Twenty-five years ago, Dunning articulated a vision for greater interdisciplinary grounding in international business (IB) research. Motivated by his foresight, this special issue aims to encourage research that explicitly combines ideas from different disciplines, with a view to creating new...

The phenomenon of subsidiary initiative has received increasing attention in recent years, but the consequences of initiatives and the associated dynamics of headquarters–subsidiary relationships have received much less research attention. Building on resource dependence theory and...

This paper reports on a multimethod study of knowledge transfer in international acquisitions. Using questionnaire data we show that the transfer of technological know-how is facilitated by communication, visits & meetings, and by time elapsed since acquisition, while the transfer of patents is...

In this Retrospective, we summarise and discuss the findings of our 1999 JIBS paper “Knowledge transfer in international acquisitions”, and we consider how research in this area has evolved over the last decade. The paper's key contribution was to show how the post-acquisition integration...

This study examines the performance consequences of international attention, defined as the extent to which headquarters executives in the multinational enterprise (MNE) invest time and effort in activities, communications, and discussions aimed at improving their understanding of the global...

A subsidiary mandate is a business, or element of a business, in which the subsidiary participates and for which it has responsibilities beyond its national market. This research studied thirty-one mandates in six Canadian subsidiaries of U.S.-owned multinational corporations. A life-cycle...

This paper uses two theoretical perspectives, information processing and resource dependency, to examine global account management (the co-ordination of activities involved in serving a single customer in multiple countries). It is hypothesized that global account management structures allow the...

This paper examines the characteristics of foreign-owned subsidiaries in export-intensive “leading-edge industry clusters” as defined by Porter [1990]. Using a sample of 229 subsidiaries from three countries, we show that subsidiaries in such clusters are more embedded, more autonomous, and...

This paper reports on a multi-method study of knowledge transfer in international acquisitions. Using questionnaire data we show that the transfer of technological know-how is facilitated by communication, visits & meetings, and by time elapsed since acquisition, while the transfer of patents is...