Companies’ choice of foreign operation modes (FOM) has been a core subject of international
business studies basically from its beginning (Hymer, 1960 [1976]; Root, 1964). A halfcentury
of research has brought us a set of established perspectives on companies’ foreign
operation mode choices; the most important being the economics based approaches of
internalisation and transaction cost theories (Anderson and Gatignon, 1986; Buckley and
Casson, 1976; Hennart, 1982), evolutionary and resource based approaches (Andersen, 1997;
Kogut and Zander, 1993; Madhok, 1997), institutional approaches (Kostova and Zaheer,
1999; Meyer and Peng, 2005), and process models based on learning and decision behaviour
theories (Johanson and Vahlne, 1977, 2009)...
