International corporate governance Aguilera, Ruth V.; Marano, Valentina; Haxhi, Ilir
Journal of international business studies,
06/2019, Volume:
50, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
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.
For a long time most international business researchers assumed homogeneity within national borders. More and more, international strategy is being considered at the subnational level. We review the ...current state of the literature that adopts this more fine-grained, subnational geographic level of analysis as well as studies combining multiple levels of geographic analysis. We consider the notion of the subnational region and provide an overview of regional grouping schemes applied in research. Our integrative framework shows how in the subnational context (1) firm, industry and environmental characteristics, (2) influence strategy, location choice and entry mode, and (3) the eventual consequences of firm decision-making. We synthesize prior work, address unresolved issues, and provide recommendations for future research advancing research on different geographic levels of analysis.
•There are eight shared research synergies between Asia, US and UK/Europe regions.•Competitive advantage, firms and firm performance are the strongest themes.•IB studies are primarily about ...performance, emerging MNE and MNCs/MNEs more broadly.•IB policy studies center on foreign business attraction, transnational governance and IB promotion.•Sole authorships are largely replaced by co-authorships, often on national level.
This paper analyzes the core international business (IB) areas covered by ten IB-focused journals to date using 13,937 documents reflecting more than 300 years of combined publication history. Using bibliometric and citation analysis, it provides a systematic understanding of the current IB landscape, explicates the relevance of the future of IB research and depicts trends in this research field with emerging prevalent themes identified. The strongest themes across IB journals are performance, perspective and emerging economies/MNEs, shared strongly across UK/Europe, US and Asia-based journals. Our findings report on the prevalent research field, economy and geography, the latter analyzing the impact of author numbers and distribution, and thus, scale effects. Within this context, sole authorships are largely replaced by co-authorships, yet often on national level. We further limited the study to IB policy and found the focus centers on key themes of foreign business attraction, transnational governance and IB promotion.
Leveraging the recent research interest in emerging economies, this Perspective paper argues that an institution-based view of international business (IB) strategy has emerged. It is positioned as ...one leg that helps sustain the "strategy tripod" (the other two legs consisting of the industry- and resource-based views). We then review four diverse areas of substantive research: (1) antidumping as entry barriers; (2) competing in and out of India; (3) growing the firm in China; and (4) governing the corporation in emerging economies. Overall, we argue that an institution-based view of IB strategy, in combination with industry- and resource-based views, will not only help sustain a strategy tripod, but also shed significant light on the most fundamental questions confronting IB, such as "What drives firm strategy and performance in IB?"
Multinational subsidiaries do not merely seek legitimacy within their dual institutional contexts; they also strive to articulate an organizational identity by drawing on institutional resources ...embedded in these dual contexts. We draw attention to the subsidiary's identity duality and conceptualize it as a paradox, i.e., as the juxtaposition of the contradictory, interdependent, and persistent characteristics of the 'global' and the 'local' in the subsidiary's identity. Using 57 years of archival data from Hindustan Unilever, the Indian subsidiary of Anglo-Dutch multinational Unilever, we observe changing patterns in the articulation of identity claims by subsidiary leaders and develop a process model of how subsidiaries navigate identity duality over time. We find that subsidiary leaders may use two modes of organizational identity work for this purpose - logic ordering (the articulation of identity claims that respond to contradictory institutional demands by privileging one and subordinating the other) and logic bridging (the articulation of identity claims that respond to contradictory institutional demands by effecting a Janusian integration of the said demands). Over time, and employing these modes of identity work, leaders at Hindustan Unilever sustained a dynamic balance between the dual cores of the subsidiary's espoused identity.
This study advances our understanding of the contextualization of the effects of cultural intelligence (CQ). Drawing from trait activation theory and institutional theory, we develop a multi-level ...model showing how host countries’ informal and formal openness towards foreigners facilitate or constrain the importance of expatriates’ CQ in becoming embedded in the host organization. Furthermore, this study positions organizational embeddedness as a mediator in the association between expatriates’ CQ and a central element of expatriates’ jobs – knowledge sharing in the foreign workplace. Results from a cross-lagged survey of 1327 expatriates from 100 different nations residing in 30 host countries combined with secondary data indicate expatriate CQ relates positively to organizational embeddedness. Cross-level interaction analyses further suggest that in-group collectivism, the proxy for host countries’ informal openness towards foreigners, facilitates the importance of CQ as a predictor of expatriates’ organizational embeddedness. In contrast, CQ was not found to interact with the proxy for host countries’ formal openness towards foreigners, i.e. national immigration policies. Consistent with predictions, we identified that CQ relates positively to knowledge sharing and that organizational embeddedness carries an indirect effect. We discuss the implications for theory and practice.
This paper incorporates sloping marginal cost curves and their variations across industries into an open macro model, motivated by the fact that industries’ output, imports, and exports are more ...procyclical when their economies of scale arise from sloping marginal cost curves rather than fixed costs. The model, consistent with the data, delivers endogenous within-firm interdependence across markets and export gains/losses, which reproduce observed industrial business cycle patterns as well as more correlated aggregate business cycles across countries. The findings highlight the importance of marginal cost structures in international business cycle research.
•In US manufacturing industries, heterogeneous economies of scale mainly arise from non-constant marginal costs rather than fixed costs.•Output, exports, and imports are more procyclical in industries with decreasing marginal costs.•An open macro model with different slopes of the marginal cost curves well reproduces the industrial and aggregate international business cycle patterns.
We review the classic theory of the MNE and past attempts to use it to understand the internationalization of firms from emerging markets. We offer two criteria to determine whether EMNEs modify ...classic theory or not: (1) establishing appropriate theoretical reference points, and (2) distinguishing between theoretical constructs and empirical variables. We suggest that the literature can benefit from moving beyond comparing EMNEs to DMNEs and focusing instead on more fruitful issues. Specifically, emerging markets offer the opportunity to observe the origin of the capabilities of MNEs in general and the development of the institutional ecosystem that supports internationalization.
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