Firms in low- and middle-income economies (LMIEs) often face substantial information asymmetries when seeking access to foreign technology, as potential licensors may have limited visibility into licensees’ managerial and operational capabilities. Prior research suggests that internationally recognized quality certifications can help mitigate such asymmetries, yet we know little about the conditions under which these signals are perceived as credible by licensors. Drawing on signaling theory, this study advances a conditional signaling perspective, arguing that certifications do not operate uniformly but depend on the informational environment in which they are interpreted. I theorize that certification effectiveness is shaped by informational congruence with other observable firm attributes and contextual cues, specifically firms’ international input linkages (imports), market orientation, and the business obstacles they face. Using panel data on 3,182 manufacturing firms across 39 low- and middle-income economies from the World Bank Enterprise Survey (2003–2020), we find that quality certifications are positively associated with the likelihood of obtaining licensed foreign technology, serving as a baseline effect within LMIEs. However, this effect is significantly contingent on firms’ import activity, domestic versus international market orientation, and the severity of business obstacles, highlighting clear boundary conditions to certification credibility. The findings refine signaling theory by demonstrating when third-party certifications function as reliable governance substitutes in international technology transactions, and they offer new insights into how firms and policymakers in LMIEs can facilitate technology transfer under conditions of institutional and informational constraint.
Entrepreneurs are central to international entrepreneurship research, yet their role has been conceptualized mainly through cognitive lenses that emphasize knowledge and heuristics, while important affective-motivational microfoundations, such as passion, remain underexplored. This omission matters because microfoundational forces, including entrepreneurs’ passion, are key to understanding variance in entrepreneurial decision-making and, in turn, heterogeneity in internationalization behavior. Moreover, depending on the type of passion—harmonious or obsessive—entrepreneurs may respond differently to the experiences that arise during international venturing, an activity marked by high stakes and uncertainty. We integrate the dualistic model of passion into the context of new venture internationalization to examine how harmonious and obsessive passion interrelate with international venturing. Drawing on 36 semi-structured interviews with international entrepreneurs from Germany, we identify a recursive model that links passion, internationalization behavior, and entrepreneurial identity. Our findings suggest core differences between harmoniously and obsessively passionate entrepreneurs. Harmonious passion fosters adaptive internationalization by enabling entrepreneurs to frame foreign complexity as enrichment, experiment with entry moves, and recombine roles, creating a fertile ground for learning and identity expansion. In contrast, obsessive passion fosters rigid internationalization, which means that entrepreneurs equate expansion with personal validation and exert tight control to protect a fixed identity. With these findings, we aim to inject affective-motivational microfoundations into international entrepreneurship theory and extend passion research by highlighting harmonious and obsessive pathways within the internationalization context.
We analyze the complexity of virtual expatriation and the conflicting requirements it imposes for engaging employees remotely. Virtual expatriates must supervise and control remote employees while also fostering shared values and encouraging their engagement, but without the benefit of co-location, which has traditionally been assumed to be the reason for expatriation. Thus, the expatriate’s physical and psychological detachment from the supervised employees challenges the fulfillment of these functions. How can they lead, control, and facilitate engagement virtually? It calls for a leadership style that is more aware of this dilemma and its different manifestations across cultural contexts. We draw on Social Exchange Theory and examine the role of ambidextrous leadership (that combines fostering creativity and experimentation with providing guidance and monitoring) in promoting employee engagement. Moreover, we examine whether cultural intelligence, communication effectiveness, and interaction frequency might reinforce the positive relationship between ambidextrous leadership and employee engagement. Our empirical setting is the shipping and logistics MNC, Maersk, where we collect quantitative and qualitative data from employees whose supervisors are virtual expatriates, as well as from the virtual expatriates themselves. Our findings suggest that virtual expatriates need a more complex leadership style to engage employees from a distance, one that, in a flexible manner, combines opening and closing behaviors. Additionally, our results indicate that such engagement is strengthened among ambidextrous leaders who behave in a culturally intelligent way and who maintain frequent interactions with employees. Communicating effectively is a direct predictor of the employees' engagement, rather than a boundary condition.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping how multinational enterprises (MNEs) strategize, operate, and coordinate across borders. IB scholarship has yet to systematically explain how these transformations differ from those generated by prior technologies or what is distinctively at stake for MNEs. In this Perspective, we develop an analytical lens grounded in three properties of contemporary AI—self-updating, generativity, and agentic autonomy—to derive theory-based predictions about transformations in MNE organization, governance, and decision-making. We identify three transformations. The first is institutional misalignment, in which self-updating progressively privileges dominant institutional contexts over peripheral ones, widening capability and performance hierarchies across the MNE network. The second is cultural contingency, in which generativity embeds institutional duality in algorithmic design rather than local managerial adaptation, creating legitimacy challenges that cannot be fully resolved after deployment. The third is an accountability gap, in which agentic autonomy separates formal responsibility from actual decision influence, creating forms of distributed and uneven accountability. These transformations are not generic organizational phenomena. They arise from multinationality itself and expose important limitations in existing IB theories of knowledge transfer, institutional duality, organizational learning, and governance. Four research directions synthesize them into broader theoretical challenges for IB scholarship, suggesting that AI shifts the locus of multinational management from managerial adaptation toward the design and governance of organizational and algorithmic architectures.
Boycotts have become a prominent form of collective action confronting multinational corporations (MNCs) operating across borders. Triggered by geopolitical tensions, cultural conflicts, or corporate misconduct, boycotts can cause financial losses, reputational damage, operational disruptions, and market access challenges for MNCs. Despite their growing prevalence, research on boycotts remains fragmented and offers limited understanding of how boycotts unfold across heterogeneous institutional contexts and why their consequences vary so widely across MNCs. This study systematically reviews 87 peer-reviewed articles published between 1985 and 2024 in international business, management, marketing, and sociology journals. Integrating insights across these literatures, we develop a framework that reconceptualizes boycotts as both constraints and potential catalysts for organizational and societal change. Whereas prior IB research has predominantly emphasized the negative consequences of boycotts, we argue that boycotts may lead to positive outcomes when MNCs’ responses align with the normative orientation of boycott demands. We also demonstrate that MNCs are not merely passive targets of boycotts but active agents that can shape boycotts and their outcomes through their responses. Finally, we propose several avenues for future research to broaden our understanding of how MNCs can manage and leverage boycotts as opportunities for strategic advantage while fostering societal change.
