استكشف المجموعة الواسعة من العناوين المتاحة.

Forty years after the publication of the original Uppsala Model, we revisit the empirical observations that inspired its conceptual development. The empirical evidence, we suggest, invites the formulation of an alternative and complementary model of the internationalization process of the firm, one that we have named the 'Casino Model' of internationalization. The Casino Model uncovers a number of new research issues pertaining to internationalization and to the nature of strategic decision-making under conditions of environmental uncertainty and partial ignorance.

Business organizations may expand internationally by replicating a part of their value chain, such as a sales and marketing format, in other countries. However, little is known regarding how such \"international replicators\" build a format for replication, or how they can adjust it in order to adapt to local environments and under the impact of new learning. To illuminate these issues, we draw on a longitudinal in-depth study of Swedish home furnishing giant IKEA, involving more than 70 interviews. We find that IKEA has developed organizational mechanisms that support an ongoing learning process aimed at frequent modification of the format for replication. Another finding is that IKEA treats replication as hierarchical: lower-level features (marketing efforts, pricing, etc.) are allowed to vary across IKEA stores in response to market-based learning, while higher-level features (fundamental values, vision, etc.) are replicated in a uniform manner across stores, and change only very slowly (if at all) in response to learning (\"flexible replication\"). We conclude by discussing the factors that influence the approach to replication adopted by an international replicator.

The key elements of the Uppsala school paradigm of the internationalization process of the firm are the historical context to which it applies and the micro-foundations that shape firm internationalization. Technological, institutional, and political developments of recent decades have fundamentally changed both the context of international business activities and the managerial practices that guide firm behavior. Consequent revisions of the model shifted its focus from ‘internationalization’ to ‘evolution’ in firms more generally, thereby undermining its relevance and paradigmatic status. This calls for a new conceptual basis and a ‘paradigm shift’ in research on the internationalization process of the firm. To promote this endeavor, this Counterpoint advocates the explicit adoption of historical perspectives, such as that of the original Uppsala studies, and methodologies, especially ‘archeological’ discourse analysis, as originally developed by Michel Foucault. Its aim is to understand the process of knowledge creation in specific societal contexts. Combined with social constructivist approaches to the sociology of knowledge, it could fruitfully be applied to the analysis of the formation and content of beliefs and practices regarding the efficacy of different internationalization strategies, as they have evolved in business firms and other relevant epistemic communities, such as those of professional experts or industries.

In this editorial for the Special Issue on International Entrepreneurship, we interrelate key concepts about the pursuit of opportunities from the entrepreneurship and international business literatures. In doing so, we consider the assessment of opportunities as an individual-level cognitive activity, the construction of opportunity as a firm-level innovative activity and the shaping of opportunity as an institutional-level structuring activity. We then extend the discussion to explore the notion of a distributed, global ecosystem of opportunities and opportunity seekers, which we believe may provide a platform for valuable future research.

Knight and Cavusgil's journal of International Business Studies Decade Awardwinning article offers numerous contributions to international business research. As one example, it advances cross-disciplinary conversation about entrepreneurial internationalization. A critical review of their study reveals, however, that certain findings require reinterpretation. This commentary does so, discussing the resultant implications and the question of when it is (in)appropriate to use the term \"born global\". Parts of Knight and Cavusgil are then used as a foundation to identify research questions at the level of the firm. Finally, points from Cavusgil and Knight's retrospective are used to argue that we need greater understanding of the individual(s) that are central to the firm's internationalization behaviour. Suggestions for research are made by drawing on concepts and theory from the entrepreneurship, innovation and psychology literatures.

