Knowledge that Transforms

Journal of International Business Studies (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41267-022-00541-7 In their book The Contest for Value in Global Value Chains, Lilac Nachum and Yoshiteru Uramoto ask one of the most important – and unanswered – questions in international business and supply chain research: Who appropriates the value created in global value chains (GVCs) and why? The authors examine this question by focusing on the global apparel supply chain and on Bangladesh as the producing country. The book stands out by providing a holistic analysis of GVCs, from labor to manufacturers, buyers, and consumers. It paves the way for a more systemic understanding of value creation and appropriation in GVCs with critical implications for research, practice, and policy-making. According to Nachum and Uramoto, research has increasingly shown that there is a misalignment between value creation and value appropriation (also referred to as ‘‘value capture’’) in GVCs. The authors define value creation as the net value added to a supply chain by each participant (measured as sales – purchases), whereas value appropriation is defined as the share of gains of total value created by a supply chain (measured as total income – total costs). Value creation is thus mainly linked to productive capabilities in collaborative processes ‘‘driven by a common goal shared by the participants’’ (p. 15). It requires high levels of reciprocal interdependencies, and it can be described as a win–win scenario for participants. By comparison, value appropriation is linked to the product’s perceived value for consumers and their willingness to pay. The participants in the GVC have conflicting interests, and variations in power among the actors result in value distribution becoming a zero-sum game. Journal of International Business Studies (2022) a 2022 Academy of International Business All rights reserved 0047-2506/22 www.jibs.net

Informal institutions such as Guanxi play a critical role in compensating for insufficient formal institutions in emerging markets. Arising from the institutional evolution, Chinese entrepreneurs’ participation in political systems induces the emergence of new types of Guanxi that the entrepreneurs can draw on in internationalizing their new ventures. Drawing from institutional and cognitive decision-making theories, we theorize that the entrepreneurs’ political participation enhances their self-perceived status (willingness) and resource acquisition (ability) in their new ventures’ engagement in high-commitment entry modes. Our analysis of 5,999 Chinese private new ventures offers empirical support for the mediating effects of self-perceived status and resource acquisition on the association between entrepreneurs’ primary and secondary political participation and their ventures’ engagement in high-commitment entry modes. Our research contributes to the international business literature by examining the micromechanism of the interplay between formal and informal institutions and to the international entrepreneurship literature by highlighting the critical role that individual cognition plays in new ventures’ internationalization decision-making.

Recent advances in digitalization and increasing integration of international markets are paving the way for a new generation of firms to use non-traditional entry modes that are largely marginalized in previous entry mode studies. While extant research revolves around the level of resource commitment and control in foreign activities, non-traditional modes are encapsulated by the extent of embeddedness required for exploring new and/or exploiting existing resources. In particular, we draw attention to four such categories of non-traditional entry modes the literature has touched on, i.e., capital access, innovation outposts, virtual presence, and the managed ecosystem. We explore the key attributes, antecedents, and strategic implications of these modes. Our paper highlights the need for enriching current entry mode research by considering a broader range of entry mode activities available to firms as well as employing new theoretical perspectives to understand the complex phenomena of internationalization.

In responding to the Forsgren and Holm (2021) critique of internalization theory, we develop a capability-based model of internalization and quasi-internalization, highlighting the key role of the international recombination of assets. With external control mechanisms becoming more sophisticated, full internalization has become increasingly unnecessary. Rather, the capacity to orchestrate complex networks is an increasingly important source of competitive advantage. We demonstrate that internalization theory does not need to assume that the MNE is all powerful, or that it can dictate the choice of mode with its foreign business partners. We also disagree with the argument that internalization theory presumes perfect rationality. When managers’ perceptions deviate from reality, they do indeed make wrong choices (over- and under-internalization) that come with various types of efficiency penalties. We share the Forsgren and Holm view that a learning perspective can provide insights on the evolution of an MNE’s asset recombination mode, as it gains experience and knowledge. Furthermore, we show that internalization theory has been extended to incorporate such a learning perspective.

