Using an Uppsala internationalization framework, informed by upper echelons theory and institutional theory, we investigate the factors associated with a firm's adoption of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) activities and their performance implications. For the period 2010–2020, from a dataset of 2744 Chinese firms, we find that international experience at the top management team (TMT) and firm levels has a positive effect on firm's commitment to SDGs. TMT international experience is significantly related to all three types of SDG-related activities considered, but the results vary for the depth and breadth of firm internationalization activities. The organizational level SDG regarding innovation has a significant and positive effect on financial performance, but the performance effect is not significant for societal SDGs and other organizational SDGs, and significantly negative for environmental SDGs. Non-market behaviors, alongside market behaviors can be accommodated within an Uppsala internationalization approach, broadening its application, and confirming its contemporaneity in our modern world.

The purpose of this editorial, and the special issue, is to initiate a dialogue about the role of time in international business (IB) scholarship. While time is inherent in IB phenomena, it has, to date, received limited attention in IB research and theorizing. When IB scholars do account for time, they generally adhere to assumptions representing time as linear and objective. We discuss the importance of time in the philosophical, conceptual, and methodological domains of IB, defining each of these three interconnected domains, problematizing their dominant assumptions about time, and suggesting potential avenues for rethinking time in IB.

We investigate how organizational goal setting impacts slack resource allocation between markets at home and overseas, and argue that organizational goals, publicly announced, impact managers’ evaluations of resource allocation opportunities. Based on a sample of Chinese publicly listed manufacturing firms for the period 2010 to 2016, we find that when firms announce publicly a sales increasing goal as their priority, their attention will be focused on this goal with a tendency to invest the firm's slack resources locally. This tendency to invest slack resources locally is enhanced if the announced goal is not achieved, but is not achieved with a minor discrepancy. However, if the goal is not achieved, and with a major discrepancy, managers will likely conduct problemistic search and look to foreign locations to invest the firm's slack resources to achieve this goal. We also find the impact of organizational goal setting is more salient for SOEs and is dependent on levels of remuneration in the firm. As such, we revisit the importance of organization goals and the resource allocation decision in the firm which has not received the research attention one may have expected.

We investigate the degree and duration of the effects of deceptive signaling on globalized digital platforms, vis-à-vis naturally formed organic signaling such as importer review scores and discernible inducing signaling such as banner advertisements. Sponsored listing has emerged as a powerful tool for facilitating Internet-mediated exchanges in internationalization activities. Some digital platforms based in weakly regulated countries provide sponsored listing to exporters without explicitly disclosing that sponsorship. This constitutes a deceptive signal to importers in strongly regulated countries whose governments require sponsorship disclosure. Deceptive signaling is hypothesized to stimulate an institutional hypnosis on importers, with the most immediate and largest enhancing effects on exporter performance of the three types of signaling. Organic signaling is hypothesized to exert the most durable effect. Using transaction-level data from a globalized digital platform assembled with web mining methods, we develop a novel algorithm to detect deceptive signaling. Regression results from generalized method of moments estimation support these hypotheses. Our study is among the first to investigate institutional hypnosis manifested in increasingly widespread and unchecked forms in digitized international business transacting. By discovering and reporting on a dark side of institutional arbitrage, we offer actionable implications for digital platform governance, participants, and regulators.

The Uppsala Internationalization Process Model is the most cited model within the field of international business. However, even with its most recent formulation, the model is predicated on a key set of assumptions about the limiting and releasing mechanisms in a 'change of state' decision. The model assumes that uncertainty, risk, lack of trust, and lack of awareness of opportunities are the main constraints, and that the accumulation of experiential knowledge, trust, and market commitment are the main releasing factors that allow a firm to overcome those constraints and progress to a higher state of commitment. We argue that the preceding view may be excessively narrow, and that inertia and managerial intentionality may also play a role as critical limiting and releasing mechanisms, respectively. This development implies that the passage of time and experiential learning may not always have a positive impact on firm internationalization. The extended model proposed in this paper highlights the role of the manager, and brings a contingent element to the model, thus broadening its applicability by providing new insights on issues typically considered outside the realm of the Uppsala model, such as rapidly internationalizing firms, regionalization, mode inertia and mode skipping.

