In 2020 critical perspectives on international business (cpoib) will be marking its 15th birthday. The journal was launched in 2005 and joined the group of international business (IB) journals, many of which have a far longer history – Thunderbird International Business Review (launched in 1959), Management International Review (1960), Journal of World Business (1965, at that time called the Columbia Journal of World Business), Journal of International Business Studies (1970), International Studies of Management and Organization (1971), International Business Review (1992) and Journal of International Management (1995). Since its launch, cpoib has handled submissions by authors from more than 70 countries and has published 290 articles. In 2010, five years after inception, cpoib received Emerald’s best new journal award. More important than numbers (and rankings[1]), the journal became home for research devoted to phenomena of utmost importance not only to scholars but also other stakeholders. Issues that were discussed include ignorant and impatient globalization, globalization’s structural violence, global (financial) crises, global value chains, tax havens and corruption. The Journal also posed and answered researchquestions related to culture, language, communication and translation. It problematized topics such as cross-border talent management, gender and diversity, as well as power and politics in the multinational, expatriation, corporate social responsibility, IB in authoritarian regimes, the downsides of digital platform internationalization and many more. The geographical coverage was equally varied – cpoib has published critical perspectives on IB in Africa, Brazil, Russia and other relatively underexplored regions and countries. Some contributions examined in great detail specific industries, be that education, retail, fast fashion, minerals or banking, providing a critical view on how they operate and the consequences of those operations. Other articles told critical IB stories anchored in single companies such as Starbucks, Toyota, a world-class university and non governmental organizations. The contributions borrowed and brought into the IB space insights from disciplines such as sociology, economic geography, linguistics, management, development studies, economics, finance and several others. The published articles used different theories (postcolonialism, institutional theory, stakeholder theories and many others) and varied between being viewpoints, conceptual pieces and empirical studies. The ambition behind all was to becritical, reflective and challenge orthodoxy in the IB field and, where appropriate, question widely held assumptions and counter existing prevalent or dominant imperatives. This is not easy to achieve and it is likely that the outcome of such ambitions is often not easy to accept either. But it is needed. Full paper available at https://doi.org/10.1108/cpoib-05-2019-103
