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In developed markets, emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs) seem to be more discriminated by host country nationals than foreign developed market multinational enterprises (DMNEs). They are challenged with host country nationals’ prejudices and face a stigma of being from emerging markets. While literature agrees that EMNEs suffer from additional disadvantages due to their country-of-origin, research fails to identify those factors that may lead to a higher discrimination against EMNEs than against foreign DMNEs.

Based on institutional theory, we look at institutional-related and resource-related antecedents that have an impact on various forms of direct and indirect discrimination by host country nationals.

Our framework analyzes the crucial differences between host country nationals’ perception of EMNEs and foreign DMNEs and the resulting challenges for EMNEs in the developed world. It enhances our understanding of the importance of institutional environments in explaining differences in host country nationals’ discrimination against foreign MNEs.

The extant literature on emerging market multinationals (EMNEs) suggest that they derive their advantages from factors such as economies of scale, and that they internationalise, in large measure, to access technology. However, support for this framework typically comes from analysis of static data, comparing EMNEs and OECD MNEs at a point in time. Little attention is paid to their development paths in a dynamic setting. We examine these propositions directly using an approach that enables us to decompose productivity growth of firms into its components, namely, changes in scale economies, technological progress and technical efficiency. We compare Chinese MNEs with their non-MNE domestic counterparts and developed country MNEs that have operations in China. We demonstrate that Chinese MNEs continue to derive much of their productivity growth from changes in scale economies, while developed country MNEs continue to have an advantage with respect to technical progress. Both these types of MNEs have a significant advantage over Chinese non-MNE domestic firms.

The chapter provides an economic explanation and perspectivation of strategic asset seeking of multinational enterprises from emerging economies (EMNEs) as a prominent feature of today’s global economy.

The authors apply and extend the “springboard perspective.” This perspective submits that EMNEs acquire strategic assets in developed markets primarily for use in their home markets.

The authors succumb that the springboard perspective is alluring theoretically as well as empirically as it suggests that when EMNEs acquire strategic assets, they experience liabilities of foreignness (LOF) that are low relative to those of MNEs from developed markets. The authors concede to this LOF asymmetry but also point out that liabilities of outsidership (LOO) can offset or weaken the home-market advantage of some EMNEs when competing with MNEs.

LOO appears as the more relevant concept to use when explaining strategic asset seeking of EMNEs. A set of propositions are formulated to guide empirical testing.

The insights gained from using the springboard perspective and the LOO concept are non-trivial: They basically predict future dominance of ‘insider’ EMNEs at the expense of MNEs from developed markets.

Using Triad-based multinational enterprises as their empirical setting, influential scholars in international management uncovered key organizational characteristics needed to create globally integrated and locally responsive multinationals. They proposed a “modern” theory of multinationals' organization (Hedlund, 1994). But recently, a new generation of multinationals from emerging markets has appeared. Little is known about their organizational choices and some scholars even doubt that they leverage organizational capabilities altogether. Does the “modern” theory still hold in their case? This exploratory study of three emerging-market multinationals (EMNEs) discloses that for reasons related to their origin in emerging economies and to the competitive specificities of these economies, EMNEs approach the global and local conundrum in ways which are both similar – and vastly different – from recommendations of the “modern” theory. We inductively develop a new theory that accounts for the evolution of organizational capabilities in EMNEs to reconcile global integration and local responsiveness. We discuss its implications for the executives of both emerging and Triad-based multinationals.

As FDI flows grew in volume and complexity in the 1990s and early 2000s, three new players appeared on the global stage: sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), which were government-controlled entities with the authority to take significant equity stakes in foreign firms; private equity (PE) firms, which resorted increasingly to cross-border acquisitions, and emerging-market multinational enterprises (EMNEs), which ratcheted up their overseas acquisitions and investments. While none of these players was entirely new, each became more visible in the 2000s. Looking ahead, we anticipate that SWFs will continue to be marginal FDI players, with a few exceptions, despite their high visibility; that PEs will play a highly volatile role, varying from marginal at times to important at others; and that only EMNEs were already quite important in 2009 and likely to gain in importance, as emerging economies become prime movers of the global economy. The global financial crisis of 2008–2009 may thus only have speeded up the inevitable rise of emerging economies as both sources and destinations for FDI. We further conclude that EMNEs will contribute significantly to sustainable development because of their distinctive capabilities in making and selling products for low-income customers, and their emerging competence in “green” technologies.

Outward foreign direct investments (FDI) by Turkish firms in the new millennium show intriguing geographic distribution pattern and unlike the predictions of classical theories of FDI. In this study we contribute by linking the observed pattern of outward FDI with Turkish firms’ motivation for investment across national borders. We enrich research by collecting and analyzing FDI motivation data at the firm-level for a very important but less researched developing country: Turkey. Content analysis of text material on the foreign investments made by 211 Turkish firms reveals that Turkish firms primarily perform FDI in European developed countries for reasons other than conventional, namely, market- and strategic-asset-seeking motivations. More importantly, Turkish firms seem to be using the European countries to (1) present themselves as a European Union company, (2) make use of special features of these countries to expand their businesses within and to other countries and, (3) make use of the favorable tax treatment policies available to foreign investors. Surprisingly, our analysis shows that in spite of its small size, the Netherlands is a preferred destination for Turkish FDI over other Western European countries due to its strategic location and favorable investment policies.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine how multinational firms have an added incentive to promote corporate social responsibility (CSR) in order to maximize profitability and adapt to the changing normative climate in a post Great Recession economy.

This chapter builds on institutional theory using contextual evidence from Mexican firms to provide insight into the varying pressures facing local and multinational enterprises in emerging markets.

This chapter highlights different sets of pressures faced by emerging market firms, both domestic and multinational. This chapter contends that emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs) are incentivized to uphold CSR practices to a greater degree than domestic firms from emerging markets.

Contextual evidence for this chapter was confined to Mexican firms, which provides an opportunity for future research to be carried out from alternative emerging markets.

From a social standpoint, this chapter sheds light on the challenges of globalization and the current rift between national level policies, coinciding behavior, and global expectations. From a practical standpoint, this chapter could inform and alert CEOs and practitioners to the nuances of CSR expectations, contingent upon the sphere in which they choose to operate in.

This chapter contributes to the growing dialogue on EMNEs while highlighting the schism between national and global expectations for CSR. Further, this chapter adds to the literature on institutional theory by connecting it to the in-group and out-group literature from sociology.

The acronym and neologism “VUCA” is employed by management and some scholars to denote the unpredictability of the modern world and its impact on business. The VUCA approach suggests that a rational firm’s response should be to: protect against volatility by engineering-in redundancy and slack, gather information to reduce uncertainty, develop expertise to make complexity computable, and learn heuristically to reduce ambiguity. We combine a critical perspective on the VUCA approach with the global factory model, popularly used to describe the flexibility sought by advanced economy multinational enterprises (MNEs) within the global value chain. Both VUCA and the global factory would seem to account less well for the expansion of emerging multinational enterprise (EMNEs) abroad, particularly the preference for equity-based control and inflexibility when seeking strategic assets. Also, both approaches fail to incorporate behavioral principles toward risk. Using International Business theory, we propose a research agenda that may help to make VUCA more tractable, the global factory more useful, and the internationalization of EMNEs more comprehensible.