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Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.

In this paper, the authors undertake a systematic analysis of multinationality–performance (M-P) literature published in the last decade, when antecedents for internationalization and moderators of the M-P relationship had attained a center stage in international business and international management research. Though M-P relationship is one of the most widely studied topics within international business literature, so far synthesis of the entire theoretical landscape is missing in extant literature.

Through keywords search process, the authors found 111 studies in management literature that look at internationalization, its antecedents, performance of internationalized firms, and moderators of the M-P relationship. The focus of this study is to identify theoretical foundations used to explain the antecedents and moderators in M-P relationship, in order to suggest the future research direction for the field. The authors classify the antecedents and moderators based on their theoretical underpinnings not only to identify commonly used theoretical foundations in the last 10 years of international strategy research but also to highlight potential areas for future research.

The authors’ analysis indicates that research on international strategy in the last decade was dominated by theory testing in the context of developed economies. The authors’ review suggests that majority of the antecedents and moderators in the M-P relationship are anchored within institutional theory, organizational structure, resource-based view, social capital, and upper echelon theory.

The authors’ findings are indicative of a rich research potential of M-P relationship in the contextual research setting of emerging markets while leveraging more diversified theoretical bases and multiple levels of research design.

Making links between micro and macro levels has been problematic in the social sciences, and the literature in strategic management and organization theory is no exception. The purpose of this chapter is to raise theoretical issues in developing micro-foundations for strategic management and organizational analysis. We discuss more general problems with collectivism in the social sciences by focusing on specific problems in extant organizational analysis. We introduce micro-foundations to literature by explicating the underlying theoretical foundations of the origins of individual action and interaction. We highlight opportunities for future research, specifically emphasizing the need for a rational choice programme in management research.

Supply chain management (SCM) emerged in the early 1980s as a result of the rapidly changing and challenging business environments in many industries. SCM is a consequence of the increased necessity for holistic considerations in, between and across companies’ business activities and resources in and between marketing channels, in order to improve the overall performance towards the ultimate consumer in the marketplace. SCM’s generic theoretical foundations are derived from time‐, functional‐, and relationship‐dependencies in, between and across companies’ business activities in marketing channels. There are major similarities and minor differences in the theoretical boundaries between SCM and Alderson’s interpretation of a functionalist theory of marketing. The author argues that the theoretical origin of SCM is derived from, and underpinned by, a part of this functionalist theory of marketing. Furthermore, there is a need for a generic re‐definition and expansion of the theoretical boundaries of SCM towards the incorporation of horizontal dependencies between marketing channels in the marketplace.

The focus of this paper is to provide the profession of volunteer administration (VA) a model outlining theoretical dimensions of the discipline. The dimensions provided include the (a) processes, (b) discipline, (c) foundations, and (d) theoretical base. Volunteer administration is the set of associated processes of operating a volunteer program. Included are a compilation of competencies identified by the Association for Volunteer Administration (2001) and 13 professionals that participated in a study conducted by Boyd (2002). The seven processes are Commitment to the Profession, Organizational Leadership, Systems Leadership, Accountability, Management Skills, Personal Skills, and Organizational Culture. The foundational disciplines are Leadership and Management, Community Development, and Teaching and Learning. Psychology and sociology provide the empirical evidence that supports the foundations and processes of VA. Professionals should look deeper into the theoretical base of VA, in order to develop and encourage focused research initiatives and academic curricula for volunteer administrators.

Theory is a kind of condensed human knowledge. This paper is to examine the mechanism of interdisciplinary diffusion of theoretical knowledge by tracing the diffusion of a representative theory, the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM).

Based on the full-scale dataset of Web of Science (WoS), the citations of Davis's original work about TAM were analysed and the interdisciplinary diffusion paths of TAM were delineated, a supervised machine learning method was used to extract theory incidents, and a content analysis was used to categorize the patterns of theory evolution.

It is found that the diffusion of a theory is intertwined with its evolution. In the process, the role that a participating discipline play is related to its knowledge distance from the original disciplines of TAM. With the distance increases, the capacity to support theory development and innovation weakens, while that to assume analytical tools for practical problems increases. During the diffusion, a theory evolves into new extensions in four theoretical construction patterns, elaboration, proliferation, competition and integration.

