China’s expanding position within the global business arena has placed focus on its role in assisting to stimulate the global economy during the current ‘global financial crisis’. This raises the importance of better understanding how the Chinese conduct their inter-firm interactions, in...

This paper revisits two core propositions in the knowledge-based view of the firm propounded in the seminal work by Kogut and Zander (1993): (a) that MNCs exist because transfers and re-combinations of knowledge occur more efficiently inside MNCs than between MNCs and third parties, and (b) the...

Internationalisation occurs when the firm expands its selling, production, or other business activities into international markets. Many enterprises, especially small- and medium-size firms (SMEs), are internationalising today at an unprecedented rate. Managers are strategically using...

Networking through international joint ventures (IJVs) is considered to be an important mechanism of exchanging skill sets across culturally different societies. IJVs could be used as an internationalisation entry mode by foreign companies to access, and participate in, the different and...

Outsourcing and offshoring are changing the nature of the firm, and producing unprecedented international relocation of economic activity. We engage with Williamson’s (1996) challenge to organizational scholars to address ‘which transactions go where and why?’ to explain the...

Totally generalisable theories of firm internationalisation in the post-industrial era of international business, where national barriers are becoming less significant and technology becoming more influential, appear to be illusory. Stepwise or evolutionary models that predict gradual...