Introduction to Part II: Institutional Theory in International Business and Management

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 ).