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There is an extensive research stream devoted to evaluating host country political risk as it relates to foreign investment decisions, and in today’s geopolitical climate, this type of risk is becoming increasingly salient to business leaders. Despite notable advancements related to understanding the importance of government-related risk, inconsistent conceptualizations and findings remain. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to offer a comprehensive overview of how host country political risk has been conceptualized, measured and studied in relation to multinational enterprises' (MNEs’) investment decisions. After reviewing the relevant literature, five major aspects of non-violent (government type, public corruption, leadership change) and violent (armed conflict, terrorism) political risk were identified. The organization and review of each aspect of political risk provide insights on fruitful directions for future research, which are discussed.

To identify research articles on political risk and foreign investment, 13 leading management and international business journals were searched using relevant keywords (January 2000 to January 2023). Moreover, reviewing articles from these journals led to locating and reviewing additional relevant articles that the authors cited. Keyword searches were also conducted on Google Scholar and Web of Science in an effort to identify relevant articles outside of the 13 targeted journals.

Both violent and non-violent aspects of host country political risk have been studied in relation to MNEs' investment decisions. Specifically, five major aspects of host country political risk were identified (government type, public corruption, leadership change, armed conflict and terrorism). Although the general consensus is that risk related to the government often creates obstacles for MNEs, conceptualizations, measures and findings in prior research are not uniform.

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of host country political risk and foreign investment. In doing so, the aspects of political risk are identified, organized and overviewed.

The paper aims to understand how state and non-state domestic terrorism impacts MNEs in foreign markets. Despite the burgeoning literature on terrorism within international business (IB), most research has focused on international terrorism, or terrorism generally. Consequently, there has been limited research examining how domestic or local based terrorism impacts foreign firms.

This is a conceptual paper.

Domestic terrorism is the most common form of terrorism in the world today and involves the state and non-state actors. Non-state domestic terrorism can be low intensity or high intensity. High intensity non-state-domestic terrorism typically involves regular and protracted political violence, along with inter-communal violence. This can expose MNEs to considerable operational, governance and legitimacy pressures.

The paper contributes to the gap in IB terrorism research with regards domestic or local based terrorism. Drawing on IB theory and critical terrorism research, the paper addresses the nature and impact of domestic terrorism within IB. The authors’ paper shows the operational, governance and legitimacy pressures of both state and non-state domestic terrorism for MNEs in host markets. While most IB scholars consider the threat of non-state terrorism for international firms, this study shows how domestic state terrorism benefits and constrains foreign firms.

“First principles” of international business (IB) thinking should be applied systematically when assessing the functioning of internationally operating firms. The most important first principle is that entrepreneurially oriented firms seek to create, deliver and capture economic value through cross-border linkages. Such linkages invariably require complementary resources from a variety of parties with idiosyncratic vulnerabilities to be meshed. Starting from first principles allows bringing to light evidence-based insight. For instance, most companies are not global and even the world’s largest firms rarely change the location of key strategic functions. International new ventures (INVs), emerging economy multinational enterprises (MNEs) and family firms face unique vulnerabilities but also command resources that can be used to create value across borders. The quest for “optimal” international diversification appears to be a futile academic exercise, and in emerging economies with institutional voids, relational networks – and more broadly, informal institutions – are unlikely to function as scalable substitutes for formal institutions. In global value chains (GVCs), many lead firms and their partners have been able to craft governance mechanisms that reduce bounded rationality and bounded reliability challenges, and it is also critical for them to use governance as a tool to create entrepreneurial space. Finally, many of the world’s largest companies have been on successful trajectories toward reducing their climate change footprint for a few decades. But these firm-specific trajectories are fraught with challenges and cannot just be imposed via unilateral, macro-level targets decided upon by individuals and institutions lacking a clear understanding of innovation and capital expenditure processes in business.

Wars, and violent conflicts generally, can generate significant institutional dynamics and new legitimacy pressures for multinational enterprises (MNEs). The purpose of this paper is to understand the nature or source of institutional pressures facing MNEs in war and to examine how MNEs respond and navigate these institutional pressures.

This is a conceptual paper.

Through the theoretical lens of institutional theory and drawing on insights from the devastating Russian–Ukrainian war in Europe, the study provides a framework that explains the nature of institutional pressures impacting MNEs in a major war conflict and how MNEs respond to these pressures. Central to the framework is the impact of formal and informal institutions on MNEs during war. As a result of regulatory and social pressures, MNEs have to make important strategic decisions either to protect their legitimacy or to defend their economic objectives against institutional demands.

