention on the internationalization of emerging market firms (EMFs). We break from the recent strategic approach on internationalizing EMFs to develop a problematization approach, which permits us to introduce a geographic relational perspective. We use this perspective to highlight process thinking, complex social realities, and relational practice as means by which to better develop theory on the internationalization of EMFs. Our emergent approach emphasizes the need to view EMF internationalization as deeply situated in multifaceted contextual influences, as influenced by path dependence and as manifested in practice. These three relational tenets (contextuality, path dependence, and practice) are central to our geographic relational approach’s ability to generate new challenging research questions for understanding EMF internationalization. Consequently, we add novelty to the international business domain by bringing space and process to the forefront of the EMF research agenda.

We examine the role of ownership structure on international diversification during institutional transition. We also examine how domestic and foreign ownership, as well as business group affiliation, moderate the performance consequences of international diversification. Our theoretical framework integrates agency and institutional perspectives with internationalization research. We argue that the ownership concentration, along with the identity of owners, will influence firm internationalization. Our results, based on a longitudinal sample of more than 5,000 publicly listed Indian firms during 1990–2005, demonstrate that greater domestic or foreign ownership is associated with a higher level of international diversification by emerging economy firms. Furthermore, a negative relationship emerges between international diversification and firm performance, moderated by the ownership concentration of domestic owners and group affiliation.

We find support for the role of experiential learning in the international expansion process by extending the stages model of internationalization to incorporate a sophisticated consideration of temporal and cross‐national variation in the credibility of the policy environment. Using a sample of 3857 international expansions of 665 Japanese manufacturing firms, we build on the concepts of uncertainty and experiential learning, to show that firms that had gathered relevant types of international experience were less sensitive to the deterring effect of uncertain policy environments on investment. One implication of our results is that research on international strategy should emphasize understanding the political institutions that constrain or enable political actors, just as entry mode research has done. A second implication is that research in the stages model of internationalization should give the same weight to the policy environment as a source of uncertainty to a firm, as it has given to cultural, social and market institutions. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Extant theories agree that debt should inhibit diversification but predict opposing performance consequences. While agency theory predicts that debt should lead to higher performance for diversifying firms, transaction cost economics (TCE) predicts that more debt will lead to lower performance for firms expanding into new markets. Our empirical tests on a large sample of Japanese firms support TCE by showing that firms accrue higher returns from leveraging their resources and capabilities into new markets when managers are shielded from the rigors of the market governance of debt, particularly bond debt. Furthermore, we find that the detrimental effects of debt are exacerbated for R&D intensive firms and that debt is not necessarily harmful to firms that are either contracting or managing a stable portfolio of markets.

In a study of a sample of 2,705 international plant location decisions by listed Japanese multinational corporations across a possible set of 155 countries in the 1990-1996 period, we use neoinstitutional theory and research on political institutions to explain organizational entry into new geographic markets. We extend neoinstitutional theory's proposition that prior decisions and actions by other organizations provide legitimization and information to a decision marked by uncertainty, showing that this effect holds when the uncertainty comes from a firm's lack of experience in a market but not when the uncertainty derives from the structure of a market's policymaking apparatus.

The pooled prevalence of anxiety and depression in Eastern Europe were 30% and 27%, respectively. Forty-one per cent of frontline healthcare workers suffered mental health symptoms. Southeastern Europe (Balkans) had lower prevalence of mental health symptoms than the rest of Eastern Europe. To perform a systematic and meta-analysis on the prevalence rates of mental health symptoms including anxiety and depression during the COVID-19 pandemic in the general population in Eastern Europe, as well as three select sub-populations: students, general healthcare workers, and frontline healthcare workers. Studies in PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, PsycINFO, and medRxiv up to 6 February 2021. Prevalence rates of mental health symptoms in the general population and key sub-populations during the COVID-19 pandemic in Eastern Europe. Data were pooled using a random-effects meta-analysis to estimate the prevalence rates of anxiety and depression. The meta-analysis identifies and includes 21 studies and 26 independent samples in Eastern Europe. Poland (n = 4), Serbia (n = 4), Russia (n = 3), and Croatia (n = 3) had the greatest number of studies. To our knowledge, no studies have been conducted in eleven Eastern European countries including Hungary, Slovakia, and Slovenia. The pooled prevalence of anxiety in 18 studies with 22 samples was 30% (95% CI: 24-37%) pooled prevalence of depression in 18 studies with 23 samples was 27% (95% CI: 21-34%). The cumulative evidence from the meta-analysis reveals high prevalence rates of clinically significant symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic in Eastern Europe. The findings suggest evidence of a potential mental health crisis in Eastern Europe during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Our synthesis also reveals a relative lack of studies in certain Eastern European countries as well as high heterogeneities among the existing studies, calling for more effort to achieve evidence-based mental healthcare in Eastern Europe.

Recent trends in the organization of multinational corporations (MNCs) in large emerging markets point to the (re)emergence of a host country headquarters (HCHQ) as a central structural element to the implementation of MNCs’ strategies in these countries. Yet, academic research on the strategy, structure and the organization of MNCs’ subsidiaries in a country has yet to account for this recent structural phenomenon. To help better understand this innovation in MNCs’ structural organization, we develop a new classification scheme, which focuses on the totality of an MNC’s subsidiaries within a single host country as a unit of analysis. As such, we emphasize an HCHQ perspective rather than a corporate headquarters (HQ) or a subsidiary perspective. We motivate this new classification scheme by leveraging the limitations of prior studies as well as considering the opportunities this new perspective offers for research on MNCs and for practice in international management.

We use an interdisciplinary approach to investigate multinational banks' foreign activities. We bridge core concepts from the stages theory of internationalization to internalization theory, to extend the literature on the defensive expansion hypothesis. Unlike the primarily aggregate levels of analysis employed in previous research on multinational banking, we utilize a firm-level analysis of the internationalization experiences of 21 Japanese banks in the period 1980-1998. We find that banks undertake foreign direct investment to secure internalization benefits by following their existing clients, and to achieve economies of scale in the application of their intangible assets in international markets. The magnitude of these relationships, however, is contingent upon the level of a bank's experience in the host countries. Consistent with predictions from internationalization theory, we find that the motivations for international expansion can change over time.

We examine the link between international diversification, organizational knowledge resources, and subsidiary performance. The success of international corporate diversification depends on a firm's capability to transfer knowledge to its subsidiaries, and how its local subsidiaries effectively utilize that knowledge. As knowledge resources are imperfectly mobile, a firm may find it difficult to transfer knowledge to its subsidiaries. In our analysis of 4964 Japanese subsidiaries over a 14-year period, we find that knowledge that is valuable, but not rare, positively affects subsidiary performance in the short term, but not the long term. In contrast, knowledge that is both valuable and rare affects subsidiary performance in the long term, but not the short term.

Although it is established that firms sometimes expand abroad to augment their capabilities, previous studies have generally focused on technological determinants of foreign expansion. We analyze capability-seeking aspects of foreign direct investment by examining the relationship between upstream (technological) and downstream (marketing) capabilities and the choice between acquisition and greenfield modes of international entry. In analyzing 2175 entries by British, German, and Japanese investors into the United States, we find that for downstream capabilities, which tend not to be geographically fungible, the absolute level of capabilities in the entered industry explains the mode choice. However, for upstream capabilities, which tend to be geographically fungible, the acquisition motive stems from a relative capability differential between host and home country firms. These results have implications for the concept of fungibility in the resource-based view of the firm as well as for the literature on sourcing of resident assets by foreign firms, which has thus far ignored issues of entry mode and downstream assets.