International Business is vital to nations, to their economies. It brings wealth, it creates jobs, it opens views, it changes mindsets, and it creates economic and social stability. International Relations is important to nations too. It establishes relationships between nations, it exchanges political views between nations, it creates stability. International Business and International Relations are intertwined empirically as politicians need to boost economies through supporting entrepreneurship, international entrepreneurs need politicians and government representatives to get access to foreign markets, to deal with legal issues across borders. Commercial diplomacy is at the heart of the intersection between International Business and International Relations. Narrowly conceived, commercial diplomacy is the work of state officials in diplomatic service who carry out activities that support International Business. This book changes the conversation by studying the International Business - government relationship at the meso (organisational) and micro (individual) level, rather than focusing on the macro (national) level. This book aims to advance studies of commercial diplomacy by combing insights from two fields of study that to date have hardly spoken to each other. It brings insights from International Relations (and in particular the sub-field diplomatic studies) about the theory and practice of commercial diplomacy and it brings insights from business studies about the theory and practice of International Business. Combining the two, the book defines the field by being more holistic, it brings together in one place a thorough review of existing analysis of the subject from both fields, it outlines the basics of a new conceptual framework, it presents new empirical work based on data collected in five different countries (from the US to Indonesia), and puts forward a new research agenda.