As the paper situates the pressures of war for MNEs in a formal and informal institutional context, this offers a new approach to understanding the costs and pressures of war on MNEs.

This study reviews the literature on institutional theory in international business and examines the institutional factors behind the success or failure of multinational corporations (MNCs) in emerging markets.

This systematic literature review analysed 116 peer-reviewed articles published in leading journals between 2005 and 2022. The R package Bibliometrix and VOSviewer visualization software were used for analysis. A hybrid methodology combining bibliometric and content analyses was utilized to obtain a descriptive evaluation of the publication impact along with a keyword co-occurrence map, context-specific institutional effects and subsidiary strategies.

The Journal of International Business Studies, along with influential authors such as Mike W. Peng, Klaus Meyer, and Mehmet Demirbag, have taken the lead in advancing institutional theories for MNC internationalization in emerging markets. The clusters from the co-word analysis revealed dominant MNC entry modes, institutional distances and MNC localization strategies. The content analysis highlights how the institutional environment is operationalized across the macro-, micro- and meso-institutional contexts and how the MNC subsidiary responds in emerging markets. Meso-level interactions emphasize the relational aspects of business strategies in emerging markets.

Contextualizing subsidiary strategies and institutional forms can help managers align their strategic responses to the dynamic relationship between subsidiaries and the institutional environment. The review findings will enable policymakers to simplify regulatory policies and encourage MNC subsidiary networks with local stakeholders in emerging markets.

Legitimacy strategies such as corporate community involvement in emerging markets are crucial for enhancing societal support and removing stakeholders' scepticism for MNC business operations in emerging markets. Moral legitimacy should be implemented by managers, such as lending support to disaster management efforts and humanitarian crises, as they expand to new business environments of emerging markets.

This study is the first to explore institutional diversity and subsidiary strategic responses in a three-layered institutional context. The findings highlight the relevance of contextualizing institutional perspectives for international business scholars and practitioners as they help build context-specific theoretical frameworks and business strategies. Future research recommendations are suggested in the macro-, micro- and meso-institutional contexts.

Critiques of international business (IB) have long pointed to the weaknesses in the understanding of context. This has ignited debate on the understanding of institutions and how they “matter” for IB. Yet how institutions matter ultimately depends on how IB applies institutional theory. It is argued that institutional-based research is dominated by a narrow set of approaches, largely overlooking institutional perspectives that account for institutional diversity. This paper aims to forward the argument that IB research should lend greater attention to comparing the topography of institutional configurations by bringing political economy “back in” to the IB domain.

Using principal components analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis, the authors provide IB with a taxonomy of capitalist institutional diversity which defines the landscape of political economies.

The authors show institutional diversity is characterised by a range of capitalist clusters and configuration arrangements, identifying four clusters with distinct modes of capitalism as well as specifying intra-cluster differences to propose nine varieties of capitalism. This paper allows IB scholars to lend closer attention to the institutional context within which firms operate. If the configurations of institutions “matter” for IB scholarship, then clearly, a quantitative blueprint to assess institutional diversity remains central to the momentum of such “institutional turn.”

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of institutional theory, serving as a valuable resource for the application of context within international business. Further, our taxonomy allows international business scholars to utilise a robust framework to examine the diverse institutional context within which firms operate, whilst extending to support the analysis of broader socioeconomic outcomes. This taxonomy therefore allows international business scholars to utilise a robust framework to examine the institutional context within which firms operate.

When terrorism threaten geopolitical stability, many policymakers turn to economic sanctions. In this way, governments and multilateral organizations continue to affect corporate and managerial choices, through the shaping and constraining of international trade policies. Still, most of the international business remain relatively quiet about the impact of the non-market environment on firms’ strategic efforts. Questions remain about how firms adjust their strategies in the face of the often-sudden impact of changes in multilateral rules and enforcement mechanisms. This study aims to address this question by shedding light on three potential adjustment strategies for firms that have been impacted by sanctions.

As part of a larger, multimethod study, the authors undertook 16 semi-structured interviews with senior managers of firms whose operations have been affected by international sanctions.

