Journal of International Business Studies

Tung, Rosalie L.

doi: 10.1057/s41267-022-00569-9pmid: N/A

Verbeke, Alain

doi: 10.1057/s41267-022-00571-1pmid: N/A

Ioannou, Ioannis; Serafeim, George

doi: 10.1057/s41267-022-00579-7pmid: N/A

In our Decade Award-winning article from 2012, we theorized and provided evidence consistent with nation-level institutions having a significant impact on corporate social performance (CSP) variation across companies. By establishing a link between the macro (i.e., country level) and micro (i.e., firm level) levels of analysis and by synthesizing across multiple disciplines including institutional economics, political science, cultural research, and institutional theory, we were able to demonstrate that differences across countries in terms of the political system, the education and labor system, the financial system and the cultural system significantly impacted variation in CSP across companies. In this Retrospective, we briefly discuss our original findings and elaborate on future research directions. Given the weak evidence regarding the impact of the financial system in our original study, we specifically focus on discussing recent developments in the financial system and their implications for research. We suggest additional research opportunities inspired by recent articles by scholars of international business that have extended our original article in important ways.

Yi, Jingtao; Li, Jiatao; Chen, Liang

doi: 10.1057/s41267-022-00561-3pmid: 36267500

Despite the surge of interest in digital globalization, its social dimensions have received far less attention than deserved. The lack of conversation between the two prominent areas of IB research, digitalization, and corporate social responsibility, presents a valuable opportunity for extending the agenda Ioannou and Serafeim (J Int Bus Stud 43(9):834–864, 2012) pioneered a decade earlier. We briefly depict the organizational differences between multinational enterprises (MNEs) and multinational platforms (MNPs), followed by a closer look at how social responsibility of digital platforms might depart from our conventional understanding derived from MNEs. We then propose the notion of ecosystem social responsibility emphasizing social value co-creation before categorizing the main areas of social issues specific to MNPs. Based on these ideas, we derive several new insights into the social challenges faced by firms governing global platforms versus multidomestic platforms, respectively, as they serve international markets. Lastly, we discuss future research directions and, in particular, the implications for ecosystem sustainability.

Goerzen, Anthony; Sartor, Michael; Brandl, Kristin; Fitzsimmons, Stacey

doi: 10.1057/s41267-022-00575-xpmid: N/A

Ioannou and Serafeim's (J Int Bus Stud 43:1–31, 2012) JIBS Decade Award-winning article outlines the impact of national institutional differences on firm corporate social performance (CSP). We build on their contribution by proposing that to identify how national institutions shape CSP, we need to consider various levels that have an impact on this relationship, i.e., the micro, firm, subnational, and supranational levels. We elaborate on each of these levels to argue that scholars should consider adopting a broader approach to analyzing CSP drivers. We develop potential research opportunities to inspire future scholars to extend our understanding of national institutions and their influence on CSP. These insights also aim to inform the connection between firm behavior and CSP performance.

Napier, Elizabeth; Knight, Gary; Luo, Yadong; Delios, Andrew

doi: 10.1057/s41267-022-00584-wpmid: 36589252

We examine the 2022 JIBS Decade Award article by Ioannou and Serafeim (J Int Bus Stud 43(9):834–864, 2012) and review the literature since 2012 to clarify research developments in corporate social responsibility and corporate social performance (CSP) in the multinational enterprise, articulating key themes, findings and antecedents. We present a general framework that highlights unique traits and processes of CSP for MNEs. To advance scholarly progress, we delineate how new theoretical perspectives, such as organizational identity and strategic choice, can be blended with the IB literature to deepen theorization of the topic. We also discuss how new global dynamics, such as geopolitics, digitization, and activism, may shape CSP strategies and activities for MNEs and how future research can tackle these issues.