In this editorial for the Special Issue on International Entrepreneurship, we interrelate key concepts about the pursuit of opportunities from the entrepreneurship and international business literatures. In doing so, we consider the assessment of opportunities as an individual-level cognitive activity, the construction of opportunity as a firm-level innovative activity and the shaping of opportunity as an institutional-level structuring activity. We then extend the discussion to explore the notion of a distributed, global ecosystem of opportunities and opportunity seekers, which we believe may provide a platform for valuable future research.

In this paper, we summarize how internationalization research has evolved over time, where it stands today, and how it might evolve going forward. Specifically, we examine internationalization research from earlier times to the present day. We contrast the incremental internationalization characteristic of older multinational enterprises with the early, rapid internationalization of born global firms. The paper summarizes the evolution of research on early internationalization and born global firms, and provides evidence to suggest why this area now has attained legitimacy in scholarly research. We then examine important theoretical issues in born global research and suggest avenues for future research.

Modern domestic barter systems are operating in Australia at the local community level, and at the national level for business exchanges. The Australian Government, and Australian firms practise countertrade at the international level. These exchange regimes appear to have become institutionalised in an economic system which is organised on the primacy of market exchange based on price as the co-ordinating device. In this paper, possible explanations for this enigma are presented.

Strategy-making assists small firms in managing change and uncertainty by developing suitable strategic options. We move beyond the conventional formal-informal dichotomy to show how three informal approachesinternal participation, external participation, and centralized strategy-makinghelp both entrepreneurial firms and conservative firms to navigate more or less dynamic environments. In an empirical study of 320 small firms, we find that participation during strategy-making relates positively to performance whereas centralization only matters for conservative firms in stable environments. In dynamic environments, better performance in entrepreneurial firms is associated with all three approaches. Our findings highlight the importance of viewing strategy-making in small firms as multifaceted and context specific.

Terrorism threatens international business (IB) through its direct and indirect effects. As governments tighten security at public sites, businesses have become more attractive terrorist targets, with important implications for the operations and performance of multinational firms. While terrorism has been substantially studied in other fields, there has been little scholarly research to address terrorism and the distinctive challenges that it poses for IB. In this article we conceptualize terrorism in relation to IB. We provide background on the dimensions and effects of terrorism, and develop a theoretical grounding for terrorism research by drawing on the literature from IB, economics, political science, and other fields. After discussing findings from the literature review, we offer a comprehensive agenda for future research regarding the relationship between terrorism and IB. Our agenda emphasizes the effects of terrorism, organizational preparedness, company strategy and performance, global supply chain and distribution channels, and human resource issues. Our review helps establish a baseline for future empirical research. Consistent with the early stages of research, IB scholars are encouraged to offer useful perspectives and effective solutions that shed needed light on terrorism and help reduce its destructive effects for IB and multinational firms.

We study the narratives of executive managers of internationalizing firms to understand their organization of time in the internationalization process. While most of the international business literature has studied internationalization processes in terms of objective ‘clock time’, we seek to understand how managers perceive and construct time in a subjective sense. In addition to Butler's (1995) four conceptions of time, we identify possibly two more in the narratives of executive managers of firms that are associated with their accelerated internationalization. Also, use of the concept association software Leximancer enables a novel approach at unravelling narrative understandings in which executives from smaller firms associate time with a myriad of activities in the internationalization process, while the time concept is stable and relatively independent of these activities for executives in larger firms that are internationalizing.

