Joseph L.C. Cheng - Böcker

This new volume publishes four selected articles covering an interesting set of topics in international management studies with a comparative focus, including: organizational control in joint ventures; institutional and cultural effects on subsidiary operations; corporate governance practices; and employee's choice of dissatisfaction behavior display. These articles along with the five Research Forum papers, present a rich diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches. They also represent the state-of-the-art and some of the best thinking in the field.

This volume includes contributing chapters from authors based in Asia, Europe, and North America to examine an emerging topic in the international management field - managing multinationals in a knowledge economy. They were selected to reflect the influences of three key factors - economics, culture, and human resources - on managerial decisions that affect multinationals and their effective operations. Leading the volume is an invited article by John H. Dunning, "An Evolving Paradigm of the Economic Determinants of International Business Activity." It presents a comprehensive review of his thirty-plus years of research on the eclectic paradigm, and a preview of his most recent work on the role of relational and institutional assets in foreign direct investment.This article, along with commentaries on Dunning's work written by Jose de la Torre, Timothy Devinney, Will Mitchell, and Stephen Tallman, can be found in the Research Forum section. The present volume also includes five other articles selected through a double-blind review process. They complement the Research Forum papers, which focus on the economic determinants of international business activity, by examining critical cultural and human resource issues faced by multinationals.These include: the role of culture in entry mode decisions, the impact of national context on top management teams, cultural attributes of Russian management, the utilization of managerial expatriates, and the bridging of theory and practice in international human resource management research. A review of the volume's ten chapters suggests that, despite all the technological advances in cross-border communication and coordination, social capital and human resources are the most critical factors possessed by multinationals.

The early research on multinational enterprises usually relied on traditional economic theory or relatively simple but powerful theories developed in the field of international business. They were developed to help us understand why firms entered international markets. However, as the field of international management has developed further, with more scholars from adjacent disciplines conducting research on issues of importance to international markets and multinational firms, newer, more diverse and complex theoretical perspectives have been developed. The present volume involves a series of invited papers focused partly on Professor Dozs recent work and on other newer and important theoretical perspectives on the multinational enterprise. These works are authored by a number of top scholars in the field from North America and Europe. The intent of this volume is to highlight and emphasize the new and diverse theoretical foci in this field (e.g., management of large groups in emerging markets, international entrepreneurship and the liabilities of foreignness) and serve as a catalyst to the increasingly important research, designed to help us understand and build a theory of the multinational firm. The book is divided into three parts, with the first focused on the new and visible theory of the metanational firm by Yves Doz and comments on this work and Yves Dozs broader contributions to the field by three top scholars in the international management field. The second part contains two works that examine the evolving nature of theory on the multinational firm in international management research. The third part contains five papers that present diverse yet highly important theoretical perspectives on the multinational enterprise. This work provides a base upon which future excellent research in the field of international management will be advanced.

Two recent developments from globalization have fundamentally altered the nature of work organizations: the workforce has become increasingly diverse in national and cultural origins, and work assignments are increasingly performed by teams consisting of members located in different countries. Together, these changes have resulted in employees increasingly finding themselves working in culturally diverse, geographical dispersed, multinational teams. Yet, relatively little scholarship has been done to study the dynamics of such teams and how they can be better managed. The current volume presents cutting-edge theorizing and research from a multidisciplinary (e.g., psychology-, communications/technology-, organizational behavior-, and strategy-oriented) group of scholars who have been active in studying multinational teams in a global context. This book is divided into three parts. The first includes four chapters focusing on culture and other intra-group factors that affect the effective functioning of multinational teams. The second includes five chapters that examine the effect of technology and other external influences on team processes and outcomes. The third part includes four chapters dealing with leadership and management issues. The two final chapters were written by authors who have been actively involved as organizers of multi-country academic research teams whose life spans many years and continues today. Cumulatively, this book's chapters provide management scholars a diversity of theoretical and methodological perspectives, at many levels of analysis, and include insights borne from the authors observation-based and/or living-based experience with the culturally-challenging issues they discuss. Additionally, these chapters also provide practicing managers useful ideas on both intra- and external-group dynamics that help increase their understanding about the effective functioning of multinational teams. As a result, this book offers both breadth and depth on the topic of managing multinational teams in a global context that promise to make its contents of interest to many audiences.