Under strict scrutiny of public governance primed by international relation tensions, geopolitics, and the rise of social movements and public activism in the globalized economy, public sentiment is exerting increasing pressure on multinational corporations (MNCs). Utilizing the context of inward acquisition, a sensitive cross-border action that often triggers sentiment of host-country nationals, we theorize from the public sentiment perspective and the public thermostat analogy that foreign acquirers will adjust their ownership levels in target firms according to how they perceive to be acceptable and legitimate as expressed by host-country nationals’ public sentiment toward their home country. Using a sample of 410 acquisition deals from 22 foreign countries/economies into China during 2010–2017 and a sentiment analysis of 100,902 blog posts, we find that a host country’s public sentiment toward the acquiring firm’s home country is positively related to acquisition ownership levels, and has a mutualistic symbiotic interaction with the host region’s marketization level. Our study contributes to the study of informal institutions by proposing public sentiment as a new form of informal institution that is normative-cognitive whilst affective, and can be mobilized and communicated broadly and timely via a public sphere to confer social, political, and cognitive legitimacy to MNCs.

This study examines how firms with scarce market and non-market resources can succeed in internationalizing, even in a host country that lacks trade and diplomatic relationships with the firms’ home country. With a hand-collected, historical database of the Spanish publishing industry’s investments in Mexico over the 20th century, we find that in a context of suspension of bilateral trade agreements and diplomatic relationships between Spain and Mexico, Spanish publishing firms leveraged Spanish emigrants to internationalize in the Mexican market, initially through exports, then through distribution and local commercial subsidiaries, and finally through local production. Spanish publishers progressively used emigrants to develop social and cultural support, to help establish formal and informal rules, procedures, and norms of institutions and to lobby in Mexico. Combining historical and inductive analyses, we offer a novel perspective on firms’ internationalization through a changing use of emigrants to endogenize the cultural, trade, and political distance between the home and the host country, and we develop new theoretical insights on the social, cultural, and political embeddedness of firms.

Although MNEs create inventions both internally and collaboratively with partners as well as within and across countries, we know very little about the effects that combining such inventive activities have on their profitability. This study develops an invention-based perspective that considers how MNEs' profitability is influenced by the ways they organize the development of inventions across organizational boundaries (internally or collaboratively) and geographic boundaries (within or across countries). This perspective postulates that profitability is not merely driven by advantageous technological endowments but also by how such technological assets have been created. Accordingly, it explains why specific combinations of inventive activities across the two boundaries affect the likelihood of creating breakthrough inventions differently, provide different revenue and cost advantages, and have different effects on MNEs’ profitability. It further explains why cross-country inventions contribute more to profitability when they are internalized, while within-country inventions are more profitable when they are created collaboratively.

In 2013, China launched its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a large portfolio of infrastructure projects across 71 countries intended to link Eurasian markets by rail and sea. The state-led nature of the Initiative combined with its transformative geopolitical implications have conditioned the type of engagement that many governments and firms in host and third countries are willing to take in Chinese-funded BRI projects. Building on two theoretical streams that have originated in international political economy but have received growing attention in international business, varieties of capitalism and geopolitics, this perspective shows how a greater understanding of the institutional and geopolitical context surrounding BRI helps decipher the selection of host-country firms and third-country MNEs in Chinese-funded BRI projects. We portray firm selection in a BRI project as the outcome of a one-tier bargaining game between China and a host country. We show how institutions and geopolitics influence both the legitimacy gap of Chinese SOEs in a host country and the host country’s relative bargaining power, affecting the likelihood that host firms and third-country MNEs are selected in BRI projects. We also discuss the geopolitical jockeying strategies that these firms can adopt to influence the outcome of the bargaining game.

This study addresses the growing calls among international business and international entrepreneurship scholars for greater research attention to the effect of leaders’ characteristics on their firms’ risky internationalization choices. Focusing on the fundamental leader characteristic identified in the international entrepreneurship literature, i.e., risk propensity, we develop and test an original framework for analysis, which suggests that CEOs with greater risk propensity will tend to steer their firms towards greater degrees of internationalization and towards more risky venues/locations (countries at a greater cultural distance) and vehicles/entry modes (acquisitions versus alliances). We also more precisely assess our underlying assumption of agentic CEOs affecting firms’ internationalization decisions by positing and testing additional moderator relationships, in which we suggest that the effect of CEO risk propensity on the riskiness of firms’ internationalization choices will be (1) amplified when CEOs enjoy greater power, and (2) attenuated for firms with greater internationalization experience. Empirically, our analyses show significant and robust support for both our main effect and moderator hypotheses. Our study has implications for the burgeoning literature on the micro-foundations of internationalization, as well as the upper echelons and international entrepreneurship literatures.