Global health and international business: new frontiers of international business research
Critical Perspectives on International Business
ISSN: 1742-2043
Article publication date: 6 June 2019
Issue publication date: 6 June 2019
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to revisit the interdisciplinary roots of international business (IB) by challenging the compartmentalized and obscured nature of certain major themes in current IB research. Here, the author broadens IB’s natural scope by introducing the links with global health while preemptively removing the existing limits of critical perspectives.
Design/methodology/approach
The study synthesizes ignored common insights from IB and global health governance. It supplies a select composite of emerging themes mostly at the interface of IB and global health as foundational proposals for reengaging IB for radical social change. This is in response to the urgent calls for inquiries into the “extra dimensions” of IB in answering wicked questions of global sustainability, injustice and inequality and other emergent grand challenges whilst embracing novel conceptual, theoretical and empirical opportunities.
Findings
This study demonstrates that IB research in its current form is reductive, quintessentially compartmentalized and evidently weak in responding to the emergent wicked problems of global scale. This is because several layers of complex, burning interconnected questions with roots in IB hardly receive exposure in research although they are the very existential and emerging issues with massive impacts on populations both in home and host countries.
Practical implications
This study sets new research agendas for critically studying IB and global health topics of vital relevance to reflect the changing frontiers of knowledge production in the fourth industrial revolution.
Originality/value
This study calls for deeper and broader discussions about the limitless opportunities of cross-fertilization of IB and other disciplines whilst highlighting the heretofore-overlooked connections between IB and environmental and medico-techno-scientific disciplines.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The author is deeply grateful to the editors of CPOIB, Professors Christoph Dörrenbächer and Snejina Michailova for the enormous support and insightful comments and suggestions which shaped the outcome of this paper.
Citation
Ahen, F. (2019), "Global health and international business: new frontiers of international business research", Critical Perspectives on International Business, Vol. 15 No. 2/3, pp. 158-178. https://doi.org/10.1108/cpoib-12-2017-0091
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited