Sara L. McGaughey

Evolving strands of research on firm internationalization: An Australian-Nordic perspective

Peter W. Liesch is a professor at the Business School of the University of Queensland, Australia. Lawrence S. Welch and Denice E. Welch are professors at the Mt. Eliza Business School in Melbourne, Australia. Sara L. McGaughey is a senior lecturer at the School of International Business of the University of New South Wales, Australia. Bent Petersen is an associate professor in the Department of International Economics and Management of the Copenhagen Business School in Frederiksberg, Denmark. Peter Lamb is a lecturer at the School of Business of La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia.

The evolution of the international business field: a scientometric investigation of articles published in its premier journal

Macro-environmental trends such as technological changes, declining trade and investment barriers, and globalizing forces impacting both markets and production worldwide point to the heightened importance of international business (IB) and the relevance of IB research today. Despite this, a leading scholar has expressed concerns that the IB research agenda could be ‘running out of steam’ (Buckley, Journal of International Business Studies 33(2):365–373, 2002), prompting on-going introspection within the IB field. We contribute to this debate by investigating the evolution of the IB field through a scientometric examination of articles published in its premier journal, the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS) from 1970 until 2008. We introduce a new analytical tool, Leximancer, to the fields of international business and scientometry. We show an evolution from an initial and extended emphasis on macro-environmental issues to a more recent focus on micro-economic, firm-level ones with the multinational enterprise (MNE) as an organizational form enduring throughout the entire period. We observe a field that has established a justifiable claim for relevance, participating actively in the interdisciplinary exchange of ideas.

Non-traditional international assignments, knowledge and innovation: an exploratory study of women’s experiences

For many multinational corporations (MNCs), sustainable competitive advantage resides in an MNC’s ability to innovate; that is, to create new knowledge, integrate it with an existing knowledge base and exploit the resulting knowledge bundles across national borders. Traditionally, a key mechanism by which knowledge is transferred across borders and recombined works through expatriate assignments. There is, however, a growing trend towards alternative forms of international assignments, such as flexpatriates, commuters, frequent flyers and self-initiated expatriates. We ask how the use of such non-traditional international assignments affects knowledge creation and transfer in MNCs and hence innovation, which we construe as both idea generation and implementation. Our exploratory study draws on the experiences of five women living in Spain who undertook various forms of international assignment in MNCs with differing administrative heritages, working in consultancy and engineering fields. Our findings point to variations in the type and quality of knowledge generated across different forms of international assignments, and draw attention to the socially embedded, informal interactions underpinning much knowledge transfer and recombination. Our findings are also suggestive of a gendered element to knowledge creation and transfer, and how these activities may be perceived by the senior management of MNCs. Our concluding conjecture is that within each form of international assignment, women’s contributions to the innovative efforts of MNCs may have somewhat less to do with formal management practices, and may even, at times, be in spite of them.

Strategic human resource management and inertia in the corporate entrepreneurship of a multinational enterprise

Abstract Corporate entrepreneurship (CE) supports sustained competitive advantage through the continuous exploration and exploitation of new sources of knowledge. With an emphasis on combining knowledge in new configurations, strategic human resource management (HRM) activities are core to these entrepreneurial endeavours. We explore how strategic HRM activities may facilitate and impede CE through a rich, qualitative case study of three local entities within a business unit of a large multinational enterprise facing business stagnation and low levels of corporate entrepreneurship. Responding to a call for more empirical research that probes the subtle and complex interactions between HRM activities and other organisational factors affecting CE, we identify a configuration of inter-dependent factors that mutually reinforce each other and sustain inertia in corporate entrepreneurship. We also make two novel contributions to theory by (1) elaborating the links between organisational process-orientation, strategic HRM and CE; and (2) refining to our current understanding of human competencies for CE.