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The use of expatriates to transfer individual and organizational know-how and knowledge is a practice widely used by multinational enterprises (MNEs). However, for service firms, the mobility of employees across national borders depends on the commitments made by countries under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). In particular, the Mode 4 form of supply under GATS can limit the ability of professionals to enter a particular country and can restrict the intra-organizational transfer of knowledge in multinational service firms. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how MNEs attempt to overcome these barriers and transfer knowledge through their global network.

Using Nonaka and Takeuchi’s SECI model of knowledge transfer, the authors study the intra-organizational knowledge transfer practices of an Indian multinational service firm. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 key informants involved with the organization.

The company uses global teams to transfer tacit knowledge and facilitates inpatriation through an internship program that helps the firm overcome nationality requirement that restricts the movement of their managers to other countries, which in turn limits their ability to transfer knowledge in the intra-organizational setting. The company uses the services of a not-for-profit youth organization that helps recruit interns for the program and also facilitates the relationship with the Indian Government, which provides support for this initiative by reducing barriers to entry for the interns.

This study takes the unique approach of studying barriers to movement of professionals and a firm’s strategic response. It identifies the pressures and barriers that companies face in the global economy and highlights the role of government agencies and other stakeholders in facilitating or restricting the transfer of knowledge within a firm’s international network. The paper articulates the implications for policy and practice, and a future research agenda.

This study aims to investigate whether the absorptive capacity, learning intent of the recipient, the attractiveness of the knowledge source and the relationship quality between the recipient and the source in high-technology sectors in emerging markets influences the nature of the intra-organizational knowledge being transferred.

A total of 180 completed survey responses from all cellular network providers operating in Pakistan were analyzed. This study uses multiple regression analysis to empirically tests the above relationships using data from the cellular network sector in Pakistan.

The findings highlight how the highly educated workforce and the motivation to learn has an impact on the effective cross-border sharing of knowledge, both technological and marketing knowledge.

This study is one of the few to test the factors that influence the effective and efficient transfer of knowledge from developed to emerging markets.

Biculturals possess higher cultural intelligence than monocultural individuals. This study explores biculturals' key factors and attributes and how their cultural knowledge and identification influence International Business Negotiations (IBNs) and help their firms outperform others.

Data were collected from semi-structured interviews with 35 bicultural senior managers in Lebanon.

The findings highlight three essential qualities and behaviors that allow biculturals to act as a bridge between the parties during IBN: adaptability, cultural frame switching (CFS) and creativity.

This study explores the notion of bicultural personnel using their understanding of multiple cultures to be innovative, avoid groupthink and generate new creative ideas that help overcome stalemates during IBNs.

This study aims to explore the intention–action relationship of small and medium-sized (SMEs) firms with knowledge capital that declare their intention to internationalize from their inception.

The authors apply the theory of planned behavior and hand-collect a database of Chinese born globals, purely domestic firms and traditional exporting firms. The authors’ hypothesis is that Chinese born globals [or young aspiring globals (YAGs)] will strive to acquire domestic and international patents at an early stage to institutionally protect their knowledge-capital via intellectual property rights as they enter the competitive global marketplace.

The results confirm that knowledge-focused YAGs apply for patents at an earlier stage than purely domestic and traditional exporting firms. However, in the long run, these firms are neither demonstrating increased knowledge capital by being more innovative nor producing more valuable innovations than their counterparts.

This study tests the intention–action relationship in the context of SMEs internationalization. It contributes to the internationalization literature by identifying the internationalization pattern of born globals (YAGs) from emerging markets and providing an explanation for what happens to these firms as they mature.

This study aims to the influence and impact of regulations and highlights the barriers to market entry faced by Australian professional service firms in the European Union (EU) and their strategies to manage and transfer tacit knowledge.

The authors collected data by reviewing relevant regulatory documents and conducting semi-structured interviews with key informants from Australian architecture firms and senior representatives from the professional, trade and regulatory bodies in Australia and Europe.

