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Over the past few decades, examinations of emerging economies (EEs) have received increasing attention in international business (IB) research. This article takes a critical stance on some of the re-occurring shortcomings of that research.

The authors conducted a critical literature review of 493 articles on EEs that have been published in five top-tier IB academic journals in the period 2010–2020. True to the nature of a critical literature review, the authors judge and question some of the practices that have impeded knowledge accumulation.

The authors found a recurring lack of definitional clarity and contextualization, as well as overgeneralized inferences from findings. The authors provide recommendations on how to address these weaknesses and a checklist to guide future IB research on EEs.

The authors question and problematize what they see as dominant but undesirable practices when conducting EE research. The actionable directions for addressing uncovered issues and checklist to guide future research in this area that the authors offer are rather bold and unambiguous.

Entrepreneurship policy is a vital component of any entrepreneurial ecosystem. However, the specific policy initiatives that have a greater impact on women's entrepreneurship remain unclear in many developing economies. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of entrepreneurship policies targeted at women’s entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

Employing fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), this paper utilises and analyses secondary data collected by the World Bank's Women, Business, and the Law (WBL) from 1970 to 2020, encompassing 48 countries within SSA.

Through our analysis, we identified two configurations that sufficiently support women's entrepreneurship. First, a combination of gender-based policies focussing on enabling “access to credit” and “signing of contracts”; and second, a blend of policies supporting “signing of contracts”, “business registration”, and “opening a bank account”, represent significant antecedents to supporting women's entrepreneurship. These distinct pathways are crucial to fostering women’s entrepreneurship in the SSA region.

The study's findings indicate that the impact and effectiveness of entrepreneurship policies targeted at women entrepreneurs in developing economies depend on the effectiveness of other policies that are in place.

This study offers new insights into the intricate interrelationship between entrepreneurship policies and women’s entrepreneurship in developing countries by considering the interdependence and combinative value of gender-based policies that effectively support women’s entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa.

This study empirically aims to examine the collaboration between social enterprises (SEs) and impact investors (IIs), which are organisations with similar interests but with distinct logics, and in high demand in emerging economies with complex problems. Despite the significant economic contributions of these organisations, there have been limited studies examining how they collaborate in different contexts, including theoretical insights explaining how they gain partner fit from resource synergy.

Mainstream businesses use the compatibility and complementarity concepts to examine buyer–supplier strategic alliances. Using similar concepts in the context of hybrid organisations, the authors interviewed six pairs of SEs and IIs with dyadic relations in Nigeria, aiming to deeply understand how they align dissimilar logics in pursuing common goals in emerging economies.

The authors’ findings revealed how compatibility criteria from the institutional logics perspective and complementarity from social exchange theory guide collaboration between SEs and IIs in an emerging economy. Using these theories provides new insights that distinguish SEs and IIs collaboration from conventional theories on the internationalisation of businesses, which remained insufficient for understanding the cross-border operations of SEs.

The study holds practical implications for organisations, regardless of their size, international investors, governments, organisations and individuals desiring to pursue sustainable business agendas in emerging economies with huge impact opportunities and the process involved.

The outcomes of this study extend knowledge of the theoretical lens examining collaborative entrepreneurship from the perspective of hybrid organisations. It also challenged existing knowledge on collaboration between SEs and IIs, often characterised by potential tensions due to the dissimilarity of institutional logics of actors.

This study provides an analysis of professional development school (PDS) dissertation research that focuses on learning in PDSs. These 103 dissertations written between 1990 and 2020 address an aspect of learning in PDS work, including inquiry as a pedagogical learning tool, student learning PK-12, intern/teacher candidate learning, university teacher educator learning, and inservice teacher learning. From the current exploration of PDS dissertations, most especially from the comparison studies, the authors have learned that there is still no clear path to presenting PDS as having a positive impact when compared with non-PDS experiences..

Within each of these categories, the authors examine the dissertations by methodology and explore common themes among dissertation findings. As the PDS movement enters its third decade of inquiry and builds its efficacy on models of learning, the findings provide insight into the degree to which PDS scholars are building on the past to determine future PDS research agendas around learning.

The authors examine the dissertations by methodology and explore common themes among dissertation findings. The themes included: intern learning does happen in PDS sites; PDSs provide structures for intern learning; teacher educators can learn from their PDS work; dissertations in the area of student learning overwhelmingly had inconclusive findings, except for research that focused on targeted interventions, which demonstrated student gains.

With fewer PDS-focused dissertations being written in more recent years, the authors wonder if the complexity of PDS may be a deterrent to the growth and sustainability of this model?

From the current exploration of PDS dissertations, most especially from the comparison studies, the authors have learned that the authors still do not have a clear path to presenting PDS as having a positive impact when compared with non-PDS experiences. However, the authors are beginning to understand the types of studies that are needed to move this agenda forward and hope the work will help inform the PDS community of some.

This is the first known study of PDS dissertations across time.

This paper contributes to the development of an enhanced understanding of the breakout strategies of immigrant entrepreneurs within a transnational context. It develops a dynamic notion of breakout by placing it within a wider understanding of immigrant entrepreneurial strategy characterised by multifocal embeddedness within transnational space.

This study adopted a qualitative research methodological approach. In-depth interviews were completed with 30 first- and second-generation UK-based Nigerian entrepreneurs and key informants, to provide data on business growth strategies of individual immigrant entrepreneurs in the context of opportunity structures across host, home and third countries.

Nigerian immigrant entrepreneurs adopted distinctive entrepreneurial strategies related to the complex and diverse transnational context within which they were embedded. Findings demonstrated how the realisation of diversification and differentiation strategies was particularly influenced by locational and spatial strategies, the specific contextual embeddedness of the entrepreneur and generational differences across entrepreneurs.

Conceptualising immigrant entrepreneurship from a standpoint of transnational, multifocal embeddedness produces a complex and multi-layered understanding of business breakout as a dynamic process. Drawing together the unifocal, bifocal and multifocal dimensions of embeddedness with findings on the breakout strategies being pursued by immigrant entrepreneurs, an original typology is presented which identifies different approaches to breakout across varied contexts. This has significant policy and practice implications for the content, targeting and access of business support and wider social issues, relating to the identities, social mobility and integration of immigrant entrepreneurs.

This study aims to understand what drives firms towards board gender diversity in emerging markets. The authors examine the effect of regulative, normative and cognitive pressures on board gender diversity and the moderating effect of national governance quality.

This study tested the hypotheses using unbalanced panel data for the period between 2014 and 2019, which includes 1,384 observations of 380 different firms located in emerging markets.

The results reveal that board gender diversity is directly conditioned by normative pressures (women’s economic and educational empowerment). This relationship becomes stronger if firms are located in countries with high governance capacity. Interestingly, this study finds that regulative and cognitive pressures do not enhance women’s presence on boards if they are not accompanied by strong national governance.

Although we have learned in recent years about how women’s presence on boards brings positive corporate outcomes, we know little about how country-level antecedents foster or hinder this gender diversity. This paper expands knowledge of the way gender-related institutions affect a firm’s board gender diversity, and these findings have policy implications for firms, policymakers, the government and other institutions.