Cuervo-Cazurra, Alvaro; Grosman, Anna; Megginson, William L.

doi: 10.1057/s41267-022-00522-wpmid: 35573037

We review and bridge the literature on the internationalization of state-owned firms and sovereign wealth funds to provide a novel understanding of how government ownership affects foreign investments in three ways. First, we explain how state-owned firms and funds behave differently from private ones because they need to balance governments’ nonbusiness objectives and firms’ business goals. This results in competing predictions on whether government ownership helps or hinders internationalization due to particular nonbusiness objectives. Second, building on the review, we provide suggestions on how to extend research topics and theories of the firm by incorporating these nonbusiness objectives in the internationalization decisions in four areas: home government’s endowments, characteristics, and attitudes; host-country expansion’s support, influence, and impact; home- and host-country relationship conflicts, mediation, and disguising; and management’s orientation, opacity, and arbitrage. Third, we capture how governments may use state-owned multinationals and sovereign wealth funds to nudge host-country governments by introducing the concept of discreet power and the use of four strategies (recognition, values, development, and supremacy) to achieve it. This helps to outline the beginning of a unified approach to how governments use their foreign investments to achieve nonbusiness goals.

Wang, Peng; Liu, Bin; Delios, Andrew; Qian, Gongming

doi: 10.1057/s41267-022-00513-xpmid: N/A

We replicate and extend Mohr et al.’s work (Journal of International Business Studies 47: 408–426, 2016), which hypothesized that increased state participation in the equity of international joint ventures (IJVs) decreased dissolution likelihoods, as tested with a sample of 623 Sino–foreign IJVs in the 1985–2009 period. Given the rapid developments in China’s economy and its institutional environment, we ask the question of whether the effects in Mohr et al. (2016) can be observed over a long period of time. We examine the generalizability of their findings (1) by replicating their study with a larger sample from the same data source, and over a longer period (1985–2017), and (2) by studying a sample of 803 IJVs from the same population but from another data source (the Annual Census of Chinese Industrial Enterprises) in the 2000–2017 period. We find that state equity can benefit IJV survival from favorable regulatory support, but it can also lead to lower survival rates due to unfavorable governmental intervention. Overall, we advocate a two-sided effect of state equity that leads to a curvilinear relationship between state equity and IJV dissolution, where time is an important boundary condition.

Griffith, David A.; Lee, Hannah S.; Yalcinkaya, Goksel

doi: 10.1057/s41267-022-00510-0pmid: N/A

Concerns have been raised as to the potentially deleterious effects of advertising on society. We examine this issue given the recent calls to explore the societal effects of international business activities, the substantive nature of advertising spending globally, and the movement by governments to hold businesses accountable for societal harms. We build upon the general theory of competitive rationality, suggesting a positive relationship between advertising spending and happiness at the country level. We integrate an institutional economics framework into the general theory of competitive rationality to understand country effects. We explore whether institutional environments (i.e., political, regulatory, and social) are associated with happiness and/or moderate the relationship between advertising spending and happiness. We empirically examine these relationships using a 34-country, 9-year unbalanced panel dataset. Our findings indicate that advertising spending at the country level is positively associated with happiness, even when accounting for country-level institutional direct and moderating effects. We discuss our results in comparison to prior findings, highlighting implications for international marketing theory and practice, and setting forth a foundation for debate and research in the field.

Bennett, Daniel L.; Boudreaux, Christopher; Nikolaev, Boris

doi: 10.1057/s41267-022-00515-9pmid: N/A

Using institutional economic theory as our guiding framework, we develop a model to describe how populist discourse by a nation’s political leader influences entrepreneurship. We hypothesize that populist discourse reduces entrepreneurship by creating regime uncertainty concerning the future stability of the institutional environment, resulting in entrepreneurs anticipating higher future transaction costs. Our model highlights two important factors that moderate the relationship. First is the strength of political checks and balances, which we hypothesize weakens the negative relationship between populist discourse and entrepreneurship by providing entrepreneurs with greater confidence that the actions of a populist will be constrained. Second, the political ideology of the leader moderates the relationship between populist discourse and entrepreneurship. The anti-capitalistic rhetoric of left-wing populism will create greater regime uncertainty than right-wing populism, which is often accompanied by rhetoric critical of free trade and foreigners, but also supportive of business interests. The effect of centrist populism, which is often accompanied by a mix of contradictory and often moderate ideas that make it difficult to discern future transaction costs, will have a weaker negative effect on entrepreneurship than either left-wing or right-wing populism. We empirically test our model using a multi-level design and a dataset comprised of more than 780,000 individuals in 33 countries over the period 2002–2016. Our analysis largely supports our theory regarding the moderating role of ideology. However, surprisingly, our findings suggest that the negative effect of populism on entrepreneurship is greater in nations with stronger checks and balances.