This book provides an essential historical framework for understanding global business. The author shows how entrepreneurs built a global economy in the nineteenth century by creating firms that ...pursued resources and markets across borders. It demonstrates how firms shifted strategies as the first global economy disintegrated in the political and economic chaos between the two world wars, and how they have driven the creation of the contemporary global economy. Many of the issues of the global economy have been encountered in the past. This book reveals how entrepreneurs and managers met the political, ethical, cultural, and organizational challenges of operating across borders at different times and in different environments. The role of multinationals is placed within their wider political and economic context. There are chapters on the impact of multinationals, and on relations with governments. The focus on the shifting roles of firms and industries over time provides compelling evidence on the diversity and discontinuities of the globalization process. The book explores the history of multinationals across a wide spectrum of manufacturing, service and natural resource industries. By providing an accessible survey of the history of international business worldwide, this book will be key reading for students taking courses in International Business, Business History, and Entrepreneurship; and of interest to academics and researchers working in these areas. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance/0199272093/toc.html
Why have so many firms in emerging economies internationalized quite aggressively in the last decade? What competitive advantages do these firms enjoy and what are the origins of those advantages? ...Through what strategies have they built their global presence? How is their internationalization affecting Western rivals? And, finally, what does all this mean for mainstream international business theory? In Emerging Multinationals in Emerging Markets, a distinguished group of international business scholars tackle these questions based on a shared research design. The heart of the book contains detailed studies of emerging-market multinationals (EMNEs) from the BRIC economies, plus Israel, Mexico, South Africa, and Thailand. The studies show that EMNEs come in many shapes and sizes, depending on the home-country context. Furthermore, EMNEs leverage distinctive competitive advantages and pursue distinctive internationalization paths. This timely analysis of EMNEs promises to enrich mainstream models of how firms internationalize in today's global economy.
In this article, we review critiques of international business (IB) research with a focus on whether IB scholarship tackles "big questions." We identify three major areas where IB scholars have ...addressed important global phenomena, but find that they have had little influence outside of IB, and only limited effects on business or government policy. We propose a redirection of IB research towards "grand challenges" in global business and the use of interdisciplinary research methods, multilevel approaches, and phenomena-driven perspectives to address those questions. We argue that IB can play a more constructive and vital role by tackling expansive topics at the business-societal interface.
The information and digital age is shaped by a small number of multinational enterprises from a limited number of countries. This volume covers the latest insight from the International Business ...discipline on prevailing trends in business model evolution. It also discusses critical issues of regulation in the new information and digital space.
Since the 1950s, subsidiaries of the most prestigious foreign multinationals have played a key role in Brazilian economic development, thus creating a very competitive domestic market. On top of ...this, government interventions in the last few decades have been inconsistent and contradictory, resulting in a series of economic crises. Only the most resilient Brazilian firms have been able to survive and prosper in this challenging environment. This book, first published in 2011, analyzes a variety of leading Brazilian multinationals and examines their competencies and competitive strategies in a variety of different settings. It develops an innovative analytical framework based on international business, international operations management, and international human resources management. This framework is then applied not only to Brazilian multinationals, but also firms from Latin America, Russia, India and China. This provides novel insights into the rise of Brazilian multinationals and the increasingly important role played by emerging economy multinationals in the global economy.
This book examines and evaluates various private initiatives to enforce fair labor standards within global supply chains. Using unique data (internal audit reports and access to more than 120 supply ...chain factories and 700 interviews in 14 countries) from several major global brands, including NIKE, HP and the International Labor Organization's Factory Improvement Programme in Vietnam, this book examines both the promise and the limitations of different approaches to actually improve working conditions, wages and working hours for the millions of workers employed in today's global supply chains. Through a careful, empirically grounded analysis of these programs, this book illustrates the mix of private and public regulation needed to address these complex issues in a global economy.
Although the study of family firm internationalization has generated considerable scholarly attention, existing research has offered varied and at times incompatible findings on how family ownership ...and management shape internationalization. To improve our understanding of family firm internationalization, we systematically review 220 conceptual and empirical studies published over the past three decades, structuring our comprehensive overview of this field according to seven core international business (IB) themes. We assess the literature and propose directions for future research by developing an integrative framework of family firm internationalization that links IB theory with conceptual perspectives used in the reviewed body of work. We propose a research agenda that advocates a cross-disciplinary, multi-theoretic, and cross-level approach to studying family firm internationalization. We conclude that family firm internationalization research has the potential to contribute valuable insights to IB scholarship by increasing attention to conceptual and methodological issues, including micro-level affective motivations, background social institutions, temporal perspectives, and multi-level analyses.
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