Institutions and international business

The call for papers for this special issue on "Institutions and International Business" began by noting that
International business is the study of transactions between counterparties who either reside in different nations or who reside in one nation but are compared to a pair of counterparties in another nation. This simple definition focuses our attention on the key facet of research in this area that distinguishes it from other fields. International business research necessarily requires attention to the institutional characteristics that alter the costs of engaging in business activity of a given form in one nation as compared to another. These institutional characteristics span the regulative, normative and cognitive domains. They influence every aspect of behavior by multinational enterprises including their location choice; the organization of their local subsidiary; their choice of technology, capital and labor staffing; and their sequence of investment. Whereas scholars have begun to establish the importance of variation in the level of institutional characteristics across home and host countries on such behaviors, we have less scholarship providing a link to subsidiary-level performance or linking change in institutional characteristics within a country to the behavior or performance of multinational enterprises. We also know little about the type of foreign firm or behaviors best able to cope with institutional variation or to positively influence institutional change. We encourage scholars in international business, political science, sociology, economics and psychology without constraints upon methodological approach or the geographic domain of inquiry to submit papers to this Special Issue that address these broad questions.

In response to that call, we received 58 submissions, of which eight appear in this issue. Per our hope, the authors of the published papers span departments, methodological approaches and geographic domains of inquiry and even geographic locations. We see the results of the engagement of the broad question of "How institutions influence international business" by scholars of comparative politics, entrepreneurship, industrial organization, marketing, political economy, sociology, strategic management and even international business. The papers also vary in their methodological approaches from a comparative and synthetic survey, an inductive analysis of 23 cases, and fuzzy-set analysis to more conventional econometric analyses using survey or secondary data. Though by no means a result of editorial intent, the authors also span the globe with...