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Increased global sourcing of manufacturing and service activities has been a prominent part of the restructuring of firms’ supply chains in the 1990s and beyond. Academics and consultancy firms have largely supported the view of global sourcing as one of the key drivers of superior performance. As we are now increasingly discovering, the drawbacks of offshore outsourcing – or, put differently, the advantages of vertical integration – have been underestimated or even neglected. In this chapter, we first discuss the need to balance sourcing levels and then how global sourcing levels must achieve a strategic fit with the environment. Finally, we synthesize these balance and fit perspectives to suggest how, over time, changes in the fit alter the required balance in global sourcing. From this synthesis, we develop a number of future research questions related to important conceptual perspectives on sourcing. For managers we provide indications of how they can achieve a balance and a fit of their sourcing strategies.

This study examines the diffusion process of corporate sustainability (CS) in the global automotive industry. It discusses the different roles played by the automakers, as the industry’s focal firms, in diffusing CS strategies throughout their respective supply networks. Studies have explained this phenomenon as being the result of the higher levels of stakeholder exposure faced by focal firms, which generate higher levels of supplier sustainability risk. In this context, the authors examine the effects of three network-related firm characteristics – resource dominance, resource substitutability, and network centrality – in determining the effectiveness of a firm in diffusing CS in its network. For that purpose, we present a theoretical framework from which we derive a set of hypotheses and test them on a sample of the global automotive supply network containing 10,726 firms linked by 45,044 inter-firm relationships. The results lend significant support to the argument that these network-related firm attributes are crucial mechanisms to the process of diffusion of CS strategies in a supply network, thus contributing to extant literatures in strategic management, international business, and sustainable supply chain management.

This paper examines the statistical relationship between outbound Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and firm performance. We focus on how the link is influenced by sector-specific differences and geographical factors.

We compile a time-series cross-sectional dataset that includes financial variables and FDI activities of South Korean firms between 2005 and 2008 from the DART, a financial statement database. Then, we fit our data against the linear regression models that we designed to identify FDI-performance relationship in different subsamples. Our measurement of firm performance is specifically constructed to reflect excess returns in the stock market.

We found compelling differences in the degree of FDI-performance relationships across different industries. In manufacturing sectors, the flow of direct investment is more heavily associated with firm performances than accumulated stock of direct investment, and vice versa in the service sector. The impact of China factors toward performance aspects of Korea’s outbound FDI which also differs across sectors as well.

Although there have been extensive research efforts on this subject in general, our paper addresses an increasingly significant class of FDIs that have received relatively less attention, that is, direct investment originating from developing economies. Also, our analysis adds a sectoral dimension that contributes to more comprehensive understanding of a multinational-performance relationship.

Most years, several AIB members are elected as AIB Fellows on account of their excellent international business scholarship, and/or past service as AIB President or Executive Secretary. The Fellows are in charge of electing Eminent Scholars as well as the International Executive and International Educator (formerly, Dean) of the Year, who often provide the focus for Plenary Sessions at AIB Conferences. Their history since 1975 covers over half of the span of the AIB and reflects many issues that dominated that period in terms of research themes, progresses and problems, the internationalization of business education and the role of international business in society and around the globe. Like other organizations, the Fellows Group had their ups and downs, successes and failures – and some fun too!

The paper provides an overview of material helpful in placing the subsequent papers in context, as well as a summary of the research contributions made by the individual papers themselves.

We begin with a timeline of China’s Economic Reform, including both major events that permitted the opening and expansion of the nation’s economy, and important milestones of the historical movement. We then consider the impact of philosophy and culture (particularly, Confucianism and socialism) on China’s society and government, which leads naturally to certain observations regarding the political-economic model in which state-owned enterprises play a central role. In the final section, we briefly summarize the contents of the remaining papers.

The Fellows of the Academy of International Business provide the institutional memory for the Academy of International Business. Through their awards in recognition of practitioners who have made outstanding contributions to the practice of international business, of scholars who have produced pioneering social-science studies that provide new research perspectives for scholars of international business, and of Business-School Deans who have built outstanding academic programs in international business, the AIB Fellows also help to legitimize the field of international business. Among its members, it counts the founders of the field of international business as well as an increasing number of senior scholars whose research has helped to build international business as an acknowledged and renowned academic field of study.