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The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the franchising sector in Brazil and highlight the opportunities and offer strategies for practitioners. It also points out some challenges and gives suggestions to overcome them and thrive in the Brazilian market through the franchising system.

This paper reviews both literature and practical sources providing primary data from interviews conducted with franchising experts from the Brazilian Franchising Association and a consultant company.

International franchisors willing to enter the Brazilian market might face some challenges, such as the language barrier, the complex tax system and the need for local adaptations. Foreign entrants should consider low control entry modes as master franchising and area development agreements, with local partners that know the Brazilian culture, business system and regulations.

Brazil presents a great market potential for international franchisors. It counts with an established franchising system and a stable regulatory environment. This paper provides relevant information about the characteristics, opportunities and challenges to operate in the Brazilian market, offering suggestions of strategies and several possibilities to explore different regions, locations and models across the country.

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.

While common sense suggests that corruption will likely have a negative impact on the economy as it raises the cost of doing business, research on the topic showed inconsistent results (positive, negative and neutral). This paper aims to verify whether corruption has a “grease” or “sand” effect on the wheels of entrepreneurial rates and under which conditions corruption will have stronger or weaker effects.

Using institutional theory as the basis for the hypotheses, generalized least squares estimation is conducted to empirically examine the role of corruption and political discretion in entrepreneurship in a sample of 93 countries.

Countries with higher levels of corruption are associated with lower levels of firm creation. However, this negative effect of corruption is weaker when there are higher levels of political discretion.

This is the first evaluation of the moderating effect of political discretion on the negative impact of corruption on entrepreneurship.

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.

Although China is among the most populated and fastest growing markets in the world, the reason why China’s franchising scale and scope is so limited remains an enigma. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on franchising in China and offer strategies for practitioners to more effectively operate under a franchise model in the Chinese market.

This paper reviews both literature and practical sources providing some primary data from interviews conducted with franchise industry practitioners in China.

The findings of this paper are that foreign entrants to China must carefully consider if they should enter the Chinese market through franchising or if the market may be too difficult to navigate. Franchisors, whose brand is unknown in China or have operations that are too Western-centric, should probably seek international markets closer to home. Those with a high value proposition in the local market and the capabilities to adapt effectively to China’s peculiarities may, however, find a promising and profitable niche to operate in.

This paper focuses on the under examined realities of franchising in the Chinese market. Based on the previous experiences of franchisors in China, the paper raises seven practical strategies that practitioners can use to more successfully enter the Chinese market through franchising. Although China is among the most populated and fastest growing markets in the world, the reason why China’s franchising scale and scope is so limited remains an enigma. According to the International Franchise Association and International Trade Administration reports, China is among the top-ranking countries in terms of trade opportunities, with the top 100 franchisor sales estimated at ¥428bn (about US$66bn). China is the largest franchise market in the world, with over 4,500 franchise systems and some 400,000 franchised outlets in over 70 industries. However, considering China’s US$13.6tn (2018) economy, this is still far lower than its full potential. In addition, the scope of franchising is limited and is mostly centered in food and beverage and retail outlets, which consists of approximately 40 per cent of all franchisors.

This paper aims to offer a comprehensive systematic review of knowledge management (KM) in franchising literature over the past 29 years.

By means of bibliometric citation analysis, ISI Web of Science (WoS) database is used to analyze articles from 1990-2018. A total of 169 articles by 369 authors across 40 countries published in 113 journals from 200 institutions were clustered and examined through HistCites and VOSviewer.

The exploration of KM in franchising is associated with 3 factors: governance structure; performance outcome; and franchise network growth. The findings also reveal that KM in franchising is still an emerging discipline encompassing conflicting results which offer potential for future research.

Identified research gaps and contradicting views in the literature offer opportunities for researchers to contribute to this research domain by empirically testing the role of absorptive capacity, replication vs adaptation strategies and new franchising formats, such as micro/social franchising.

This study is unique in its examination of KM in franchising. It also highlights the value of knowledge in franchise chain performance.

