International Business and the Migrant-Owned Enterprise

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Strategic Ambidexterity and Its Performance Implications for Emerging Economies Multinationals

Acknowledgements: We would like to thank the IBR Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Pervez Ghauri for his overall insightful suggestions, support, and guidance for this special issue. We would also like to thank the authors who have submitted their work. Our thanks also go out to our outstanding reviewers for the valuable comments and feedback given during the review processPeer reviewedPostprin

Strategic Agility in International Business: A Conceptual Framework for “Agile” Multinationals

Strategic agility is a fuzzy concept that may be counter intuitive as well as confounding to some scholars in terms of the agile strategies' contextual issues. At the same time, the need to be agile is crucial for firms, especially for Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) that operate in culturally different host countries. Thus, a deep understanding of strategic agility is very intriguing for both academics and executives, as several gaps are apparent in the extant literature. In this paper, we review mainstream studies on agility in the international business context, discussing its relevance and proposing main aspects of strategic agility to clarify further this indistinct concept. Moreover, we provide a novel conceptual framework based on the integration of agility in different operational areas (e.g. Information Technology, supply chain and production) that organizations should foster to become an “agile multinational”. Our synthesis represents an innovative strategic direction for MNEs to understand better strategic agility, which clearly extends the concept of flexibility, while managing stakeholder relationships in order to develop key dynamic capabilities. Finally, we also discuss the main contributions of the other articles included in this special issue, thus providing specific examples of agility in well debated IB contexts (e.g., emerging markets). We also suggest some future research areas for this complex and ambiguous concept. © 2020 Elsevier Inc

Stakeholder engagement for innovation management and entrepreneurial development: A meta-analysis

This paper reviews contemporary studies in entrepreneurship literature related to innovation management (IM), stakeholder engagement (SE), and entrepreneurial development (ED), using bibliometric techniques and longitudinal statistical analysis of 1059 articles published in the Journal of Business Research (JBR) and other relevant business and management journals indexed in Scopus from 1974 until July 2020. We have employed a structured literature review and meta-analysis to explore the emerging research patterns in prospective observational studies encompassing the field of ED, SE, and IM. Our findings suggest that dynamics of the interaction of SE, IM, and ED are shaping the scholarship of academic research in entrepreneurship. Our meta-analysis reaffirms that contemporary research conducted at the intersection of SE, IM, and ED indicates the consolidation of these tenets in future research in entrepreneurship leading to an integrative view. Finally, we present future research directions at the intersection of SE, IM, and ED for entrepreneurship research

Strategic agility in international business: A conceptual framework for “agile” multinationals

Strategic agility is a fuzzy concept that may be counter intuitive as well as confounding to some scholars in terms of the agile strategies' contextual issues. At the same time, the need to be agile is crucial for firms, especially for Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) that operate in culturally different host countries. Thus, a deep understanding of strategic agility is very intriguing for both academics and executives, as several gaps are apparent in the extant literature. In this paper, we review mainstream studies on agility in the international business context, discussing its relevance and proposing main aspects of strategic agility to clarify further this indistinct concept. Moreover, we provide a novel conceptual framework based on the integration of agility in different operational areas (e.g. Information Technology, supply chain and production) that organizations should foster to become an “agile multinational”. Our synthesis represents an innovative strategic direction for MNEs to understand better strategic agility, which clearly extends the concept of flexibility, while managing stakeholder relationships in order to develop key dynamic capabilities. Finally, we also discuss the main contributions of the other articles included in this special issue, thus providing specific examples of agility in well debated IB contexts (e.g., emerging markets). We also suggest some future research areas for this complex and ambiguous concept

Do we need to distance ourselves from the distance concept? Why home and host country context might matter more than (cultural) distance

We scrutinize the explanatory power of one of the key concepts in International Business: the concept of (cultural) distance. Here we focus on its effect on entry mode choice, one of the most researched fields in international business strategy. Our findings might, however, be equally be relevant for the field of International Business as a whole. Our analysis is based on a review of 92 prior studies on entry mode choice, as well as an empirical investigation in over 800 subsidiaries of MNCs, covering nine host and fifteen home countries across the world. We conclude that the explanatory power of distance is highly limited once home and host country context are accounted for, and that any significant effects of cultural distance on entry mode choice might simply be caused by inadequate sampling. Entry mode studies in particular, and International Business research in general, would do well to reconsider its fascination with distance measures, and instead, focus first and foremost on differences in home and host country context. We argue that serious engagement with deep contextualization is necessary in International Business research to pose new and relevant questions and develop new and innovative theories that explain empirical phenomena