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
Based on extensive interviewing and access to a wide range of databases, this is an examination of the migration career of wealthy migrants who left East Asia and relocated to Canada, Australia, New ...Zealand, and the United States, in the 1980s and 1990s. * An interdisciplinary project based on over 15 years of research in Vancouver, Toronto, and Hong Kong, with additional comparative visits and consultations in Sydney, Beijing, and Singapore * Traces the histories of the migrants families over a 25 year period * Offers a critical view of the spatial presuppositions of neo-liberal globalization, and an insertion of geography into transnational theory
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.
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.
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.
This study explores 134 articles on agility and flexibility research published in the top-nine international business (IB) journals. Accordingly, we critically analyze, map and structure flexibility ...and agility research in IB, and synthesize the findings into an integrative framework. The paper identifies a wide range of definitions of the concept and a lot of work on its conceptualization. However, studies at the individual and institutional levels of analyses are scarce, and the concept is under-theorized, as there is a dearth of real theoretical underpinnings in this research stream. Thus, in addressing this gap, more qualitative and interdisciplinary research is needed.
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.
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.
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