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Upon receipt of Ramaswamy, Kroeck and Renforth's (hereafter RKR) comment, I was unsure whether to be honored that someone thought enough to replicate my research or worried that I had erred egregiously. Once I pinpointed RKR's concerns, my task turned to devising a useful reply. In recourse, and also out of budding curiosity, I retreated to the library to scan back issues of the Journal of International Business Studies. In the twenty-six years from the inception of JIBS, there has not been a comment that faithfully recreated the dataset and reran the analysis of a previously published study Certainly, I came across extension of some and debate of a few. However, RKR's initiative is unprecedented; as such, I commend their exemplary effort.
To recap briefly, the work in question, Measuring the Degree of Internationalization of a Firm, appeared in this journal in Fall 1994. My aim in that paper was to deal with a nagging methodological issue in the international literature: how to reliably measure the degree of internationalization of a firm. Put plainly, I aimed to specify an operational measure of the degree of internationalization of a firm that would lend itself to testing, replication and application. I noted in that study that while many positivistic and instrumental studies considered the issue, no consensus had emerged regarding how to measure this construct reliably. I began by combing the literature for reported indicators of the degree of internationalization of a firm. A potential measure, presuming its received relevance, was held to a coarse test: could I, and thus anyone else, estimate it with publicly-available archival data? After sorting through many candidates, I ended-up with nine items: Foreign Sales as a Percentage of Total Sales, Research and Development Intensity, Advertising Intensity, Export Sales as a Percentage of Total Sales, Foreign Profits as a Percentage of Total Profit, Foreign Assets as a Percentage of Total Assets, Overseas Subsidiaries as a Percentage of Total Subsidiaries, Top Management International Experience, and Psychic Dispersion of International Operations. Data on each item were collected from a variety of archives for seventy-four American manufacturing MNCs. Alpha, factor, and frequency analyses revealed a linear combination of five items with a reliability coefficient of .79 as an unidimensional measure of the degree of internationalization...