Historically, Australian professional service firms use the United Kingdom (UK) as their EU base. The mutual recognition of qualifications and prior experiences are barriers to intra-organizational expatriation and knowledge transfer. The study identifies the dual nationality of the architects as a way of circumventing the residency/nationality restrictions.

The study discusses Brexit and how the uncertainty surrounding the UK and EU’s agreement adds to the complexity for non-European firms’ market entry and operations in the region.

This study investigates the effectiveness of trade unions in preserving and promoting the rights of the worker, and being their voice in ensuring safe working conditions as part of the firms’ CSR activities.

Data were collected from employees, managers, and owners of ready-made garments firms in Bangladesh. An open-ended survey instrument was used and distributed widely. Analysis of the 200 responses was undertaken using the qualitative narrative technique.

The findings show that, unlike traditional labor-management relations, in Bangladesh managers tend to have a more favorable attitude towards unions than employees do. The strong political links between the factory owners and the unions’ leadership raise questions about whose interest the unions represent.

The authors highlight how adopting a CSR agenda can help unions make better representations on behalf of their members. This, in turn, can enhance the workforce’s efficiency and help strengthen the sector to develop processes to help face disruptions like those experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study is unique in addressing the role of unions in promoting CSR activities in emerging economies, where the formal institutional application remains limited. The study’s findings can help explain some of the sector’s challenges.

The study investigates the extent to which organizational learning and innovativeness can improve the firms' performance through a customer-focused strategy.

Data were collected from Indonesian financial service firms using a questionnaire-based survey. The 157 useable survey responses were analysed to test the proposed hypotheses using SmartPLS.

This study finds that both organizational learning and innovativeness have a positive effect on performance. The effect of organizational learning on performance depends on the variations of the customer-focused strategy. However, innovativeness does not mediate through customer-focused strategy to enhance performance.

In firms that implement business model innovation, managers should focus on resource flexibility. Where it is responsive, managers need to be concerned with ensuring various uses of existing resources to understand the performance effectively.

As one of the types of dynamic capabilities, organizational learning and innovativeness are also important antecedents of performance.

This study extends the business innovation model from the adaptability of customer-focused strategy. The findings confirm that organizational learning has a prominent role in meeting customer needs for a dynamic market.

This study examines how emerging market multinational enterprises operating in the service sector manage knowledge and team members in their overseas subsidiaries and what role expatriates play in their operations.

The authors use a multiple case study design and interview 20 senior managers representing 16 Indian IT firm's subsidiaries in Australia. The onsite-offshore concept and the SECI model are used to explain the knowledge management process.

The findings show that Indian IT firms mostly transfer knowledge from their headquarters in the parent country to their subsidiaries in the host country using the onsite-offshore model where work is divided and coordinated between team members situated between the two locations. Furthermore, the host country subsidiaries have limited independence in decision-making due to a forward, one-way diffusion of knowledge, thus limiting a two-way interaction between the HQ and the subsidiary for opportunities to create and exchange new knowledge.

The study is one of the few to investigate the onsite-offshore phenomenon in service-based emerging market multinational enterprises.

The purpose of this study is to empirically investigate the dark side of business-to-business (B2B) relationships in traditional business practices worldwide that rely on strong networks.

This study applies a questionnaire survey to collect data from buyers in 224 Kuwaiti firms and uses the partial least squares structural equation model for data analysis.

Drawing on the social exchange theory, we test the relationships between B2B wasta, relationship satisfaction, innovation and efficiency. The findings show that despite the belief that wasta brings long-term benefits when applied in B2B relationships, it negatively impacts the firm’s efficiency.

This study contributes to the existing literature on B2B relationships by identifying important issues related to the multifaceted nature of B2B wasta relationships. The study confirms the importance of relational and innovation benefits over economic consequences based on elements of social exchange theory, which extends our current understanding of the application of SET in B2B wasta relationships.

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.