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The purpose of this paper is to explore two specific areas pertaining to industrial networks and international business (IB). First, the authors look at how business relationships influence the internationalization in time, from the establishment of the first subsidiary in a foreign market to the following ones, and in space, that is, across different markets. Second, the authors investigate how an increasing external network dependence of subsidiaries in their internationalization may cause a detachment of a subsidiary from the mother company as its knowledge becomes insufficient to guide a subsidiary’s internationalization.

This paper utilizes an exploratory, longitudinal, single-case study of Loccioni – a manufacturer of measuring and automatic control systems for industrial customers – to illustrate the specific dynamics of the influences of industrial networks on the internationalization of subsidiaries.

The case study helps to elucidate the roles, entailing also free will and own initiative, of small suppliers’ subsidiaries which operate inside several global factories, and how “surfing” on many different global factories, by means of several local subsidiaries, actually supports these suppliers’ own international developments. This notion adds to our understanding of the global factory phenomenon a supplier focus that stresses how the role of suppliers is not merely that of being passive recipients of activities and directions from a focal orchestrating firm, but can also be that of initiative-takers themselves.

The paper contributes to the IMP tradition by providing a multi-layered and geographically more fine-grained view of the network embedding companies that operate on internationalized markets. This paper thereby sheds light on a less investigated area of research within the IMP tradition: the link between internationalization in different countries and the interconnectedness between the industrial networks spanning these countries. At the same time, this paper contributes to IB theories by showing how a late-internationalizing SME can enter highly international markets by “plugging into” several established “Global Factories” as a way to exploit further opportunities for international expansion.

The aim of the study was to show that a new method, using a look-up table technique, can be used to detect the presence and position of an inclusion embedded in a tissue-like material. Due to the time-consuming nature of the finite element (FE) method or FEM, real-time applications involving FEM as part of a control loop, are traditionally limited to slowly varying systems. By using a simplified two-dimensional FE model and a look-up table, we show by simulations and experiments that it is possible to achieve reasonable computational times in a tactile resonance sensor application.

A piezoelectric disk was placed in the center of a silicone rubber disk (SRD) with viscoelastic properties, where it acted as both sensor and actuator and dissipated radial acoustic waves into the silicone. The look-up table was constructed by calculating the radial Lamb wave transition frequencies in the impedance frequency response of the sensor while varying the position of an inclusion. A position-matching algorithm was developed that matched measured and calculated Lamb wave transitions and thereby identified the presence and position of an inclusion.

In an experiment, the position of a hard inclusion was determined by measuring the Lamb transition frequencies of the first radial resonance in two SRDs. The result of the matching algorithm for Disk 1 was that the matched position was less than 3% from the expected value. For Disk 2, the matching algorithm erroneously reported two false positions before reporting a position that was less than 5% from the expected value. An explanation for this discrepancy is presented. In a verifying experiment, the algorithm identified the condition with no inclusion present.

The approach outlined in this work, adds to the prospect of developing time-sensitive diagnostic instruments. This approach has the potential to provide a powerful technique to quickly present spatial information on detected tumors.

This paper aims to theorize on the internationalization process model to explain cases of manufacturing reshoring as decisions taken to manage risk when internationalizing.

The paper is of a conceptual nature. Building on the logic of the internationalization process model, the authors extend previous work by focusing on firms’ risk perception (determined by commitment, knowledge and uncertainty as key variables) to explain also reshoring decisions.

Four propositions were developed, concerning the likelihood of firms to make manufacturing reshoring decisions. The first two propositions deal with the effects of new risk contingencies, and the other two refer specifically to the effects of managerial perceptions of three different typologies of risk, namely, host-country, home-country and reshoring-process specific risk.

While reshoring has been discussed mainly on the basis of economic arguments, this paper offers an alternative, behavioural view of this phenomenon as a strategic risk-management process. Therefore, it offers initial steps to theorize about reshoring from a risk-management perspective and, in doing so, opens up a number of avenues for future research.

A review essay on Ronald Findlay, Lars Jonung and Mats Lundahl, eds. Bertil Ohlin: Centennial Celebration (1899–1999). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Pp. xvi, 546. $60.00. The Swedish economist Bertil Ohlin was born in 1899 and died in 1979. Less than half of his professional life he spent as a full time academic scholar in economics. He was a student at the University of Stockholm and was supervised by his teachers, Gustav Cassel and Eli Heckscher. In 1922, Ohlin presented his licentiat thesis where he set out the ideas later conceptualised as the Heckscher-Ohlin model. Two years later, in 1924, he took his doctoral degree under Cassel with a dissertation simply called Handelns teori (The Theory of Trade). A longer version of this dissertation was later published in English as Interregional and International Trade (1933). This work made him a famous trade theorist in a line of tradition going back to Ricardo and Torrens. Paul Samuelson in 1941 coined and immortalised the term “the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem” which he and Wolfgang Stolper developed further in a famous article in the Review of Economic Studies (1941) entitled “Protection and Real Wages.” Already at the age of 26 the bright young man Ohlin became a professor in economics at the University of Copenhagen and five years later he was appointed to a chair in the same subject at Handelshogskolan (The Stockholm School of Economics) in Stockholm.