The Death and Rebirth (?) of International Business Research

• Published date: 01 May 2017
• Author: Andrew Delios
• Date: 01 May 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12222

The Death and Rebirth (?) of International Business

Research

Andrew Delios

National University of Singapore

My motivation for this essay extends from my three views on the state of international

business (IB) research.

The world of IB is vibrant and stimulating. Current IB research is not.

Managers engaged in IB are energetic, creative and risk-taking. Modern day IB schol-

ars are not.

Media stories covering IB are novel, engaging and eye-catching. Recent IB journal

publications are not.

At its birth, IB research galvanized a generation of inspired scholarship. This first

wave of IB research breathed life into our understanding of the multinational corpora-

tion (MNC), which until then was characterized as a foreign demon. Unfortunately, the

initial success of this MNC focus anchored subsequent generations of researchers to the

identical research questions concerning why MNCs exist, how they grow and how they

are managed. At the same time that IB research became stultified; the practice of IB

became more international, more nuanced and more challenging to understand.

The consequence is that I have an intense dislike for new research in IB. In strict

counterpoint to the real world of IB, contemporary research in IB is outdated, staid and

boring: helpful for sedation, but uninformative for knowledge generation.

Contemporary IB research has been suffocated by its fetishistic focus on the MNC. IB

research has become detached from new phenomena in the globalizing world. It fails

to explore anything new. Further, a stifling fixation with quantitative methods has

squeezed the life out of IB research. Notably, the IB scholarly community has been com-

plicit in the institutionalization of these two features of IB research; by making an MNC

empirical focus the gold standard for journal publication.

Address for reprints: Andrew Delios, Professor and Head Department of Strategy and Policy, NUS Business

School, National University of Singapore, 1 Business Link, Singapore, 117592, Republic of Singapore

(bizakd@nus.edu.sg)

For your comments about this discussion, please visit http://www.socadms.org.uk/death-and-rebirth/.

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C2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies

Journal of Management Studies 54:3 May 2017

doi: 10.1111/joms.12222