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Purpose – After tracing the development of the global value chains (GVC) approach, the chapter argues that by refocusing on the international strategies of lead firms it is possible to bring location specificity issues into play and contribute to retrieve a distinctive international content to the GVC governance theory.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter discusses the GVC governance theory, drawing from recent contributions in the field of international business (IB).

Findings – Although designed to account for the rise of new inter-firm networks controlled by international lead firms, the new GVC theory of governance somehow lacks a distinct international content and, privileging transactional constraints, falls short of explicitly considering variations in lead firm structural characteristics and strategies. An alternative governance schema is then proposed, taking explicitly into account the strategic evaluations that lead firms carry out with regard to their internal resources compared to suppliers’.

Research limitations/implications (if applicable) – The chapter provides the outlines of a new promising international research agenda for GVC researchers. Additional research is needed to further investigate the relation between location specificity, the strategic motives to go global and the international organisation of the value chain.

Practical implications (if applicable) – The alternative governance schema proposed in the chapter aspires to represent a simple tool aimed at supporting managers in the establishment of the appropriate boundaries of the firm.

Originality/value – The chapter shows that both IB research and GVC analysis could greatly benefit from reasoned cross-fertilisation.

This chapter analyses the rise of the ‘global factory’ – the globally integrated network centred on a focal multinational enterprise. This is a response to the increased volatility of the global economy and involves the creation of systems that allow flexibility in both the location and the control of increasingly ‘fine-sliced’ activities, the avoidance of monopoly and the evolution of new management skills. Foreign direct investment is only one strategy amongst several utilised by globally integrated multinationals.

Entrepreneurs in a competitive economy face three fundamental problems. They need to search for and discover a business opportunity (Kirzner, 1973), evaluate it (Knight, 1921), and then seize the opportunity to reap entrepreneurial profits (Schumpeter, 1911) (Langlois, 2007). The problem that we address is how the ability to exploit business opportunities is influenced by entrepreneurial search and the economic organization of entrepreneurship (Arrow, 1962; Lippman & Rumelt, 2003b; Aghion et al., 2005; Foss, Foss, & Klein, 2007). In many cases, the discovery for a new business opportunity needs to be motivated by expected gains, since the search and evaluation of business opportunities is a costly, resource-consuming process (Denrell, Fang, & Winter, 2003; Nickerson & Zenger, 2004; Foss & Klein, 2005; Teece, 2007; Foss & Foss, 2008).¹ We show the critical role of expectations for understanding of the economic organization of entrepreneurship, and argue that transaction cost economics, with its insistence on bounded rationality, but farsighted contracting offers useful insights and presents rich opportunities for further theoretical and empirical research (cf. also Furubotn, 2002).

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

The study discusses the professionalization of academic leadership in Israel by analyzing and comparing two different training programs: the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s (HUJI) program and the CHE-Rothschild program. The HUJI program began in 2016 to train the professoriate to take charge of leadership positions alongside a separate program for administrative staff, while the CHE-Rothschild program was launched in 2019 to train academic leaders, both professors and administrators from universities and colleges nationwide. The analysis reveals two “ideal types” of collegiality: While Model A (exemplified by the HUJI program) bifurcates between the professoriate and administrative staff, Model B (exemplified by the CHE-Rothschild program) binds administrative and academic staff members through course composition, pedagogy, and content. The study suggests a pattern of redefinition of collegiality in academia: we find that while academic hierarchies are maintained (between academic faculty and administrative staff and between universities and colleges), collegiality in academia is being redefined as extending beyond the boundaries of the professoriate and emphasizing a partnership approach to collegial ties.

This chapter provides an overview of various new streams in international business (IB) research that will have an important impact on IB studies in the years to come, both from a conceptual and a methodological perspective.

The authors discuss a set of 18 chapters, all included in this research volume, and highlight both the key intellectual contributions and the challenges identified that will need to be taken into account in future research.

The findings of the studies discussed are manifold and profound. Some of the main findings include the following: (1) multinational enterprise (MNE)-centric empirical research studies should be avoided. Resource recombination typically requires taking into account the resource base and the strategies of at least two economic actors. (2) IB studies, almost by definition, need to take into account “distance,” but most prior empirical research has not done a particularly good job in including relevant distance parameters in a methodologically sound way to assess their impact on MNE strategy, operational functioning or performance. (3) Nonbusiness institutions can be very helpful in promoting MNE expansion but include “dark side” institutions that sometimes appear very effective in particular situational contexts. (4) Institutional diversity matters: it can make international knowledge transfers difficult, it can lead to discrimination against firms from specific nationalities, it certainly suggests that there is no generalizable multinationality–performance relationship, and it raises the question whether new theory is needed to accommodate previously neglected institutional contexts.

This overview of several recent IB studies confirms that managing the international innovation chain in its entirety is fraught with difficulties. MNE senior management must economize on bounded rationality (meaning: improving information quality and information processing) and bounded reliability (meaning: making sure that economic actors make good on open-ended promises, whether implicit or explicit). Any IB transaction by definition entails new resource recombination. Doing so effectively requires correct information, reliable partners and a recombination outcome that supports value creation for the MNE. Multiple, practice-driven puzzles in the IB context are proposed to the reader, and the outcomes are often unexpected.

A variety of new concepts and methodological approaches are proposed to improve the quality of future IB research.

This chapter engages with the performativity discourse in CMS that seeks to impact practice for social transformation. It seeks to draw attention to the implicit assumption of ‘scale’ as a causal mechanism in social transformation.

This essay is primarily conceptual and theoretical. However it uses two real life social organizations from India as an illustration for the basic assumptions and the argument. It draws upon institutional theory and William Wimsatt’s work on ontology of complex systems, causation and robustness to make its arguments.

The essay argues that large size and scale does not necessarily mean greater social transformation for the good. Drawing upon Wimsatt’s work, it argues that system level causal mechanisms are not necessarily limited to aggregative, additive effects the way a scale-based argument would have us believe. In fact such systemic interactions would be unpredictable. Therefore when CMS as a community of scholars looks at difficulty in scaling up of successful endeavours as a weakness it might hamper egalitarian social transformation in more ways than one. It delays and/or closes opportunities for new ways, risks reproducing ills of existing large scale systems and creating oppressive universals. It suggests that for a pluriversal world a more phenomenological understanding of local transformative efforts is needed for the CMS community.

This chapter provides a novel and sound theoretical basis for eschewing size and scale as indispensible for fostering social transformation.