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This paper discusses national differences in the interpretation of time in mixed motive decision contexts, such as negotiation. Specifically, we consider how members of different national cultures (Portugal, Turkey, and the United States) experience temporality in these situations. We argue that cultural temporality such as polychronicity, future orientation, and uncertainty avoidance form part of a broader national environment. The national environment is also expressed in national stability factors such as legal systems, family ties, and homogeneity of populations. We propose that temporality and stability aspects of national environment determine negotiation paradigms, which subsequently influence temporality in negotiations. We conclude by suggesting that inclusion of complex and interdependent national environment factors in the study of negotiation has the potential to substantially advance our understanding of mixed motive decision situations.

In this chapter we examine the extant research in international business (IB) by conducting a bibliometric study of the articles published in three leading IB journals – International Business Review, Journal of International Business Studies and Management International Review, over their entire track record of publication available in the ISI – Institute for Scientific Information. In longitudinal analyses of citation data we ascertain the most relevant works of the IB field. We also identify intellectual interconnectedness in co-citation networks of the research published in each journal. A second-tier analysis delves into publication patterns of those articles that are not at the top citation listings. Our results permit us better understand and depict the extant IB research and, to some extent, its evolution thus far.

Research suggests that context matters for MNEs’ international business strategy. MNEs’ strategies vary when different intertwined contexts interact with each other. While International Business scholars understand well the influence of the institutional environments on firms’ international strategies and operations, some contextual differences are less understood as is the case involving African countries and firms. In this study we investigate how different institutional contexts and legitimacy challenges combine to impact ownership strategic choices of African firms in their cross-border acquisitions (CBAs). Specifically, we study the influence of the host country institutional development and two institutional dimension distances: administrative distance and knowledge distance. Methodologically, we use a sample of 314 CBAs made by acquirers from 24 African countries in 71 host countries worldwide to test a number of theoretically driven hypotheses. This study contributes to our understanding of how foreign investors from less institutionally developed countries that are more likely to face higher legitimacy barriers use ownership strategies to achieve legitimacy abroad.

Yair Aharoni is a Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Management, Tel-Aviv University. He received his DBA from the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration. His doctoral dissertation – The Foreign Investment Decision Process – was published in a book version and was translated to Spanish and Japanese. He is a Fellow of the International Academy of Management and the Academy of International Business. During his long and distinguished academic career, Aharoni was the Daniel and Grace Ross Professor of International Business and later the Issachar Haimovic Professor of Business Policy – both at Tel Aviv University. He was the Thomas Henry Caroll Ford Foundation Visiting Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration (1978–1979). He was also the J. Paul Stitch Visiting Professor of International Business at Duke University (1987–1995) and the director of CIBER (Center of International Business Education and Research) (1992–1995). He published several dozens books and monographs in Hebrew and in English, more than 100 papers and chapters in books and more than 150 cases. For his academic achievements he was awarded both Landau Prize (2007) and Israel Prize in management science (2010).

If we look to the uniqueness of IB/IM scholarship and ask where it stands separate from standard and traditional management and business research we really have only two differentiating, but exceedingly important, factors that justify discussing IB/IM as a separate research paradigm (See, e.g., Devinney, Pedersen, & Tihanyi, 2010).