Anne-Wil Harzing

Middlesex University, UK · Department of International Management and Innovation

Hirsch’s h-index cannot be used to compare academics that work in different disciplines or are at different career stages. Therefore, a metric that corrects for these differences would provide information that the h-index and its many current refinements cannot deliver. This article introduces such a metric, namely the hI,annual (or hIa for short)....

The management of human resources in headquarters (HQ)–subsidiary relationships requires intensive communication, but effective communication often depends on having a shared language. Hence, language differences can be a serious threat to the successful management of human resources in multinational corporations. In this large-scale quantitative s...

Extending existing international business (IB) research, we conceptualize shared social identity as an outcome rather than only an antecedent of multinational enterprise knowledge flows to provide an alternative reason for why such knowledge flows occur. We further argue that shared language among subsidiary and headquarters (HQ) managers is an ins...

We scrutinize the explanatory power of one of the key concepts in International Business: the concept of (cultural) distance. Here we focus on its effect on entry mode choice, one of the most researched fields in international business strategy. Our findings might, however, be equally be relevant for the field of International Business as a whole....

Female academics continue to be under-represented on the editorial boards of many, but not all, management journals. This variability is intriguing, because it is reasonable to assume that the size of the pool of female faculty available and willing to serve on editorial boards is similar for all management journals. This paper therefore focuses on...

Advancing, both conceptually and practically, the equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) agenda, which is notoriously difficult to implement, this paper addresses the under‐researched area of global diversity management (GDM) in multinational companies (MNCs). Drawing on Harrison and Klein's (2007) conceptualisations of diversity (separation, var...

Intra-company knowledge transfer is a key source of competitive advantage for multinational companies (MNCs) and this knowledge is usually embedded in individuals. Drawing on organizational knowledge creation theory, we explore how inpatriation contributes to knowledge transfer and, in turn, subsidiary performance. Inpatriation involves the interna...

Purpose: The expatriation literature has developed an insightful body of research on the reasons why women are not assigned abroad as frequently as men. However, we know very little about the systemic and recursive consequences of women’s underrepresentation in international assignments (IAs), which are examined in this conceptual paper. Design/me...

Employing expatriates who share an ethnicity with host country employees (HCEs) is a widespread expatriate selection strategy. However, little research has compared how expatriates and HCEs perceive this shared ethnicity. Drawing upon an identity perspective, we propose HCEs' ethnic identity confirmation, the level of agreement between how an HCE v...

In response to the somewhat paradoxical combination of increasing diversity in the global workforce and the resurgence of nationalism in an era of global mobility, this chapter aims to uncover how employees on international assignments respond to exposure to new cultures. Specifically, the study aims to explicate the underlying psychological mechan...

Innovation performance of multinational corporations (MNCs) derives from access to and utilization of a combination of explorative and exploitative knowledge across heterogeneous settings. These settings increasingly encompass flagship industries in emerging economies. There is limited research, however, that scrutinizes the processes of knowledge...

Although the country-of-origin effect on staffing practices of multinational corporations (MNCs) is well-known, its underlying mechanisms are under-theorized. Drawing on the cross-cultural management and comparative institutionalism literatures, we propose an overarching, theory-based framework with two mechanisms, dispositional and contextual, tha...

Identifying employees to represent headquarters (HQ) effectively in overseas units is a management challenge faced by all multinational corporations (MNCs). To date, management of this type of expatriate employees has accorded a central role to culture, such as understanding cultural differences, facilitating cultural adaptation and adjustment, and...

Over the last 10 years, the use of experimental methods has received an increasing level of attention in the field of Management and International Business. Editors of major journals have encouraged its use. However, experimental research is still under-represented in the field of International Management and is even rarer in language research. Hav...

Intensified competition means that multinational enterprises (MNEs) are increasingly concerned with locating innovation activities in the most appropriate locations. This had led to emerging economies in the South becoming an important destination of R&D-related foreign direct investment (FDI), departing from their traditional role as low-cost prod...

Purpose In response to the somewhat paradoxical combination of increasing diversity in the global workforce and the resurgence of nationalism in an era of global mobility, the purpose of this paper is to uncover how employees on international assignments respond to exposure to new cultures. Specifically, the paper aims to explicate the underlying p...

In the last 3 years, several new (free) sources for academic publication and citation data have joined the now well-established Google Scholar, complementing the two traditional commercial data sources: Scopus and the Web of Science. The most important of these new data sources are Microsoft Academic (2016), Crossref (2017) and Dimensions (2018). W...

Drawing on 50 semi-structured interviews in a case study of a Belgian multinational and its foreign subsidiary in Poland, we develop new insights into how using different types of international assignments (long-term expatriation, short-term expatriation, short-term inpatriation) allows a HQ-subsidiary dyad to transfer different types of knowledge...

In this article, we propose that the concept of ethnic identity confirmation (EIC), the level of agreement between how expatriates view the importance of their own ethnic identity and how local employees view the importance of expatriates’ ethnic identity, can explain why expatriates who are ethnically similar to host country employees are sometime...

In this chapter, we focus on how ethnic identity affects interactions between expatriates and local employees when they share an ethnicity. A large number of overseas Chinese are working in China; yet how they view their shared ethnicity might be different from how local employees view it. Such divergent perspectives are one cause of the challenges...

In this chapter, we review the main findings of our book and highlight the key implications that we can draw from our studies. While sending expatriates to China is still a common practice, MNCs clearly struggle in managing this group of employees. Expatriates themselves also find it challenging to cope with the changing social and work environment...

