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One of the most important trends that supporting the rise of institutional theory research is the increasing number of leading multinational enterprises headquartered in a greater number of countries. Although early international business studies focused on multinationals from the United States, the developed countries of Western Europe and Japan, some of the largest multinational enterprises today are from non-Triad countries, including Brazil, China, Korea, India, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and Taiwan. These new multinationals exhibited behaviours different from those of established Triad multinationals and, in many cases, competed with distinctly different strategies. The result was that international business scholars, who traditionally concentrated on studying host country factors as the key to understanding corporate behaviour began to pay much more attention to the characteristics of the multinationals’ home institutional environments as a potential determinant of the multinationals’ internationalization strategy. For example, a growing number of studies have examined the variance in corporate governance systems around the world and their implications for the strategies of multinational enterprises (La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, & Shleifer, 1999; Pedersen & Thomsen, 1997). The shift in the population of leading multinationals has also led to the emergence of research on business groups. Although Japanese multinational enterprises had the kereitsu structure and some European firms were parts of conglomerates these structures were considered by most scholars to be inefficient. However, this viewpoint is changing as the body of new multinational enterprises originates from countries where business group membership has been the norm, rather than the exception (Guillén, 2000; Khanna & Palepu, 2000; Khanna & Rivkin, 2001).

The Booz & Co./Strategy+Business Eminent Scholar in International Management is an annual award given by the International Management Division of the Academy of Management and Sponsored by Booz & Co./Strategy+Business.

The Booz & Co./strategy+business Eminent Scholar in International Management is an annual award given by the International Management Division of the Academy of Management and Sponsored by Booz & Co./strategy+business.

The first part of Volume 24 contains our annual feature from a leading scholar. Professor Stephen Kobrin was the recipient of the 2010 Booz & Co./strategy+business Eminent Scholar in International Management Award, given by the International Management Division of the Academy of Management, and in his acceptance speech gives us his view on the evolution of the nation state and global governance. This is a particularly salient introduction to this volume as Professor Kobrin's work very neatly addresses the question of what is the role of location when political power is now spanning traditional locational boundaries. Jonathan Doh and Ruth Aguilera provide commentaries that integrate Kobrin's work with that of stakeholder theory and transnational governance.

The first part of Volume 26 is dedicated to our annual feature from a leading scholar. The 2012 Recipient of the Booz & Co./Strategy + Business Eminent Scholar in International Management Award was Professor Jean-François Hennart of Tilburg University. Professor Hennart was honoured by this Award by the International Management Division of the Academy of Management at its annual conference in Boston, Massachusetts. His acceptance speech discusses the role of his work on transaction cost economics on international business and organizational structure. The speech is followed by the commentaries of Alain Verbeke and Jenny Hillemann of the University of Calgary and Arjen Slangen of Tilburg University.