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Pankaj Ghemawat is honored not only for the breadth of his contribution to International Management as a scholar but also as an educator and passionate advocate of his ideas to practitioners. His work extends from industrial organization applications within the traditional strategy field all the way to international business insights into global strategy. The methodologies he employs straddle theoretical models, field-based cases, and even the creation of original databases. This suggests that in the hands of a true intellectual, there is value to an eclectic approach in academia. This is particularly true since the key insight of Pankaj’s work is that differences among countries remain central to global strategy and that it is those differences that can be arbitraged into competitive advantage.

This essay is a commentary on Ghemawat’s work on the reality of semiglobalization and its relevance to the International Business (IB) field and to the world of practice. It recognizes Ghemawat’s contributions to the IB field – at par with his earlier contributions to the competitive strategy area and highlights Ghemawat’s emphasis on well-grounded empirical research. This approach serves well to establish the case that markets are semi-integrated, and the world is semiglobal. Through his work, Ghemawat has brought back to center stage a central premise of the IB field: that locations and distance across locations matter.

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 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.

The paper aims to look at the sustained differences among countries in devising and evaluating marketing strategies.

The paper uses the example of football to illustrate this view of globalization.

The paper finds that border‐crossing businesses need to pay more attention to the sustained differences among countries in devising and evaluating strategies.

The paper offers interesting views on the development of globalized marketing strategies.

We learn from history but it can be a mistake to assume that the past will always repeat itself. Nevertheless, it is reasonable assumption that, because of what took place in the 20th century, the new millennium will see continuing and increasing globalization as a feature of the business world. The reason for this, as explained by Powers and Collins Jones in their examination of the way the global marketplace has evolved, is that globalization is a logical progression of a process that continued throughout the 20th century.

Purpose – After tracing the development of the global value chains (GVC) approach, the chapter argues that by refocusing on the international strategies of lead firms it is possible to bring location specificity issues into play and contribute to retrieve a distinctive international content to the GVC governance theory.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter discusses the GVC governance theory, drawing from recent contributions in the field of international business (IB).

Findings – Although designed to account for the rise of new inter-firm networks controlled by international lead firms, the new GVC theory of governance somehow lacks a distinct international content and, privileging transactional constraints, falls short of explicitly considering variations in lead firm structural characteristics and strategies. An alternative governance schema is then proposed, taking explicitly into account the strategic evaluations that lead firms carry out with regard to their internal resources compared to suppliers’.

Research limitations/implications (if applicable) – The chapter provides the outlines of a new promising international research agenda for GVC researchers. Additional research is needed to further investigate the relation between location specificity, the strategic motives to go global and the international organisation of the value chain.

Practical implications (if applicable) – The alternative governance schema proposed in the chapter aspires to represent a simple tool aimed at supporting managers in the establishment of the appropriate boundaries of the firm.

Originality/value – The chapter shows that both IB research and GVC analysis could greatly benefit from reasoned cross-fertilisation.

This paper aims to provide a personal perspective on the extent to which business schools have globalized what they teach and to make content‐ and process‐related suggestions about how to make further progress.

The paper provides a mixture of quantitative and qualitative/interpretative analysis.

The paper finds that rhetoric around the globalization of business education has greatly outrun the reality of curricular change and this problem seems unlikely to be solved until the craving for distinctively global content can be satisfied.

Semiglobalization – the intermediate state of integration in which neither the bridges nor the borders between countries can be ignored – is proposed as a conceptual umbrella for organizing curricular change and in terms, of process, a two‐track‐approach, combining infusion and insertion, is recommended.

Both the conceptual and procedural recommendations of this paper are novel.