International and political tensions can affect businesses in many ways, from exporting to strategies associated with global knowledge sourcing. Learnings from organizations that have had to respond to sudden and extreme changes in their fragile ecosystems will aid this study. In this commentary paper, the authors offer suggestions about how to adapt, respond and operate in a new reality.

While the imposition of long-term political sanctions, especially by powerful nations and multilateral institutions, has become more frequent, how businesses cope with these extreme external shifts still remains unknown. This paper focuses on firms operating in a sanctioned regime, investigating how they deal with these sudden changes in their environment.

Conventional wisdom suggests that war in the host country makes it unattractive for foreign firms to invest. To see if this is true for US firms on the aggregate, this paper aims to examine the veracity of a “permanent war economy” hypothesis, that foreign direct investment (FDI) may, in fact, increase in the host country not despite, but because of, war, i.e. one that lends credence to the idea that, in the USA, “defense [has] become one of constant preparation for future wars and foreign interventions rather than an exercise in response to one-off threats.”

The authors test the hypotheses using Generalized Method of Moments estimation, with Heckman Selection, on US FDI data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and war data from the Correlates of War2 Project, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program/International Peace Research Institute data set, the International Crisis Behavior Project and the Center for Systemic Peace Major Episodes of Political Violence data set. The final sample consists of 351 country-year observations in 55 host countries from 1982 to 2006.

The findings indicate that overall US FDI in a host country in a given year decreases if the host country is engaged in wars with multiple countries and if the US Government is involved in the war. Most notably, the results show that US involvement in multiple host country wars is actually correlated with increased US FDI into the host country, providing empirical support for the “permanent war economy” hypothesis.

While other studies have focused on war and FDI, the authors have sought to show the impact of the involvement of arguably the most influential country, i.e. the USA, in the sovereign matters of a focal host country. By studying FDI from the USA as a function of US involvement in wars overseas, over the years with the greatest use of private military companies by the USA and the largest portion of global FDI accounted for by the USA, this work motivates a research agenda on home-host-"other” relations in the context of war and FDI, with the “other” being the supranational “elephant in the room.”

Deglobalization and the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic have severely hindered multinational enterprise (MNE) investment. At the same time, digital technology is seriously challenging it with traditional production factor flows. Few studies have realized that the impact of digitalization is not limited to either transaction costs or the location-boundness of firm-specific advantages (FSAs), but extends to profound changes in the fundamental essence of MNEs. There is still limited understanding of this body of knowledge as a whole, including how its subtopics are interrelated. This study took the production factor change perspective to review MNE theory in the digital era. Therefore, this study aims to identify any upcoming and undeveloped themes in order to provide a platform suited to direct future research.

This paper presents a summary and a review of 151 articles published between 2007 and 2020. Such review was conducted to systematically explain the connotations and influential mechanisms of digital empowerment on MNE theory. This was achieved by using the CiteSpace citation visualization tool to build a keyword co-occurrence network.

The research findings pertain to how digitalization expands, breaks through, and even reshapes traditional MNE theory from four distinctive angles: the influential factors of internationalization, the process of internationalization, competitive advantage, and location choice. The findings are followed by the presentation of future research directions.

This paper presents an examination of MNE theory in the digital era from the perspective of production factor change. In doing so, it identifies significant theoretical innovation opportunities for future scholarly research priorities.

Why is it that, despite repeated claims that digital-content firms and internet-based businesses can internationalize everywhere almost instantly, many seem unable to profitably expand outside their home markets? Why have emerging market firms (EMNEs) caught up with established developed-country multinationals (DMNEs) so much faster than expected? In this chapter, the author argues that the clue to these two puzzles lies in the realization that, contrary to the dominant view in the international business (IB) literature that focuses only on the intangibles exploited by DMNEs and assumes that these firms are free to unilaterally decide on their mode of entry and operation, doing business in a foreign country is only possible if intangibles are bundled with complementary local resources, usually held by local firms. Taking into account these complementary local resources and their owners makes it clear that DMNEs are not always free to choose their entry mode but must enlist the cooperation of local resource owners. The need of digital-content and internet-based firms for local complementary resources also explains why they sometimes experience problems when expanding abroad. Lastly, control of complementary local resources provides EMNEs with a home advantage against DMNEs competing with them in their home market. The author shows how EMNEs can capitalize on this advantage to obtain the intangibles they lack and need. The fact that these advantages are available on efficient global markets, while complementary local resources are not, explains the surprising speed of EMNE catch-up.