A New Generation in International Strategy

This book comprises eighteen cutting edge chapters by emerging scholars in international strategy, offering a variety of fresh perspectives on critical issues that the field will face in the near future. These young scholars have unique and innovative thoughts about international strategy, which are well ahead of the mainstream of international business academics. Various topics are addressed, including the rise of outsourcing and the global spread of research and development activities; structural innovations by multinational firms, with particular attention to organizing for the efficient transfer of knowledge resources within networks of alliances; and new ways of considering the effects of location, focusing on the relative importance of regional clusters and countries and the impact of geographical and cultural distance on international strategies. Stephen Tallman has geared the book to an academic audience, specifically faculty and graduate students in international business, international management, and global strategy. Sophisticated international business practitioners will also find it an interesting read.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1044/thumbnail.jp

Offshoring, Outsourcing, and Strategy in the Global Firm

Offshore outsourcing of many of the activities of the firm has become a major issue of concern in welfare economics, politics, business management, and international business scholarship. From both practical and scholarly perspectives, though, we must recognize that this is not a new phenomenon, and that neither outsourcing nor offshoring is necessarily the problem that has been represented in the popular and scholarly press (Contractor et al., 2010: Engardio, 2006). The production of goods in locations other than those in which they are sold has been an established strategy of multinational firms for decades--as has the subset of situations in which offshore locations are used to produce for home country consumption. Traditional situations such as Nike moving shoe manufacturing to Asia have become commonplace and attract little attention. However, the dramatic increase of offshore service provision since 2000 was unexpected, affects the sort of knowledge work that was to be the refuge of the developed world, and imposes international competition on firms, jobs, and markets that had been seen as exempt--and has attracted new attention. In a similar vein, we are finding that offshore outsourcing is expanding rapidly in new era sectors such as alternative energy. Even as the science and engineering of alternative energy emerge from Western university labs, companies hoping to exploit these new ideas are finding not only that overseas manufacturing is less expensive but also that only countries like China retain the capacity to manufacture such goods. Perhaps we should take a longer look at offshore outsourcing to see what it can offer us both as scholars and as business practitioners--but without the distractions of populist hysteria

Global Strategy: Global Dimensions of Strategy

This comprehensive volume from Wiley\u27s Global Dimensions of Business series explores the topic of international strategic management at an MBA or Executive Education level. Authored by an accomplished teacher who possesses a strong understanding of the market, this text offers clear frameworks coupled with lively, international case studies.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1043/thumbnail.jp

The Search for Externally Sourced Knowledge: Clusters and Alliances

External sources of knowledge have become more important to firms as they have dispersed their value-adding operations around the globe and outsourced them to alliances. The global network firm has access to a rich store of external knowledge – but what do we know about accessing this treasure trove? The purpose of this paper is to summarize key ideas behind the research on alliance networks with clusters to better understand when, how, and why firms would use one or the other, or both, approaches to accessing external sources of knowledge, and to suggest new directions for both practice and scholarship

Cooperative Strategy: Managing Alliances, Networks, and Joint Ventures

Strategic alliances are increasingly common, as many organizations look towards various partnering arrangements. This second edition of Cooperative Strategy extends the first edition\u27s clear and comprehensive survey of strategic alliances. Presenting different disciplinary perspectives (economics, strategy, organization theory) and numerous examples from the corporate world. The text has been thoroughly revised and updated, taking account of new theoretical models, and its coverage of case studies has been extended. It will be ideal for business students and managers alike wishing to understand the challenges of managing alliances.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1045/thumbnail.jp

Identifying Resources for Going Global

Business firms have been described as bundles of resources and capabilities (or assets and skills, or a variety of other terms indicating a combination of hard, or at least clearly identifiable, components and soft, or at least somewhat undefined, abilities and processes), bound together by ownership, contracts, common management, organizational culture, identity, and a variety of other processes. This chapter focuses on resources and capabilities, and considers how such component parts can enhance or discourage globalization, and how the firm\u27s stock of resources and capabilities is altered by processes of globalization

Do we buy more or less when we want to learn? The knowledge strategies and structural forms of US cross-border acquisitions

Cross-border acquisitions may be a primary mode for accessing novel knowledge and the building up of knowledge capabilities. However, the successful exploration of novel business and/or location knowledge may require specific structural forms for the incorporation and internal transfer to occur. In this paper we examine the relationship between the knowledge strategy and the structural form of the acquisition, specifically the degree of equity acquired. Our analyses of 439 US cross-border acquisitions revealed a curvilinear effect of location-related knowledge exploration but a linear effect of business-related knowledge exploration on the structural form of cross-border acquisition. We conclude that the knowledge strategy, and perhaps the type of knowledge being sought, is related in complex manners to the structural form adopted.cross-border acquisitions, knowledge strategy, equity ownership, structural forms, learning

Control and Performance in International Joint Ventures

The authors examine the meaning of control in international joint ventures (IJVs) and the relationships of potential means of control in such organizations to the performance satisfaction of the foreign partner. They propose a conceptual model that provides both a traditional ownership-focused internalization perspective on those issues and an integrated approach combining a broader transaction cost interpretation of control with a resource input-based bargaining power model. A set of simultaneous structural equations with endogenousexplanatory variables provides multiple possible paths from various resource and power inputs through different means of control to perceived performance satisfaction. In such a model, intermediate variables act both as dependentand independent variables; thus the complex theoretical interactions of the variables are modeled more comprehensively and realistically than in single-equation models

The Geography of Learning: Ferrari Gestione Sportiva 1929-2008

This article considers the mechanisms that permit and enhance the movement of highly tacit component (technical) knowledge and geographically sticky architectural knowledge across borders and between clusters and firms. We address a number of critical research questions that relate to intra- and inter-locational knowledge transfer. We use a theory-driven, longitudinal, single case study to develop a conceptual framework to examine and describe how shifting the geography of knowledge sourcing can facilitate architectural change by following the transformation of one business unit within a specialist global organization through a series of evolutionary steps that involved internalizing new component knowledge from other firms and locations, transforming the company\u27s architectural knowledge through various transactions with firms and individuals from a foreign cluster, and eventually radically transforming the concept of the firm and its focus. We close by generalizing this model to address the fundamental processes of the spatial aspects of organizational learning

Leveraging Knowledge Across Geographic Boundaries

This paper examines knowledge flows within and across geographic boundaries of clusters and nations in the biotechnology industry. We hypothesize that these flows are characterized by various factors relating to the knowledge itself and by firm innovativeness and the presence of prior knowledge flows at the firm level. Surprisingly, our findings suggest that geographic proximity does not matter in some instances, while in others it has a decidedly nonlinear effect opposite to that hypothesized. The pattern of findings points to the greatest contrast in the comparison of between-cluster and between-country flows and presents an opportunity to reevaluate the role of geography and knowledge flows