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Both franchising and internationalisation are important subjects of study, but in the existent literature little attention has been given to these two topics combined. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the internationalisation through franchising, using as a case study the internationalisation process of Parfois, a specialised retail brand based in northern Portugal, and operating in the fashion accessories business.

A case study approach was adopted based on information collected from various sources, including the company's website, the World Bank database, some news reports about Parfois, and also from interviews with those responsible for the internationalisation of Parfois.

The authors have identified a clear pattern in the internationalisation process: the firm is willing to open its own stores in the European market, where it feels comfortable, allowing franchisees to assume the investment risk in other world regions, with particular relevance for the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

In the international competitive market, it is important for other retail brands to understand how a relatively small retail brand, based in a depressed European zone, is able to expand worldwide. Furthermore, the lack of existing literature about internationalisation through franchising in specialised retailing companies adds value to this study.

Using munificence, real options and ambidexterity theories, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the differential between home and host market environmental conditions affects US international franchising expansion.

The authors used firm-level panel data for 151 US-based franchising firms, from Bond’s Guide for Franchise Opportunities, for the years 1994-2008 plus macroeconomic data on the environment, to explain the probability of franchising.

The paper finds that the differential in economic growth and economic uncertainty impacts franchisors’ desire to expand abroad on a continual basis.

Researchers in international franchising should not only focus on host market environmental variables (pull factors), but also on conditions in the home market (push factors).

The paper adds to environmental explanations of international franchising by focusing on the differential in munificence and uncertainty between home and host countries.

Franchising has become a major driving force in the globalisation of service businesses. Likewise, international retailing has become an important feature of global distribution systems. This has been brought about through changing socio‐economic patterns, favourable political and cultural environments, and a shift from manufacturing to service based economies. Both developments have contributed to the globalisation of marketing activity. However, there remain fundamental conceptual inconsistencies in the literatures that explain the development of international retailing and the internationalisation of franchise operations. This paper considers the use of franchising in the internationalisation of retail operations and places the experience of retail operations that use the market entry strategy within the context of other franchising activity. The paper evaluates the literature on the internationalisation of retailing alongside the literature on franchising. It identifies the different perspectives that have emerged within the two literatures and conceptually reconciles the contradictions that exist.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors that motivate international retail companies to choose franchising as a method for entering international markets.

Employs a qualitative methodology and a multiple case study design. Six major UK‐based international fashion retailers form the empirical basis for the work.

Finds the motivating influences to be a combination of both organisational and environmental factors. International retailing experience, availability of financial resources, presence of a franchisable retail brand, company restructuring and influence of key managers emerge as the organisational factors while environmental influences are revealed as opportunistic approaches, local market complexities, domestic competitive pressures and availability of potential franchise partners.

Provides a useful source of information for those retail firms considering internationalization via the franchising method. Research is made all the more pertinent by the fact that retail service firms do not necessarily have franchising experience in the domestic market before they adopt franchising in the international environment. While findings are particular to retail firms they could also have relevance for other service sectors.

Addresses a gap in international franchising literature by examining the factors that motivate retail firms to internationalise via franchising. As such, the paper contributes to academic and practitioner understanding of the international retail franchise process.

This study aims to investigate how upper echelon theory accounts for franchising by selecting the top management team to proxy for the upper echelon and using age, tenure, education, equity ownership and stock options as its main attributes.

The sample was drawn from the Execucomp and Compustat databases and from other publicly accessible resources (e.g. LinkedIn and Business Week, in addition to Annual 10-K reports). A total of 29 restaurant companies were used for data collection, which covered the period of 2000-2013. A panel feasible generalized least squares (FGLS) regression was used to analyze the data.

The study found a significant moderating effect of the degree of internationalization on the relation between the attributes of the upper echelon (e.g. tenure, education and share ownership) and franchising decisions.

The results verified that top managers in the restaurant industry with more tenure and share ownership become more risk averse when they operate under riskier conditions, whereas highly educated restaurant top management teams tend to take more risks in strategic decision-making.

This study expanded internationalization research to upper echelon theory and into the arena of franchising.

The purpose of this research is to account for the internationalization of restaurants. The conceptual framework of upper echelons theory is applied to identify the demographic determinants of internationalization among chief executive officers (CEOs).

