Letter from the Editor

Citation

Rugman, A.M. (2013), "Letter from the Editor", Multinational Business Review, Vol. 21 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/MBR-08-2013-0047

Letter from the Editor

Article Type: Letter from the Editor From: Multinational Business Review, Volume 21, Issue 4

In this issue, we are pleased to publish four papers on diverse topics. The first paper, co-authored by Dan O’Connell and myself, examines the research productivity of both the winners and other finalists in the annual Academy of International Business dissertation award competition. In particular, we analyse the publications and citations of these scholars over the lifetime of the AIB Farmer Award from its inception in 1987 until its penultimate year of 2011. In 2013 the award was renamed the Buckley and Casson AIB Dissertation Award. We find that the average citation count for winners is 1,219, whereas for non-winners it is significantly higher at 1,779. We also find that, in terms of career research productivity only four of the top ten scholars are award winners. These results are affected by the extraordinary productivity of several outstanding finalists, such as Julian Birkinshaw, Andrew Inkpen, Joann Oxley, and Klaus Meyer. The most successful AIB dissertation award winners are Arvind Parkhe, Witold Henisz, Tatiana Kostova and Srilata Zaheer. In the paper, we acknowledge that many other successful scholars were not listed as finalists, and they, like the editor of this journal, have found that their careers have not suffered from a lack of recognition in the AIB dissertation award competition. In my case the award did not even exist back in the early 1970s.

In an interesting qualitative study, Nguyen and Hong examine the “local” knowledge-seeking activities of subsidiaries of foreign MNEs in Hanoi, Vietnam and in the Guangdong province of China. They examine how intra-organizational learning mechanisms and organizational context may be able to improve the performance of such foreign subsidiaries. Future work in this area needs to better specify the actual recombination process between host country knowledge advantages and the internal, firm-level organizational attributes of subsidiaries and their parent firms.

Yildiz offers an interesting conceptual extension of the large literature on entry mode choice, where it serves as a moderator between multinationality (M) and performance (P). He examines the relationship between performance and three types of multinational entry mode: licensing; joint ventures; and wholly-owned subsidiaries. He ignores exports. He finds, based on analysis and rethinking of the literature: an inverted U-shape relationship in M and P for licensing; a U-shaped fit for JVs; and a potential S-curve fit for wholly-owned subsidiaries. Obviously this work needs to be extended with careful empirical analysis, in which the role of FSAs as independent variables determining performance needs to be explicitly recognized. The paper by Yildiz presents an interesting extension to such potential empirical work by treating entry mode choice as a contingency (moderating) variable affecting multinationality, which, in turn, is a mediating variable affecting performance.

The paper by Cowden and Alhorr integrates the concepts of disruptive versus sustaining innovation with transaction costs/internalization theory and the integration-responsiveness framework of Bartlett and Ghoshal. They suggest that disruptive innovation occurs in the subsidiaries of MNEs. This conceptual paper demonstrates that the disruptive innovation occurs within the internal network of the MNE due to the transaction costs of external networks, such as the opportunism of network partners and bounded rationality of customers. In linking the I-R framework and location-bound FSAs to disruptive innovation, they propose that more disruptive innovations will occur in subsidiaries with local product mandates and specifically in subsidiaries with local product mandates in emerging economies. However, this logic would seem to hold only for MNEs from developed countries as their subsidiaries innovate in lesser developed markets, as disruptive innovation seeks to reach customers who could not afford prior product offerings. But it does raise the question of whether the propositions are supported in the context of MNEs from emerging economies when they move abroad. Thus this paper raises additional unanswered questions. What role would internationalization and location choice play in disruptive innovation? What is the actual process for creating disruptive innovation in the MNE? These questions can only be answered by new empirical work.

Alan M. Rugman
Editor-in-Chief