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History in perspective: comment on Jones and Khanna ‘Bringing history (back) into international business’

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Abstract

Commenting on Jones and Khanna, we suggest that international business (IB) needs simultaneously maturing theory and on-going rigorous empirical work. We advocate careful data collection and develop solid theory based on the rich empirical information. The difficulty in the process is the deciphering of causality, and that is where historical studies play a significant role. Historical documents shed light on motivations and exogenous incidents. Historical studies and large-scale data analyses can complement each other in revealing causality. While path dependence constraints causal inferences using cross-sectional data, historical studies can identify differences and similarities in the paths of events across geography and time. This advantage is particularly attractive in understanding the relationship between institutions and business behaviour, which lies inside the proper domain of IB studies.

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Notes

  1. Project Gutenberg, at www.gutenberg.org, houses electronic copies of 170,000 books and documents whose copyrights have expired. The Harvard-Google Project promises eventually to digitize 15 million more such titles from Harvard University's libraries: see http://hul.harvard.edu/hgproject/index.html. Jean-Noël Jeanneney, Président de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, recently called for a European ‘counter-attack’ against the Harvard-Google project, and the French government is currently organizing EU funding: see France to Develop Google ‘Rival’ posted 17 March 2005 at www.bbc.com.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Alberta, School of Business, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

    Randall Morck

  2. Stern School of Business, New York University, New York, USA

    Bernard Yeung

Authors
  1. Randall Morck
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  2. Bernard Yeung
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bernard Yeung.

Additional information

Accepted by Arie Y Lewin, Editor-in-Chief. This paper has been with the author for two revisions.

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Morck, R., Yeung, B. History in perspective: comment on Jones and Khanna ‘Bringing history (back) into international business’. J Int Bus Stud 38, 357–360 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400258

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400258

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