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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 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.

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.

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 purpose of this paper is to introduce and analyze the concept of place-based business models, by which entrepreneurs use highly context-specific strategies and linkages to a “sense of place” as sources of value creation. To illustrate how place-based business models create unique value, case studies are reviewed from three sectors in Italy: Slow Food (Coop Italia and Eataly), agritourism (Spannocchia) and the albergo diffuso (Sextantio).

This is a conceptual paper with case studies from qualitative data and external sources.

The case studies demonstrate the value-creating potential of opportunities for the implementation of place-based business models. In contrast with conventional harm reduction perspectives, these models show how organizational contributions to local and regional resilience may also directly generate competitive advantage. The cases also illustrate challenges such as scaling up while maintaining authenticity, and coping with the public goods-nature of place-based resources.

Conventional management theory and practice treat environmental context as a distraction from which the technical core of the organization must be protected. Place-based business models diverge from convention by using tight coupling with local context to create value, enhance local economic resilience and contribute to a “sense of place”.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to critically assess the theoretical underpinnings and extant progress of the research on regional multi-national enterprises (MNEs) and offer a blueprint for future research by re-conceptualizing how (regional) boundaries relate to the international diversification of MNEs.

The paper integrates key insights from the theory of the regional MNE and economic geography to re-orient the treatment of regional borders within international business (IB) literature.

The paper suggests that the (L) component within the ownership location and internalization (OLI) paradigm should be disaggregated into continuous “distance effects” and discrete “border effects”. Within this rubric, regional borders represent discrete border effects that generate discontinuities that are permeable, fluid and firm specific. Such reconceptualization opens up avenues for future research and more tightly integrates the research on regional MNEs with other research streams.

IB scholars need to make concerted effort to think of regions as one among several parameters in studying the strategy and structure of MNEs. A stronger focus on internal processes and mechanisms elucidating the main drivers of MNEs strategies is needed.

The paper offers innovative ways in which future research can advance the study of how regions matter in the internationalization strategy of MNEs.

The macroenvironment constitutes a widely acknowledged source of firms’ risk in international business. A substantial body of research on macroenvironmental risks encapsulates a variety of measurement approaches, antecedents, and managerial consequences. However, a review of established macroenvironmental risk measures reveals that these measures strongly focus on the quality of the macroenvironment, assuming a rather static perspective and mainly excluding dynamic aspects. Building on prior research on macroenvironmental risk as well as on environmental dynamism, we argue that macroenvironmental dynamism – i.e. the frequency, intensity, and predictability of macroenvironmental variation – is a pivotal source of risk in international business, which so far only received limited attention. Moreover, we suggest that macroenvironmental dynamism influences firms’ risk management activities, a measure we use to empirically investigate firm implications of macroenvironmental dynamism. We explore this effect using primary survey data on risk management activities from 158 foreign subsidiaries in six emerging countries and secondary data on the macroeconomic context in these countries. We find evidence that macroenvironmental dynamism, if compared to macroenvironmental quality, exerts a strong influence on firms’ risk management activities. Our findings enhance the understanding of the dynamic nature of macroenvironmental risk in international business as well as provide a concept to more comprehensively measure macroenvironmental dynamism that future research can build upon.

The world consists of diverse and distinctive economic systems. Due to the unique historical, cultural and location-specific contexts embedded in each economy, a comparison of strategic behaviors across economies is unlikely to provide a causal estimate of the influence of these contextual factors on strategy–performance relationships. In this paper, I outline three approaches to researching multinational firms that address this dilemma. They include the multilevel, historical and variance-centered perspectives, all of which can help international-business (IB) researchers develop stronger theoretical foundations from which to explain why country-specific contexts matter in designing IB action and research.