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One of the main concerns in human resource management around the world is how education is encouraging the understanding of global issues, cultures, technological changes and social trends to make appropriate decisions in firm management. This chapter will aim to illustrate the main issues in international business (IB) theory and practice that need to be considered in configurating a global-minded curriculum that is able to produce global-minded human resources. Hence, to determine what inputs must be considered in building an exceptional curriculum and successful educational strategies, the author observe the assertions from three perspectives: first, the contributors to the IB and the multinational enterprise theory; second, the author explores the stakeholders’ perspective, who see the benefits and assume the consequences of education in the field; and third, the author reviews the researchers who in recent years have studied the problems and trends of the discipline.

We examine the citations from four international business (IB) journals over 2000‐2004 to show the areas, the journals, and the institutions that impact IB research. The leading works that influence IB research are primarily management journals, scholarly books, and IB journals. IB research is published in non‐IB journals, as well and this has influenced the recent research in IB journals. U.S. and non‐U.S. academic institutions and non‐academic organizations are among the top 100 institutions that impact IB research, indicating that this research is a truly global endeavor. Finally, recent IB research is influenced more by recent published research than by past research. Scholarly books have become less influential, while the economics, finance, and marketing journals show no change in the influence on IB research over time.

This paper aims to address the relationship between critical and mainstream international business (IB) research and discuss the ways forward for the former.

The paper empirically maps critical IB scholarship by analysing more than 250 academic articles published in critical perspectives on international business (cpoib) from 2005 to 2017. The paper also includes a citation analysis that uncovers how critical IB research is recognized and discussed in mainstream IB studies.

The extant critical IB research can be broken into five main topical clusters: positioning critical IB research, postcolonial IB studies, effects of international business activities, financialization and the global financial crisis and “Black IB” and corporate social responsibility. The citation analysis demonstrates that critical IB research is rarely recognized in mainstream IB academic outlets.

This paper is the first to empirically map critical IB research and to measure its impact on mainstream IB research. Based on these insights, as well as discussions of the more critical voices within mainstream IB studies and the debate over critical performativity in critical management studies, ways of developing critical IB research are examined.

Based on fifteen years of data on the annual Academy of International Business (AIB) best dissertation Farmer Award finalists, we find that these dissertations were done at a range of North American universities. Interestingly, dissertation topics differed from the topics covered in the three top IB journals with five‐sixths of the topics in management, organization, economics, or finance and two‐thirds set in a single country or region (U.S., Japan, North America, and Western Europe). Survey research is the most common methodology but analysis of secondary data is growing. As expected, the finalists are on average an extraordinarily prolific group.

The world consists of diverse and distinctive economic systems. Due to the unique historical, cultural and location-specific contexts embedded in each economy, a comparison of strategic behaviors across economies is unlikely to provide a causal estimate of the influence of these contextual factors on strategy–performance relationships. In this paper, I outline three approaches to researching multinational firms that address this dilemma. They include the multilevel, historical and variance-centered perspectives, all of which can help international-business (IB) researchers develop stronger theoretical foundations from which to explain why country-specific contexts matter in designing IB action and research.

More than forty years ago, IU helped begin the process of internationalizing business education by becoming one of the first U.S. business schools to include an IB program in its curriculum. In 1956 Columbia University led the trend, and in 1959 IU became the second to offer an IB major. The author, the first chair of the IB department at IU’s Business School, describes the development of the field in its early years.

International Business Strategies (IBS) literature deliberated on the strategic planning and strategy implementation of home country firms in foreign markets. IBS had become a very potent growth strategy for firms. IBS as a body of knowledge had become substantial in the last few decades of research. To this end, and as a complex field of study, this paper aims to conceptually map this IBS literature. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to present a visual mapping of intellectual structure in two dimensions and to identify the subfields of IBS through co-citation analysis.

All the citation documents were included in the Web of Knowledge (WoK) database between the years 1993 and 2018. For the multivariate analysis, this study applied a sequence of statistical analyses including factor analysis, multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis. Through these techniques, this research study tried to summarize the condition and status of IBS research by classifying the IBS literature into four categories.

IBS literature has been classified into four categories, namely, evolutionary aspects of IBS; firm strategic objectives and IBS; institutional theory and IBS in emerging economies; and foreign market entry strategies for internationalization.

Based upon the basis of the analysis of extant research in IBS, the current and future extension research topics have been presented. This would help future researchers to understand the white spots for undertaking research in future.

This was one of the very first studies that mapped the International Business Strategy literature and categorized IBS literature.

Realising the sustainable development goals (SDGs) will require substantial efforts from both governments, businesses, civil society and academic researchers. This paper aims to discuss the contributions that the international business (IB) discipline can make to promoting the SDGs.

The paper is conceptual.

The authors argue that IB can contribute to promoting the SDGs, given IB’s expertise on the multinational enterprise (MNE) and knowledge that is relevant to the international dimensions that most SDGs have. However, paradigmatic features of IB such as a focus on firm-level financial performance and on the MNE as an organisation, and dominance of quantitative methods, may presently restrict the discipline’s contributions to the SDGs.

The authors present a set of recommendations for IB research on the SDGs, many of which imply an extension of the boundaries of the current IB paradigm.

This paper aims to provide a critical perspective of how the theme of women, and more broadly gender, have been treated in extant international business (IB) literature. It also suggests meaningful and promising avenues in this research space.

This paper is not intended to provide a comprehensive literature review; rather, it offers a critical and reflective view on the development of the IB stream of literature in which discussion of women has been largely marginalised.

While women and gender have been topics of considerable discussion across a range of disciplines in the social sciences, they have received limited examination in the IB literature despite this discipline being most suitable for such, given its socio-cultural analyses across international borders and organisations.

Several themes are suggested as fertile future research avenues. These themes identify gaps in existing knowledge but, more importantly, also problematize prevailing views that IB scholars tend to hold about women and gender. The future research themes suggest that the very context of IB signifies the need for systematic gender analysis which might advance current understanding of women specifically and gender, more broadly, in the IB field.

This paper makes a salient and timely contribution to the IB field in providing an original, erstwhile unexamined critique of the marginal reflection on women and gender within extant IB research.

This paper aims to draw on international relations (IR) literature to analyze, from a critical standpoint, recent developments in international business (IB) and international management (IM) in the USA, and the emerging debate between mainstream and critical researchers in Anglo‐American literature. It also aims to show that these important undertakings overshadow the political role of international disciplines and constrain the development of a critical perspective in IB from Latin America.

Based on an interdisciplinary approach, this paper addresses the main debates on IR regarding the “international” and the control of international fields of knowledge by the great powers to foster a critical perspective in IB from Latin America.

Critique from a universal perspective which does not differentiate IB and IM in the Anglo‐American literature is important, but constrains the appraisal of specific national and regional issues that are of vital importance to the development of a critical perspective in IB from Latin America.

This critical perspective moves beyond disciplinary boundaries and raises implications for research and teaching of IB and IM in Latin America.

This paper problematizes, from a perspective focused on the political economy of knowledge, the overlooking of debates about the “international” and of specific conditions that both enable and constrain the development of fields of knowledge from a less asymmetrical standpoint.