Multinational Enterprises: Research Trajectories since Hymer

Wu Xianming

doi:doi:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.2019.12.007

Summary

The core theory in the area of international business (IB) deals with the analysis of multinational enterprises (MNEs). Since Hymer, the theory of multinational enterprises has been developing for more than half a century. As the field of multinational enterprises has matured, many new research streams and perspectives have emerged. This study is motivated by two research questions: (1) Which contributions have been driving the research agenda in multinational enterprises? (2) Which emerging themes in the literature are likely to set the stage for future work? Reviews contribute to greater shared understanding and can promote cross-fertilization across different streams of research.

Scholars have intensively analyzed international strategies, mostly based on the I/R framework (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1989) and with a focus on strategy types such as multinational, global, and transnational. However, studies on typologies are criticized because they have conceptual disagreements and contradictory implications when analyzing performance within and between strategy types or because they take only a firm-specific or subsidiary-specific view. I/R is seldom regarded as a predictor in causal models, although clearer performance implications could be drawn from overcoming typologies and understanding I/R as distinct continuous strategy dimensions. Scholars call for such studies, and suggest separating international strategy and local implementation and analyzing strategy-implementation-performance paths.