Knowledge that Transforms

This article tests alternative hypotheses about why developing countries are pursuing privatization, a policy that gained considerable popularity in the 1980s. Univariate and multivariate analysis indicate that privatization was more likely to be pursued by countries with high budget deficits, high foreign debt, and high dependence on international agencies like the World Bank and the IMF. In regions such as Latin America and Asia, the trend was also more likely in countries (a) that seemed to have “overused” state enterprises in the past, and (b) those in which the private sector had grown faster than average and was thus more ready to assume tasks once assigned to state enterprises. In Africa, however, the policy may have been imposed by external agencies on countries that were not necessarily ripe for privatization. For multinational firms, the international opportunities created by privatization are likely to be greater in the 1990s than in the 1980s.

Increasing global competition is changing the nature of knowledge needed for international human resource management. This article assesses the publishing trends in international organizational behaviour and human resource management (OB/HRM) and interprets their implications for conducting transnational business. A review of over 28,000 articles in seventy-three academic and professional journals identified three important trends in international OB/HRM: first, the focus has shifted from single country and comparative research to studies on international interaction; second, culture's impact on managerial behaviour has become well recognized; and, third, the community of discourse uniting academics and professionals leads in generating knowledge relevant to transnational firms. The first two trends bode well for the relevance of international management research to practising managers. The third trend delineates the domain in which the majority of rigorous and relevant research is published and therefore the domain in which knowledge is advancing most rapidly.

This research explores expatriate assignments from a career development perspective. First, the article examines the impact of five organization-level career development programs and policies on expatriate effectiveness. Then, it explores the impact of five individual-level career management strategies on the success of expatriate transitions. Data from 118 expatriates in Saudi Arabia, Europe, South America, and Japan are presented to examine these career development issues.

Firms interested in servicing foreign markets face a difficult decision with regards to the choice of an entry mode. The options available to a firm include exporting, licensing, joint venture and sole venture. Several factors that determine the choice of a specific foreign market entry mode have been identified in previous literature. These factors can be classified into three categories: ownership advantages of a firm, location advantages of a market, and internalization advantages of integrating transactions. This study examines the independent and joint influences of these factors on the choice of an entry mode. Multinomial logistic regression model is employed to test the hypothesized effects.

This study empirically examines the level of the export-related expertise of manufacturing firms in a Midwestern state of the United States, various problems they face in export business, and types of government assistance desired, by their stage of export involvement. It also investigates the appropriateness of government export assistance and the gap between governmental export promotion efforts and private sector needs. It is shown that the identification of expertise, problems, and government assistance needs by export stage can help government agencies develop a systematic approach to export promotion.

This paper makes a case directed towards establishing the importance of global strategic considerations in choosing multinationals' entry mode. Specifically, it is our contention that beyond the environmental and transaction-specific factors well established in the literature to affect the entry mode decision, we should also consider the strategic relationship a multinational envisages between its operations across borders in reaching this decision. After incorporating various global strategic variables into an electric framework of the factors influencing the entry mode choice, this paper tests both the validity of the overall framework and the importance of each entry mode determinant in differentiating among entry modes. This is done based on ninety-six multinational managers' responses to a survey questionnaire concerning their entry mode decision experiences. The results suggest that an express incorporation of global strategic variables into an analysis of the entry mode decision is warranted.

This article assesses the extent to which the results of Bartlett and Ghoshal's [1989] work can be incorporated in what has now become one of the core explanations of multinational strategic management, i.e., the transaction cost-based theory of international production. We demonstrate that the transaction cost approach fully incorporates the empirical findings of Bartlett and Ghoshal's work. To do so requires that we make a new distinction between location-bound and non-location-bound firm-specific advantages. In addition, three possible uses of country-specific advantages by multinational enterprises need to be identified. While the transnational solution, as proposed by Bartlett and Ghoshal, is not itself a new theory of multinational strategic management, it is compatible with the transaction cost-based model of multinational strategic management.