This paper aims to provide a bibliometric meta-analysis of the already substantial and growing literature on international franchising. Franchising is a model for businesses to achieve scale with limited resources. International franchising is a mode of entry that allows firms to develop new markets with relatively little risk but also little control.

Using a systematic approach, the paper identifies all articles in the ISI Web of Science from 1970 to 2018 that includes the term international franchising (in the title, the abstract or keywords) and finds 131 articles. This paper used HistCite software to analyze the bibliometric data.

Four major research clusters in the international franchising literature are identified. In addition, this study shows a change in research patterns regarding topics, theories and methodologies from the 1970s through 2018. The paper presents the most influential articles, authors and journals.

From the analyzes, this study develops a conceptual framework of international franchising and suggest avenues for future research.

This paper aims to generalize emic studies of culture and thus provide indigenous view nuanced particularly for emerging markets.

The authors review four local business frameworks and deconstruct each into three different constructs. The authors systematically evaluate culture specific studies, particularities of jaan pehchaan (India), guanxi (China), sviazi (Russia) and wasta (Arab countries).

Building on social networking theory, the authors synthesize an emic model for four types of large emerging markets cultures – China, Russia, India and Arab countries – and divide them according to their affective, conative and cognitive elements.

By knowing the impact of the constructs and how to leverage it, managers can successfully penetrate and manage these complex markets.

Current models of culture, such as the ones proposed by Hofstede and GLOBE, are etic in their orientation, attempting to find variations in common dimensions across different cultures. Emic approaches to studying culture are more bottom-up and are idiosyncratic to the culture.

This study aims to propose a comprehensive greenfield foreign direct investment (FDI) attractiveness index using exploratory factor analysis and automated machine learning (AML). We offer offer a robust empirical measurement of location-choice factors identified in the FDI literature through a novel method and provide a tool for assessing the countries' investment potential.

Based on five conceptual key sub-domains of FDI, We collected quantitative indicators in several databases with annual data ranging from 2006 to 2019. This study first run a factor analysis to identify the most important features. It then uses AML to assess the relative importance of each resultant factor and generate a calibrated index. AML computational algorithms minimize predictive errors, explore patterns in the data and make predictions in an empirically robust way.

Openness conditions and economic growth are the most relevant factors to attract FDI identified in the study. Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malta and Ireland are the top five countries with the highest overall greenfield attractiveness index. This study also presents specific indices for the three sectors: energy, financial services, information and communication technology (ICT) and electronics.

Existent indexes present deficiencies in conceptualization and measurement, lacking theoretical foundation, arbitrary selection of factors and use of limited linear models. This study’s index is developed in a robust three-stage process. The use of AML configures an advantage compared to traditional linear and additive models, as it selects the best model considering the predictive capacity of many models simultaneously.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss China’s New Silk Road initiative as an opportunity for European small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to export to Chinese market. It offers research propositions on redefining the business process of European SMEs and Chinese importers in light of the initiative.

SMEs’ export barriers, particularly in SCM and marketing, are identified through literature review. Then they are discussed in accordance with the measures that New Silk Road proposed.

Logistic infrastructure development under the New Silk Road significantly lowers the supply chain barrier. Marketing remains a challenge for European SMEs to export to China. This paper argues that the European SMEs and the Chinese importers should create closer collaboration, expand their relationship beyond SCM, and integrate their marketing efforts for mutual benefits.

Several future research areas are proposed in this paper. The authors invite researchers and practitioners to deepen the discussion with empirical evidence.

The New Silk Road has already become a high stake project for many countries involved. Many measures are yet to be defined and the stakeholders, including industries and businesses, should have an influence on their definition. This paper provides the authors’ viewpoints on how businesses should act in this initiative.

Despite being an important topic of the world’s economy in the recent years, the New Silk Road initiative has rarely been studied in management research, possibly due to lack of evidence. As its development significantly sped up since 2017, it is high time that the research community starts to contribute to the knowledge building in this project. This paper is among the firsts to call for and to propose avenues for future research efforts.