Explore the vast range of titles available.

This study investigates the determinants of Chinese outward direct investment (ODI) and the extent to which three special explanations (capital market imperfections, special ownership advantages and institutional factors) need to be nested within the general theory of the multinational firm. We test our hypotheses using official Chinese ODI data collected between 1984 and 2001. We find Chinese ODI to be associated with high levels of political risk in, and cultural proximity to, host countries throughout, and with host market size and geographic proximity (1984-1991) and host natural resources endowments (1992-2001). We find strong support for the argument that aspects of the special theory help to explain the behaviour of Chinese multinational enterprises.

Terrorism threatens international business (IB) through its direct and indirect effects. As governments tighten security at public sites, businesses have become more attractive terrorist targets, with important implications for the operations and performance of multinational firms. While terrorism has been substantially studied in other fields, there has been little scholarly research to address terrorism and the distinctive challenges that it poses for IB. In this article we conceptualize terrorism in relation to IB. We provide background on the dimensions and effects of terrorism, and develop a theoretical grounding for terrorism research by drawing on the literature from IB, economics, political science, and other fields. After discussing findings from the literature review, we offer a comprehensive agenda for future research regarding the relationship between terrorism and IB. Our agenda emphasizes the effects of terrorism, organizational preparedness, company strategy and performance, global supply chain and distribution channels, and human resource issues. Our review helps establish a baseline for future empirical research. Consistent with the early stages of research, IB scholars are encouraged to offer useful perspectives and effective solutions that shed needed light on terrorism and help reduce its destructive effects for IB and multinational firms.

We define globalization as the geographical dispersion of multinational enterprises (MNEs)' value chain, in combination with increased inter-regional coordination, and use detailed firm-level data to show that 12 of Sweden's 17 largest manufacturing companies indeed are global. By developing a Globalization Process Model we theoretically argue, in contrast to much of the existing literature, that globalization may evolve to a more general phenomenon. The globalization process is tortuous as MNEs have to develop dynamic capabilities which make them gradually more competitive and able to cope with varying institutional contexts. Empirical testing on globalization of MNEs originating from other home countries is suggested.

The social licence to operate (SLO) concept is little developed in the academic literature so far. Deployment of the term was made by the United National (UN) Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the UN 'Protect, Respect and Remedy' Framework, which apply SLO as an argument for responsible business conduct, connecting to social expectations and bridging to public regulation. This UN guidance has had a significant bearing on how public regulators seek to influence business conduct beyond Human Rights to broader Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) concerns. Drawing on examples of such public regulatory governance, this article explores and explains developments towards a juridification of CSR entailing efforts by public regulators to reach beyond jurisdictional and territorial limitations of conventional public law to address adverse effects of transnational economic activity. Through analysis of an expansion of law into the normative framing of what constitutes responsible business conduct, we demonstrate a process of juridification entailing a legal framing of social expectations of companies, a proliferation of law into the field of business ethics, and an increased regulation by law of social actors or processes.

We examine the responses of South African multinational enterprises (MNEs) to corruption in African markets in the context of institutional voids. Corruption is a source of uncertainty and additional transactional costs for MNEs and it necessitates a strategic response. The research employs a qualitative study of a sample of MNEs with experience in internationalising into Africa. The results indicate that corruption in African markets is pervasive and closely associated with the institutional voids in these countries. MNEs see themselves as 'institution takers' responding to countries' institutional makeup at the organisational and individual level but fail to fully appreciate their impact on institutions both positively and negatively. Rather MNEs focus on strategic responses at the organisational level to address corruption operationally in the host country. We add to the existing literature by providing a dynamic framework of the complex webs of association between institutions, MNEs and corruption in conditions of economic underdevelopment. The research suggests that MNEs do not need to get caught in a vicious cycle whereby they perpetuate corruption in conditions of underdevelopment and institutional voids but instead can contribute towards a virtuous cycle through which they institutionalise ethical foundations.

As the field of international business has matured, there have been shifts in the core unit of analysis. First, there was analysis at country level, using national statistics on trade and foreign direct investment (FDI). Next, the focus shifted to the multinational enterprise (MNE) and the parent's firm specific advantages (FSAs). Eventually the MNE was analysed as a network and the subsidiary became a unit of analysis. We untangle the last fifty years of international business theory using a classification by these three units of analysis. This is the country-specific advantage (CSA) and firm-specific advantage (FSA) matrix. Will this integrative framework continue to be useful in the future? We demonstrate that this is likely as the CSA/FSA matrix permits integration of potentially useful alternative units of analysis, including the broad region of the triad. Looking forward, we develop a new framework, visualized in two matrices, to show how distance really matters and how FSAs function in international business. Key to this are the concepts of compounded distance and resource recombination barriers facing MNEs when operating across national borders.

Engaging the debate regarding the appropriate level of geographic diversification for multinational enterprises (MNEs), we examine a critical, yet unresolved, question: How is performance impacted by the MNE's level of intra-and inter-regional diversification versus the total level of geographic diversification? Using data from 123 U.S.-based MNEs over a seven-year period and leveraging both sales-based and subsidiary-based measures for diversification, we find that performance increases at an increasingly higher rate as firms concentrate more heavily on intra-regional diversification. Regarding inter-regional diversification and total geographic diversification, we find inverted-U relationships to exist between firm performance and the level of geographic diversification. Different from recent research on multinationality, our robustness checks indicate no evidence of a sigmoidal relationship between the degree of regional diversification and performance.

Purpose The authors revisit the traditional OLI paradigm with the objective to allocate politics within the set of internationalization advantages by building on the political strategy literature. The authors outline the specific role of political advantage that facilitates and propels the international expansion of state-owned multinational enterprises (SOMNEs) from emerging markets.Design/methodology/approachA conceptual paper which explains the role of political advantage in the internationalization of SOMNEs. The authors expand the scope of the OLI to capture the impact of firms' home governments' policies and relationships with host countries which are leveraged by SOMNEs in their internationalization.Findings The authors define political advantage as a new type of advantage which depends on and is sourced from external actors. The authors argue that P-advantage is a multifaceted and unstable part of POLI composition, which is contingent on political shifts and may be leveraged by various firms. The authors also assert that political capabilities have limitations in sustaining political advantage, which may be compensated via enhancing the political activity of firms.Originality/valueThe authors conceptualize the POLI-advantages paradigm for the internationalization of SOMNEs by proposing that in addition to the traditional ownership, location, and internalization advantages, firms can capitalize on their political advantage to enter markets where internationalization might have been difficult without their political connections.

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.

The globalization of state-owned multinational companies (SOMNCs) has become an important phenomenon in international business (IB), yet it has received scant attention in the literature. We explain how the analysis of SOMNCs can help advance the literature by extending our understanding of state-owned firms (SOEs) and multinational companies (MNCs) in at least two ways. First, we cross-fertilize the IB and SOEs literatures in their analysis of foreign investment behavior and introduce two arguments: the extraterritoriality argument, which helps explain how the MNC dimension of SOMNCs extends the SOE literature, and the non-business internationalization argument, which helps explain how the SOE dimension of SOMNCs extends the MNC literature. Second, we analyze how the study of SOMNCs can help develop new insights of theories of firm behavior. In this respect, we introduce five arguments: the triple agency conflict argument in agency theory; the owner risk argument in transaction costs economics; the advantage and disadvantage of ownership argument in the resource-based view (RBV); the power escape argument in resource dependence theory; and the illegitimate ownership argument in neo-institutional theory. After our analysis, we introduce the papers in the special issue that, collectively, reflect diverse and sophisticated research interest in the topic of SOMNCs.