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This chapter complements the one that appeared as “History of the AIB Fellows: 1975–2008” in Volume 14 of this series (International Business Scholarship: AIB Fellows on the First 50 Years and Beyond, Jean J. Boddewyn, Editor). It traces what happened under the deanship of Alan Rugman (2011–2014) who took many initiatives reported here while his death in July 2014 generated trenchant, funny, and loving comments from more than half of the AIB Fellows. The lives and contributions of many other major international business scholars who passed away from 2008 to 2014 are also evoked here: Endel Kolde, Lee Nehrt, Howard Perlmutter, Stefan Robock, John Ryans, Vern Terpstra, and Daniel Van Den Bulcke.

This chapter analyses the rise of the ‘global factory’ – the globally integrated network centred on a focal multinational enterprise. This is a response to the increased volatility of the global economy and involves the creation of systems that allow flexibility in both the location and the control of increasingly ‘fine-sliced’ activities, the avoidance of monopoly and the evolution of new management skills. Foreign direct investment is only one strategy amongst several utilised by globally integrated multinationals.

This chapter analyzes the dynamics of crises. A crisis typically begins with the emergence of a critical situation, followed by poor leadership and mismanagement that precipitates the crisis itself. The causes of crises may be classified as natural, political, economic, financial, industry-specific and firm-specific. This chapter examines the causes and consequences of poor leadership and management in crises of different kinds. Firm-specific crisis is a surprisingly neglected topic. The failure of a firm may reflect external factors, for example, the decline of an industry, or internal factors, for example, management failures, or a combination of the two. The chapter explains firm-specific crisis in terms of firm-specific disadvantages, which are the opposite of the firm-specific advantages identified in internalization theory.

To identify points of similarity and differences of emphasis between internalisation theory and global value chain (GVC) theory and to highlight how the latter’s particular approach is useful in analysing the impact of private sustainability standards.

Review of some key texts and reviews of internalisation theory combined with author’s reflections on GVC theory based on his contributions to its development.

GVC theory shares much common ground with the internalisation theory of international business, but their different starting points lead to different strengths and weaknesses. Internalisation theory is strong on the logic of decisions by transnational companies to internalise or externalise their activities. GVC theory is strongest in its consideration of how and why companies manage externalised activities in different ways, and its theory of network governance focuses on how governance challenges change in response to market requirements, shifts in the break point between enterprises, the role of codification in simplifying governance and the control of activities across multiple links in value chains. These factors explain how private and public–private standards in the field of sustainability are both a response to new external demands on value chains and, simultaneously, a means of reducing the complexity of governance challenges that such demands create.

Few attempts have been made to compare the two theories, and value chain theorists have not engaged with the international business literature. The chapter highlights the scope for a continuing and more systematic comparison of the two literatures.

The optimal location of plants by a global firm is analyzed for the first time using measures of distance along the spherical surface of Planet Earth. With a uniform distribution of customers an optimal location strategy will normally seek a space-filling configuration of identical areas that are as near circular as possible. The hexagonal space-filling solution for location on an infinite plane cannot be generalized to the surface of a sphere. Different spatial patterns are required for different numbers of plants; these may be based on triangles, squares, or pentagons. The chapter reviews the current state of knowledge on the topic, drawing on theories of spherical geometry and regular convex polyhedra, and on applications in physics, chemistry, and medicine. Overall, there appears to be no general solution to the problem; only a set of quite different solutions for various special cases. The lack of any general solution to this central problem in international business illustrates the “impossibility” referred to in the title of this chapter.

In this chapter I would like to recall how I got started on my research on the multinational enterprise (MNE) and outline how my thinking on this important economic institution has evolved through the years.11I thank Sondra Grace of Gracefully Put for editing this manuscript.

A case can be made that, to some extent at least, the marketing discipline has not kept pace with the practice of international marketing. Recognizing that internationalization is a dynamic process that may vary across the business of marketing, the development of marketing thought, the direction of marketing education, and the marketing research process, this paper explores that premise. Then, given the current emphasis on the integration of business activities on a worldwide basis, it suggests an interdisciplinary approach, grounded in the concept of market imperfections and internalization theory, to deal with the major challenges that now confront international marketing scholars.

Alan Rugman, in the course of his professional career, has not shied away from controversy, whether the issues were international diversification versus internationalization, internalization versus use of the external market, double diamonds versus single diamonds or global multinational enterprises (MNEs) versus regional MNEs. Whatever was the bone of contention, he has formulated strong hypotheses and then engaged in empirical work to provide evidence for his position. He has taken the issues to a wide audience – scholarly, government and business. To each group he has hammered the ideas home until he was associated with a position on the issues. In fact, Alan seems to have relished being in the middle of storms of controversy as he beat the drums furiously for what he saw as right regardless of whether he offended others taking an opposite view. The result has been that he has had a huge impact on the field of international strategic management and an influence on government policy and business activity.

This chapter argues that international business has much to contribute to intranational business in helping develop a theory of the business enterprise in space. It makes its arguments by articulating four propositions about international business that appear to carry over directly to intranational business. According to the first three propositions, business activities of multiple types are dampened by borders and those that do cross them typically diminish with geographic as well as other types of distance. The fourth proposition supplements these general discussions of the landscape of business with a focus on a specific business application: it works through the case of business strategy by discussing how insights from the international domain can be applied to the intranational domain in that field of business.