استكشف المجموعة الواسعة من العناوين المتاحة.

The complex nature of international business research, with its cross-country and multilevel nature, complicates the empirical identification of relationships among theoretical constructs. The objective of this editorial is to provide guidance to help international business scholars navigate this complexity and ensure that readers can trust their findings. We provide suggestions for how to rule out alternative explanations, explaining key considerations not only in empirical analyses, but also in theory building and in research design. Our discussion covers both qualitative and quantitative studies, because we believe that it is imperative to understand how trustworthiness is established in both traditions, even for international business researchers who self-identify with only one. This enables scholars to have a broader scope of knowledge when interpreting past research in the field and to be more adept at explaining their design choices to a diverse audience.

The literature on case studies, both in the field of international business (IB) and in the social sciences more generally, has tended to focus on the methods of data production and analysis suited to this research strategy. In contrast, in this paper we investigate methods of theorising from case studies. We seek to understand how case researchers theorise, and how future IB research might utilise case studies for theorising. By means of a qualitative content analysis of case studies published in Journal of International Business Studies, Academy of Management Journal and Journal of Management Studies, we construct a typology of theorising from case studies. Two dimensions of the case study, namely causal explanation and contextualisation, form the basis for our typology. We distinguish four methods of theorising - inductive theory-building, interpretive sensemaking, natural experiment and contextualised explanation - only the first of which has been widely used in JIBS in the period that we investigate. On the basis of our own qualitative analysis, we show the limitations of inductive theory-building, and argue that greater utilisation of the other methods of theorising would enhance the case study's explanatory power and potential for contextualisation. We argue for a more pluralist future for IB research.

While all multinational organizations face the challenge of managing tensions between local integration and global responsiveness, they are increasingly required to pursue additional, often paradoxical, objectives – such as social and commercial goals. However, we know little about how these tensions at the core of the MNC strategy interact. Based on an inductive qualitative study of four headquarters–subsidiary relationships in a Latin American Multinational Hybrid Organization, we develop a model showing the interplay of multiple tensions and management approaches to address them. This allows us to contribute to research on subsidiary roles, which we found to differ depending on how multiple tensions are addressed. Furthermore, we add to the literature on hybridity in multinational organizations by pointing out how regional differences between units of a single organization unfold. Finally, we provide some practical recommendations for the management of multinational hybrid organizations.

Information and communication technologies have given rise to a new type of firm, the ibusiness firm. These firms offer a platform that allows users to interact with each other and generate value through user co-creation of content. Because of this, ibusiness firms face different challenges when they internationalize compared with traditional firms, even those online. In this article we extend existing internationalization theory to encompass this new type of organization. We theorize that because ¡ business firms produce value through the creation and coordination of a network of users, these firms tend to suffer greater liabilities of outsidership when expanding abroad and therefore concentrate on network and diffusion-based user adoption processes as they internationalize. Based on a multi-case investigation of a sample of ibusiness firms, we develop new theory and testable hypotheses. Thus, we make an important contribution by expanding internationalization theory to a new set of firms.

The Welch et al. (J Int Bus Stud 42(5):740–762, 2011) JIBS Decade Award-winning article highlights the importance of the contextualization of international business research that is based on qualitative research methods. In this commentary, we build on their foundation and develop further the role of contextualization, in terms of the international business phenomena under study, contemporaneous conversations about qualitative research methods, and the situatedness of individual papers within the broader research process. Our remarks are largely targeted to authors submitting international business papers based on qualitative research, and to the gatekeepers – editors and reviewers – assessing them, and we provide some guidance with respect to these three dimensions of context.

This article responds to calls for IB researchers to study a greater diversity of international business (IB) phenomena in order to generate theoretical insights about empirical settings that are under-represented in the scholarly IB literature. While this objective is consistent with the strengths of qualitative research methods, novel empirical settings are not always well aligned with methods that have been developed in better-researched and thus more familiar settings. In this article, we explore three methods-related challenges of studying under-researched empirical settings, in terms of gathering and analyzing qualitative data. The challenges are: managing researcher identities, navigating unfamiliar data gathering conditions, and theorizing the uniqueness of novel empirical settings. These challenges are integral to the process of contextualization, which involves linking observations from an empirical setting to the categories of the theoretical research context. We provide a toolkit of recommended practices to manage them, by drawing on published accounts of research by others, and on our own experiences in the field.

How do the senior decision-makers within a multinational enterprise (MNE) think through and determine an internationalization decision? Despite the cognitive foundations of several key constructs, standard internationalization models do not explicitly incorporate managerial cognition. We argue that the boundedly rational decision-maker is underspecified in international business models and this oversight contributes to weak empirical findings on experience, learning, internationalization strategy and MNE performance. Drawing on these extant models, we identify seven knowledge domains and interdependences that may make up decision-makers' mental models. Granted rare access to senior executives and board members engaged in a foreign direct investment decision, we find substantial heterogeneity in the mental models these individuals used to make sense of the opportunity. This variance aligns with differences in individuals' experience along four dimensions: international breadth, depth, diversity and prior strategic decision-making. We argue these cognitive processes - how individuals exercise judgment about information search parameters, assessment and decision integration, and how decision teams coalesce in their thinking - are crucial microfoundations for modeling heterogeneity in firm-level internationalization strategies and performance.

We aim to build a greater understanding of how young entrepreneurial firms internationalize fast through foreign subsidiaries to become a multinational enterprise (MNE). Despite the prevalence of fast-paced international expansion, theory development on how it is achieved through high-commitment entry modes has been scarce. Our work substantially addresses this gap by conceptualizing how rapid multinationalization occurs. Using qualitative case studies, we explore eight young entrepreneurial firms operating in the software-as-a-service industry aspiring to achieve early market dominance internationally through rapid multinationalization. Drawing on the concept of industry recipes, we explain how recipe heuristics and recipe augmentation enable rapid multinationalization and showcase the economic and knowledge acquisition logics which underpin these endeavors. This study introduces internationalization via industry recipe, explains the micro-level regulation of internationalization speed, and contributes to aligning international entrepreneurship and MNE perspectives on internationalization.

Bartlett and Ghoshal’s transnational ‘solution’ for managing the MNC remains popular among scholars and practitioners alike. However, our in-depth qualitative study of Unilever, an exemplary case of a transnational, found that in the period 2000–2012 the company evolved into a very different organizational form with a distinct set of characteristics. We call this the neoglobal corporation. In explaining how and why this transformation occurred, we turn to organizational evolutionary theory, and use our case to generate a multi-cycle process model of MNC evolution. Given the dynamism of the MNC and its environments, we anticipate that the neo-global will also eventually transform, and call for more organization-level case studies of MNCs in future international business research.

This article investigates two important research gaps in international business (IB): how entrepreneurs evaluate international entrepreneurial opportunities (IEOs) and the role of time in the evaluation process. Drawing on the literature on decision-making models and the philosophical foundation of opportunity, this study employs Gioia's methodology and content analysis to examine how the founders of 15 early-internationalizing firms evaluated IEOs in the early- and late-stage of internationalization. The findings reveal that the interaction of time and three general rules of IEO evaluation that I coin 'simple', 'revised', and 'complex' influenced the entrepreneurs' decisions. The findings show that the founders transitioned from simple to revised and to complex rules in the IEO evaluation process and that various contingent factors such as time pressure, resource availability, and type of stakeholders drove these transitions. The three general rules correspond to what I label as 'opportunity actualization', 'revision', and 'development maximization' processes, respectively. I propose a Timebased Process model that reconciles extant internationalization models' (i.e., Process, Network, Economics, and Entrepreneurship) different explanations regarding why and how firms internationalize.