The study does not only deepen the understanding of the trajectory of a theory but also enriches the research of knowledge diffusion and innovation.

The study elaborates the relationship between theory diffusion and theory development, reveals the roles of the participating disciplines played in theory diffusion and vice versa, interprets four patterns of theory evolution and uses text mining technique to extract theory incidents, which makes up for the shortcomings of citation analysis and content analysis used in previous studies.

For over 40 years academicians and practitioners have debated the standardization versus adaptation of international marketing strategy. Despite the importance of, and tremendous interest in the topic, and the volume of scholarly activity this topic has generated, the debate remains unresolved. Why? Here, it is argued that the last 40 years of scholarly research has advanced without a strong underlying theoretical framework. The historical foundations of the standardization/adaptation perspective are presented, followed by a critical evaluation of the field under the guiding framework of the fundamentals of theoretical construction. Suggestions for developing a stronger theoretical foundation, as well as directions for future research are addressed.

The blockchain represents a seminal paradigm shift, likely to radically transform business in the future. While the paradigm associated with the World Wide Web and Big Data is focused on the “sharing of information,” the paradigm associated with blockchain is focused on the “sharing of assets.” Intellectual assets are among the most valuable of assets, and customer co-creation is a key approach for creating new value for firms. This paper aims to draw on blockchain-centric logic to develop an initial theoretical framework, with managerial recommendations, for the use of blockchain in customer co-creation.

Building upon established indigenous theory development and inductive realist approaches, the authors develop an original two-step methodology to create the initial theoretical framework. This methodology, involving foundational premises and propositions, is ideal for relatively new areas of research and is well suited to serve as a relatively faster catalyst for future research.

Despite the substantial potential impact of blockchain in innovation, no theoretical foundation for blockchain in customer co-creation exists. To fill this gap, the authors present an initial theoretical framework, using blockchain-centric logic in customer co-creation. The proposed theoretical framework highlights how key prerequisites in customer co-creation, including trust, security, transparency, identity and immutability, can be enhanced with blockchain-centric logic.

It is hoped that the initial theoretical framework, based on blockchain-centric logic, can contribute to future academic research on blockchain in customer co-creation and help practitioners better exploit the blockchain in co-creation. Directions for future research, the larger agenda for this paper, are presented in the conclusion.

This paper aims to establish a theoretic framework to provide a fundamental understanding of cyberspatial objects, their existence and their identification scheme while providing a connection between cyber-enabled spaces and cyberspace. It develops an avenue to quantify general philosophical and theoretical questions, precisely, inherently spatial basis that produces an unprecedented space–time continuum, in which cyber-enabled relations evolve.

Multidisciplinary theoretical approaches are needed to describe complex systems, which in this paper are integrated in a quest for the principles underlying the structural organization and dynamics of cyberspace. A theoretic framework is presented, and the spatial conception of cyber-enabled physical, social, information and thinking spaces and entities existence are provided.

With spatial objects and spatial properties, cyberspace is inherently spatial. Its basic constructs are founded on its spatial qualities and producing radical space–time compression, cyber-enabled spaces in which dynamic relations develop and thrive. The cyberspatial object operations are primarily built on foundations that depend on physical space and other spatial metaphors. Information space, basically missing in the literature, is an important part of cyberspace.

This work suggested a novel analytical approach to describing cyberspace from broader perspectives and fields. Due to the novelty and divergence of cyber concepts, an interdisciplinary study and methodology are needed. Thus, more research toward theoretical direction could help many of the practical implementations of concepts.

The research is of particular significance in cyberspatial mechanics to describe the dynamics and behavior of cyber physical systems. For example, object-based analysis functions like spatial query, node pattern analysis, cluster analysis, spatial similarity analysis and location modeling.

Complementing the existing literature and defining information space to the research sphere, a theoretical framework providing a fundamental understanding of cyberspatial objects and the general cyberspace foundation has been proposed, resulting in a formalized concept of existence, interactions and applications and services, with respect to philosophy, science and technology, respectively.