The prevalent view among family-firm internationalization scholars is that family management discourages internationalization. This is because selling abroad is said to require more specialized managers and more resources than selling at home, and yet family firms are unwilling to recruit non-family managers with the required international skills and to dilute their control to obtain the necessary finance. We hypothesize that this argument overlooks the possibility that managers of family-managed SMEs choose business models that both minimize the above-mentioned limitations and leverage the strengths of family governance. Specifically, we argue that selling quality products in global niches allows family-managed SMEs to internationalize without the cosmopolitan managers and the high financial investments required for selling mass-market products abroad; at the same time a global niche business model requires the long time horizon and the high level of social capital that family governance can provide. Modeling a firm’s foreign sales through a gravity model, we test this hypothesis on a large sample of SMEs from four European Union countries. We find that family-managed SMEs have fewer foreign sales than other type of SMEs, but that the difference is partially bridged if family-managed SMEs have adopted a global niche business model.

Both Anderson and Gatignon and the Uppsala internationalization model see the initial mode of foreign market entry and subsequent modes of operation as unilaterally determined by multinational enterprises (MNEs) arbitraging control and risk and increasing their commitment as they gain experience in the target market. OLI and internalization models do recognize that foreign market entry requires the bundling of MNE and complementary local assets, which they call location or country-specific advantages, but implicitly assume that those assets are freely accessible to MNEs. In contrast to both of these MNE-centric views, I explicitly consider the transactional characteristics of complementary local assets and model foreign market entry as the optimal assignment of equity between their owners and MNEs. By looking at the relative efficiency of the different markets in which MNE and complementary local assets are traded, and at how these two categories of assets match, I am able to predict whether equity will be held by MNEs or by local firms, or shared between them, and whether MNEs will enter through greenfields, brownfields, or acquistions. The bundling model I propose has interesting implications for the evolution of the MNE footprint in host countries, and for the reasons behind the emergence of Dragon MNEs.

The Uppsala internationalization process model is revisited in the light of changes in business practices and theoretical advances that have been made since 1977. Now the business environment is viewed as a web of relationships, a network, rather than as a neoclassical market with many independent suppliers and customers. Outsidership, in relation to the relevant network, more than psychic distance, is the root of uncertainty. The change mechanisms in the revised model are essentially the same as those in the original version, although we add trust-building and knowledge creation, the latter to recognize the fact that new knowledge is developed in relationships.

This paper develops a dynamic capabilities-based theory of the multinational enterprise (MNE). It first reviews scholarship on the MNE, with a focus on what has come to be known as \"internalization\" theory. One prong of this theory develops contractual/transaction cost-informed governance perspectives; and another develops technology transfer and capabilities perspectives. In this paper, it is suggested that the latter has been somewhat neglected. However, if fully integrated as part of a more complete approach, it can buttress transaction cost/governance issues and expand the range of phenomena that can be explained. In this more integrated framework, dynamic capabilities coupled with good strategy are seen as necessary to sustain superior enterprise performance, especially in fast-moving global environments.Entrepreneurial management and transformational leadership are incorporated into a capabilities theory of the MNE. The framework is then used to explain how strategy and dynamic capabilities together determine firm-level sustained competitive advantage in global environments. It is suggested that this framework complements contract-based perspectives on the MNE and can help integrate international management and international business perspectives.

Extant literature on foreign entry increasingly recognizes firms' heterogeneity as a potential reason for inconsistency in results on the establishment mode choice, that is, whether and under which conditions firms should choose to enter a new country through a greenfield investment or an acquisition. Our study contributes to this debate by identifying family ownership and family involvement in management as potential powerful sources of such heterogeneity. Integrating international business studies with both corporate finance literature on family firms and recent contributions from the Socio Emotional Wealth perspective on family ownership, we claim that, due to greater risk aversion and lower access to information, the family involvement both in the firm ownership and management leads to a higher propensity towards greenfield initiatives (vs acquisitions). However, we also find that such a propensity decreases with international experience especially in family-owned firms given the greater ability of professionalized management to overcome family-related concerns on making acquisitions. Our analysis on 1045 foreign initiatives undertaken by 311 Italian family and non-family firms between 2003 and 2013 confirms our expectations, indicating family ownership as a significant driver of firms' international strategies.