Abstract
Several decades of research in the field of international business have advanced various theories and studies on the internationalization of firms. Our assessment of the literature on internationalization shows that the focus has been primarily on path-dependency and learning-based aspects of internationalization, while managerial intentionality and the possibility of managers making deliberate strategic choices towards further internationalization have not been very prominent in the IB literature. We argue that internationalization paths and processes should be approached as a joint outcome of management intentionality and experience-based learning. In other words, managers are assumed to have the ability and the intention to influence the evolutionary paths of the firm. We derive a future research agenda that calls for the pursuit of this promising and emergent research stream. Moreover, we develop a model integrating managerial intentionality, knowledge/experience and other factors (institutional and selection forces) to explain heterogeneous outcomes of internationalization positions, paths and processes.
Notes
This article is the most cited JIBS article when measured as the number of citations in the Social Science Citation Index with 464 SSCI citations as of 1 June 2007.
We collected keywords for each of these 345 publications to assess the content related to the field of internationalization. Of the most frequent keywords (with 20 or more occurrences) we selected the 54 most relevant and discriminative. With these 54 keywords, we calculated the number of times they co-occur in publications. The resulting bibliometric cartography (Noyons, 1999) groups co-occurring keywords into clusters and maps those clusters in a two-dimensional figure: the size of each cluster indicates the number of publications represented, and the color of each cluster indicates growth in the number of publications from 1991 to 2005 (black: fast growth; grey: growth around average). The label for each research topic was provided by field experts.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to highlight the large number of very promising papers and excellent ideas that were submitted for the focused issue. Furthermore, we have to thank all authors, particularly the workshop discussants, and all reviewers for their great work and their valuable contribution to this JIBS focused issue. Moreover, we deeply appreciate the contribution and editorial guidance of the Editor-in-Chief, Arie Y Lewin, and the support of the Managing Editors, Danielle Trojan and Joy Kearney, as well as ACCS Managing Chair, Boris Frhr. Marschall v Bieberstein, throughout the process.
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Accepted by Arie Lewin, Editor in Chief, xxxx. This paper has been with the author for •• revisions.
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Hutzschenreuter, T., Pedersen, T. & Volberda, H. The role of path dependency and managerial intentionality: a perspective on international business research. J Int Bus Stud 38, 1055–1068 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400326
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400326