Increasing attention in international marketing has been directed towards understanding born global firms, highly entrepreneurial small medium enterprises that rapidly enter global markets. Recently, the role of the founder has become a focus of research. This paper reports an investigation of founder narratives of strategies for international market entry using the Leximancer system. A number of recurring themes and three emergent strategy types “business focused”, “technology focused” or “market focused” were identified. Implications and future research directions are discussed.

The Uppsala model of the internationalisation process of the firm has many similarities with Penrosean growth theory but has been limited by ambiguity about the internal mechanisms of growth. Core insights from Penrose’s Theory of the Growth of the Firm may advance development of the Uppsala model.

Existing approaches at explaining accelerated internationalization of born global firms are incomplete as they do not capture the learning that is undertaken by these firms and their founders prior to the firm's legal establishment. Building on the extant literature and drawing on the dynamic capabilities view of competitive strategy, this paper presents a conceptual model of born global firm internationalization. We conjecture that a set of dynamic capabilities that are built and nurtured by internationally-oriented entrepreneurial founders enable these firms to develop cutting-edge knowledge intensive products, paving the way for their accelerated market entry. We develop propositions and offer concluding remarks.

A salient characteristic of the changing environment in dynamic, knowledge-intensive industries has been the growing adoption of collaborative organisational forms in the international operations of firms. Recent developments in these industries demand a re-evaluation of traditional explanations of these choices as resource constraints mandate collaborative organisational forms while the potential for proprietary knowledge dissipation cautions towards greater control.

International trade and investment economies are highly integrated and interdependent and can be exploited by organized, international terrorism. The network of inter dependencies in the international economy means that a terrorist attack has the potential to disrupt the functioning of the network, so the effects can reverberate around the world. Governments can control the distributed effects of terrorism by auditing industrial networks to reveal and protect critical hubs and by promoting flexibility in production and distribution of goods and services to improve resilience in the economy. To explain these network effects, the authors draw on the new science of complex networks which has been applied to the physical sciences and is now increasingly being used to explain organizational and economic phenomena.

Recent research in the non‐profit performing arts has shown that marketing efforts designed to increase revenue from ticket sales are not achieving the results required to sustain the performing arts. This paper applies operations management analytical techniques to the non‐profit performing arts to increase understanding of operational issues and inform service management strategy. The paper takes a two‐study idiographic approach. Implementing a modified version of service transaction analysis (STA), Study One describes a performing arts service from provider and customer perspectives, identifies service gaps and develops an elaborated service description incorporating both perspectives. In Study Two, building on the elaborated service description and extant research, in‐depth interviews are conducted to gather thick descriptions of predictors of satisfaction, value and service quality as they relate to repurchase intention (RI). Technical, functional and critical factors required to improve organizational performance are identified. Implications for operational strategy, service design and service management theory for this context are discussed.

Terrorism poses both direct and indirect threats to the operations of the firm. It represents a market imperfection that increases transaction costs and creates barriers to the free flow of goods, affecting potential gains that would occur in the presence of unhindered exchange. Terrorism reflects the risk or actual encounter of violent acts, whose goal is to engender fear, coercion, or intimidation. We investigate terrorism and its association with marketing strategy and operations. Key concepts on terrorism are reviewed and a collection of propositions is offered. We highlight the pivotal roles of sourcing, production, distribution, pricing, communications, and general business strategy as functions influenced by, or capable of influencing, terrorism. Lastly, we offer managerial implications, as well as directions and guidelines for future research.

Internationalisation occurs when the firm expands its selling, production, or other business activities into international markets. Many enterprises, especially small- and medium-size firms (SMEs), are internationalising today at an unprecedented rate. Managers are strategically using information to achieve degrees of internationalisation previously considered the domain of large firms. We extend existing explanations of firm internationalisation by examining the nature and fundamental, antecedent role of internalising appropriate information and translating it into relevant knowledge. Based on case studies of internationalising firms, we advance a conceptualisation of information internalisation and knowledge creation within the firm as it achieves internationalisation readiness. In the process, we offer several propositions intended to guide future research.