Letter from the Editors: Engaging with Oceania: Some Background about the Region – and Why It Matters for IB Research

This special issue aims to introduce readers to the southern Pacific region of Oceania, which includes Australia, Melanesia, Micronesia, New Zealand, and Polynesia. This region represents remarkable diversity of institutions, cultures, and languages, and its history and economic development are deeply intertwined with the ocean. While typically viewed as a collection of geographically-remote and generally small-population island nations, relative to global centers, Oceania offers an interesting context for IB research, with respect to a variety of issues, from the impact of climate change to cross-cultural management and geopolitics

To servitize is to (re)position : utilizing a Porterian view to understand servitization and value systems

Drawing on the case of a global servitizing company in the ship power industry, we use a Porterian toolkit for analyzing the implications of industry power and its consequences on firm vertical (re)positioning within the value system. Whereas repositioning has been seen as a way of moving closer to customers and obtaining new competencies, strategic moves aimed at increasing companies’ sphere of influence were neglected. This chapter illustrates how the power approach to repositioning, through different alternative mechanisms, complements the widespread capability view and contributes to value system analysis in servitization.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Dissecting home regionalisation: how large does the region loom?

Purpose: The paper aims to motivate more rigorous theoretical and empirical specification of the home regionalization phenomenon, in particular the dynamics of shifting advantage over time within a multinational enterprise. It aims to improve dialogue among regionalization researchers. Design/methodology/approach: Contrasting the economizing and behavioral perspectives on internationalization, the paper presents five different archetypes of the home‐regionalization phenomenon. These archetypes are predicated on strategic management stylizations of competitive advantage. Findings: The paper demonstrates that the notion of home regionalization as a dominant and superior model for firm internationalization remains a promising yet under‐explained and inconsistently articulated thesis. By introducing and exploring the archetypes, it shows the diversity of home‐regionalization theses, and the prospect that multiple forms of regionalization may be at play for different firms, industries and locations. Originality/value: The paper presents the full complement of archetypes of the home‐regionalization phenomenon and explores their corresponding assumptions. These explorations open up new empirical and theoretical research avenues for distinguishing any genuine region effects

Exploring Home-Regionalisation: The Case of Cross-Border M&A

Annual Conference of the Association of Japanese Business StudiesThis paper explores the home region bias of multinational corporations. We utilise a new dataset of more than 64,000 merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions from across the globe over a 19-year period. We demonstrate a very strong home country bias on the part of firms, and a substantially weaker, but still important home region bias. Nevertheless, MNCs appear far from home region-bound, and M&As appear an effective and increasingly utilised strategic mechanism for building and complementing firm-specific advantages within and across regions

Exploring trends in regionalisation

In this chapter, we revisit the empirical findings of Rugman and coauthors concerning the overwhelming home-regionalisation among the world's largest firms. Using a longitudinal research design and continuous measures of internationalisation, we observe a number of secular trends. Among other, we find that sales growth beyond the home region is faster than sales growth within the home region. We use our empirical results to critique and augment existing regionalisation theory. In particular, we raise doubts about the sharp distinction in the literature between expansion in the home region and expansion in host regions

Management Scholarships Contribution to Climate Change Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

As climate change pervades natural and social systems, the integration of social sciences in interdisciplinary climate change research is crucial but often lacking. In this study, we use bibliometric analyses of management research on climate change to understand how management scholars have navigated interdisciplinarity, and what impact their efforts had on top-tier climate change research. We find that management scholarship (1) features substantial engagement with an interdisciplinary knowledge base through backward references, and (2) fails to attract the attention of climate change research in top-tier interdisciplinary journals, as evidenced in very low and stagnant forward citations.