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.
Multinational enterprises are deeply engaged in nonmarket strategy (NMS), including both corporate political activity (CPA) and strategic corporate social responsibility (SCSR). In this review, we ...document the multinational NMS research according to contributions’ theme, method, context, theory, and level of analysis. We then develop an institutional multiplicity framework to organize our analysis of this large and fragmented body of literature. In so doing, we identify the most impactful contributions within three major themes – multinational CPA, multinational SCSR, and the integration of CPA and SCSR – and their respective subthemes, and call attention to limitations in the extant research. We also highlight promising avenues for future research, including expanding the scope of NMS to incorporate microfoundations research, integrating macrolevel scholarship on global institutions, placing greater attention on the interaction between CPA and SCSR, and incorporating multi-actor global issues and movements. Our review underscores the growing importance and missed opportunities of NMS research in the international business field.
The world is undergoing dramatic transformations. Many of the grand societal challenges we currently face underscore the need for scholarly research – including management studies – that can help us ...best sort out and solve them. Yet, management scholars struggle to produce concrete solutions or to communicate how their research can help to tackle these grand societal challenges. With this editorial, we want to help scholars seeking to ‘make a difference’ by broadening our understanding of what constitutes impactful research. We examine five forms of impact – scholarly, practical, societal, policy, and educational – outlining how scholars can systematically extend or enlarge their research agenda or projects to amplify their impact on the challenges societies face. We suggest that each of these forms of impact has intrinsic value in advancing the scientific enterprise and, together, can help to address key societal problems that reach beyond the immediate and traditional context of business management. With concrete suggestions for getting started on these forms of impact, and possible outputs for each, we hope to stimulate management and organization scholars to think more broadly about the opportunities for making an impact with their research and to begin doing so more often.
Businesses are increasingly participating in cross-sectoral partnerships to reduce their environmental impacts on society. At the same time, some are pursuing more entrepreneurial ventures to ...stimulate environmental innovations. Environmental issues, however, are evolving into grand challenges that could create massive disruptions to organizational and societal systems that transcend the interests or influence of individual firms. As such, successful adaptation to these challenges will require innovative solutions that leverage the resources and capabilities of all relevant actors. Drawing from research on cross-sectoral partnerships and environmental entrepreneurship, we propose collective environmental entrepreneurship (CEE) as a strategy to facilitate adaptation to changing global ecosystems. We explain how cross-sectoral partnerships can overcome some of the constraints facing individual sectors in developing innovative adaptations to grand environmental challenges. Further, we show how these initiatives can institute governance arrangements that help individual sectors reconcile their diverging interests. We then apply these insights to three cases where governments, private interests, and nonprofits have collaborated to adapt to the physical impacts of climate change through innovative partnerships and draw implications for how this construct could be applied to other global challenges facing society.
Distance is a fundamental construct in International Business/International Management (IB/IM) research. It also has practical implications for the conduct of business across borders. In this ...introduction to this Point‐Counter‐Point exchange, I comment on the two perspectives on the role of diversity as a complement or substitute for the distance construct. I argue that this discussion has ramifications for not just the distance construct, but broader assumptions and tenets in the IB/IM literature.
State interventions in markets assume varieties of forms in different economic systems. To capture this variety, we consider state capitalism as a multidimensional concept, first reviewing its ...historical evolution from both practical and scholarly vantages. We describe several dimensions of state capitalism and demonstrate how cross-national variations can be captured through positioning countries along these dimensions. We use cross-sectional data for a large sample of countries to derive factors that represent key dimensions of state capitalism. We demonstrate how cross-national and historical variation in state capitalism is captured by this Virtual Special Issue and offer suggestions for future research.
This paper examines the interaction effects of institutional differences in the cognitive, normative, and regulatory domains on cross-border acquisition and alliance formation. Using a sample of 673 ...cross-border acquisitions and alliances conducted by multinational corporations (MNCs) from the manufacturing sector of six emerging economies (EEs) over the period 1995-2008, we find significant mimicking (cognitive domain) of local firms' choice of ownership modes by firms. We also find that regulatory distance (regulatory domain) moderates the mimicking of both foreign and local firms while normative distance does not have any moderating effect. These findings contribute to our understanding of how MNCs mimic ownership modes in foreign market entry and how the interaction of this mimetic tendency with other institutional pillars affects these decisions.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is an increasingly pervasive phenomenon on the European and North American economic and political landscape. In this paper, we extend neo‐institutional and ...stakeholder theory to show how differences in the institutional environments of Europe and the United States affect expectations about corporate responsibilities to society. We focus on how these differences are manifested in government policy, corporate strategy, and non‐governmental organization (NGO) activism towards specific issues involving the social responsibilities of corporations. Drawing from recent theoretical and empirical research, and analysis of three case studies (global warming, trade in genetically modified organisms, and pricing of anti‐viral pharmaceuticals in developing countries), we find that different institutional structures and political legacies in the US and EU are important factors in explaining how governments, NGOs, and the broader polity determine and implement preferences regarding CSR in these two important world regions.
Introduction to the COVID‐19 Commentaries Muzio, Daniel; Doh, Jonathan P.
Journal of management studies,
December 2020, 2020-12-00, 20201201, Volume:
57, Issue:
8
Journal Article
PDF