Data from 30 restaurant firms for the period 1999-2013 were collected from a variety of sources, primarily Compustat and Execucomp, based on Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code 5812, the annual 10-K and public information. A panel feasible generalized least squares model was used as the main instrument of analysis.

The findings indicate that the CEO gender and share ownership negatively affect the internationalization of restaurant companies, whereas size, the extent of franchising, the type of restaurant and stock options positively affect the degree of internationalization. Additionally, an inverted U-shaped relation exists between CEO tenure and the degree of internationalization.

The presented information may provide shareholders and boards of directors with valuable guidelines regarding the assignment of appropriate managers depending on the extent to which their companies are pursuing internationalization strategies.

Most studies in hospitality sectors have focused only on accounting-based measures to explain strategic decision-making, although proponents of upper echelons theory have argued that CEO attributes influence strategic decisions/changes. This study contributes to the literature on hospitality by identifying the effects of CEO characteristics on internationalization decisions.

This paper aims to investigate the influence of a corporate global mindset and international experience on the internationalization process of Brazilian franchisors. The purpose is to study the role played by global mindset in the internationalization process of franchisors from an emerging country by answering the question: What is the impact of a global mindset on the level of internationalization?

A survey of 104 companies was conducted with franchise managers to compare Brazilian (domestic-only and internationalized) franchisors to foreign franchisors with operations in Brazil. The collected data were analyzed through descriptive statistics, ANOVA and regression analysis.

Results showed that the firm’s experience in international markets (measured as the number of years in foreign countries) has a positive relation to corporate global mindset. Developing a corporate global mindset should help Brazilian franchises to grow internationally. The findings indicate that Brazilian franchisors fall behind their foreign counterparts in international experience, which affect the skills, knowledge, disposition and organizational structure needed to be successful outside their home market.

Franchisors who decide to internationalize should carefully consider the need for developing a global mindset, especially in terms of investing in communication technologies, adequate human resources and an organizational structure to support international operations.

This research contributes to the international franchising literature by exploring the role of a global mindset in the context of franchises from an emerging market. Using a multidimensional concept of corporate global mindset, comprised of global orientation, global knowledge and global skills, this study adds an aspect of international franchising beyond institutional and economic explanations.

Franchising is fast becoming one of the most popular entry mode strategies for international retail companies when moving into international markets. Academic research, however, has only recently begun to examine international franchising within the context of retailer internationalisation. A major gap in the literature is the nature of the international retail franchise relationship and, in particular, the mechanisms used to control and co‐ordinate the international franchise network. This paper reports the findings from an in‐depth, ethnographic study of the internationalisation activity of one retail franchise company and examines the extent to which the marketing channels and agency theory literatures can, in practice, explain power and control in international retail franchising.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors associated with franchisors going public using signaling theory. Listing on the stock market is a sign that the business concept has reached a threshold level of acceptance and success. To increase the relevance of this study to practitioners, the authors focus on franchising-specific controllable variables.

This study uses a sample of 2,134 franchisors from US drawn from a survey by Entrepreneur magazine during the years 2015–2016. Binominal logistic regression models are used for analysis of the data.

Findings indicate that time to franchise, international operations, franchise association affiliation, disclosure and extent of top management commitment are factors positively related to the likelihood of a franchisor being publicly listed.

Study findings are based on a sample of franchisors from North America, where financial markets are well developed, and due caution should be exercised before generalizations are made to other contexts. A major implication of this study is that signaling theory may provide an important supplement to the already well-entrenched resource-scarcity and agency theoretic explanations in franchising research.

While signaling theory is growing in importance in the franchising literature, this study is the first to uncover the relationship between company signals and initial public offering.

The relationship marketing paradigm has emerged as a major tool by which marketers may examine and conceptualise relationships with consumers, however its application to the business‐to‐business dimension of retailing has been largely neglected. The current work examines one particular aspect of business‐to‐business marketing: the franchisor‐franchisee relationship in the context of international fashion retailing. This relationship is examined in the light of the relationship marketing literature, with particular reference to the relevance of the marriage analogy. Employing a case study approach, this paper considers international fashion retailers' response to the need to develop business‐to‐business relationships in international markets via the franchising mode of market entry. The paper concludes that the marriage analogy is useful in the context of franchise relationships if properly defined by core and intended relationship benefits.