Demystifying pathways of composition-based international strategies under the de-globalization world: A configurational approach

The composition-based view explains how emerging market firms creatively adopt compositional investment, compositional offerings, and compositional capabilities to gain a competitive advantage in the global marketplace. How the composition-based international strategy contributes to organizational resilience under the de-globalization world remains unclear. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, we explore how emerging market firms reconfigure compositional elements and the crucial role of firm heterogeneity in determining organizational resilience. Our analysis of 250 Chinese manufacturing firms revealed five distinct international compositional strategies and asymmetric outcomes. Multiple configurations of composition-based international strategies and firm heterogeneity were found to be related to high and low organizational resilience. Our findings confirm that emerging market firms must reconfigure their compositional elements to achieve sustained and resilient performance throughout the pandemic. Our findings extend the composition-based view by elucidating the multiple pathways and boundary conditions of compositional strategies leading to organizational resilience.