The previous chapters in this book have focused predominantly on the role of the host country language in China and looked specifically at Western expatriates. In this and the following chapter, we turn our attention towards issues related to culture and identity and investigate two very different groups of expatriates: Indian expatriates and overs...

Language, in particular host country language, has been ignored by both academics and practitioners in expatriate management. When it comes to issues affecting expatriate performance, there is a tendency to focus on technical details such as the job description, task-related training and leadership style and to overlook the fundamental issue of lan...

The purpose of this chapter is to present a broad-brush picture based on quantitative data on the role of expatriation, language and cultural differences in China. Contrasting this data with corresponding information for eight other host countries or regions allows us to illustrate China’s unique position. The chapter first presents an overview of...

Following the theme of Chap. 3 on the importance of host country language, here, we further explore how expatriates’ host country language skills influence how they adjust to the local environment, both in the workplace and in their out-of-work space. Based on fine-grained interviews with both expatriates and their local colleagues, we examine this...

Multinational corporations often assign expatriates who share an ethnicity with host country employees (termed ethnically similar expatriates) to work on international assignments. Although sharing an ethnicity with local employees can be an advantage, it also creates a unique identity challenge. In this article, we develop the argument that ethnic...

Multinational corporations often assign expatriates who share an ethnicity with host country employees (termed ethnically similar expatriates) to work on international assignments. Although sharing an ethnicity with local employees can be an advantage, it also creates a unique identity challenge. In this article, we develop the argument that ethnic...

A fast growing number of studies demonstrates that language diversity influences almost all management decisions in modern multinational corporations. Whereas no doubt remains about the practical importance of language, the empirical investigation and theoretical conceptualization of its complex and multifaceted effects still presents a substantial...

Employing expatriates who share an ethnicity with host country employees (HCEs) is a widespread expatriate selection strategy. However, little research has compared how expatriates and HCEs perceive this shared ethnicity. Drawing upon an identity perspective, we propose HCEs’ ethnic identity confirmation, the level of agreement between how an HCE v...

We investigate the coverage of Microsoft Academic (MA) just over a year after its re-launch. First, we provide a detailed comparison for the first author’s record across the four major data sources: Google Scholar (GS), MA, Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) and show that for the most important academic publications, journal articles and books, GS and...

The main objective of this paper is to empirically test whether the identification of highly-cited documents through Google Scholar is feasible and reliable. To this end, we carried out a longitudinal analysis (1950 to 2013), running a generic query (filtered only by year of publication) to minimise the effects of academic search engine optimisatio...

Over the past decades, multinational enterprises (MNEs) have increased their exposure to foreign markets, both in terms of the number of countries they operate in and the scope of activities they perform abroad. This has resulted in increased levels of globally distributed work and cross-national collaboration (Hinds, Liu, & Lyon, 2011) whose effec...

Providing fresh perspectives on managing expatriates in the changing host country of China, this book investigates expatriate management from a language and identity angle. The authors’ multilingual and multicultural backgrounds allow them to offer a solid view on the best practices towards managing diverse groups of expatriates, including Western,...

In this article, we compare publication and citation coverage of the new Microsoft Academic with all other major sources for bibliometric data: Google Scholar, Scopus, and the Web of Science, using a sample of 145 academics in five broad disciplinary areas: Life Sciences, Sciences, Engineering, Social Sciences, and Humanities. When using the more c...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss the pervasive problem of a lack of replication studies in international business based on van Witteloostuijn’s (2016) commentary “What happened to Popperian Falsification?” Design/methodology/approach The author presents two short case studies from her own research, one in which no replication studie...

Drawing on the knowledge-based view of the firm, this article provides the first empirical study that explicitly investigates the relationship between different categories of international assignees and knowledge transfer in multinational corporations (MNCs). Specifically, we examine (1) the extent to which expatriate presence in different function...

In comparison to the many dozens of articles reviewing and comparing (coverage of) the Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar, the bibliometric research community has paid very little attention to Microsoft Academic Search (MAS). An important reason for the bibliometric community’s lack of enthusiasm might have been that MAS coverage was fairly...

We address the lack of knowledge concerning the role of host country languages in multinational corporations based on an inductive qualitative study involving 70 interviews with Nordic expatriates and host country employees (HCE) in China. Building on the strongly discrepant views of expatriates and HCEs, we demonstrate how expatriates’ willingnes...

Arbaugh, Fornaciari and Hwang (2016) use citation analysis – with Google Scholar as their source of citation data – to track the development of Business and Management Education research by studying the field’s 100 most highly cited articles. In their article, the authors distinguish several factors that might impact on an article’s level of citati...

Scholars beware! For years, researchers have lamented the long lag times endemic in conventional academic publishing, where even the highest quality papers have often taken more than two years from initial submission to publication. Luckily, advances in digital technologies and the advent of online, open-access (OA) journals are rendering such dela...

This article aims to provide a systematic and comprehensive comparison of the coverage of the three major bibliometric databases: Google Scholar, Scopus and the Web of Science. Based on a sample of 146 senior academics in five broad disciplinary areas, we therefore provide both a longitudinal and a cross-disciplinary comparison of the three databas...

Cross-national research is plagued by many obstacles. This article focuses on one of these obstacles: the fact that research in more than one country often involves subjects with different native languages. We investigated whether the language of the questionnaire influences response patterns. More specifically we tested the cultural accommodation...

Author name ambiguity is a crucial problem in any type of bibliometric analysis. It arises when several authors share the same name, but also when one author expresses their name in different ways. This article focuses on the former, also called the “namesake” problem. In particular, we assess the extent to which this compromises the Thomson Reuter...

Female academics continue to be under-represented on the editorial boards of many, but not all, management journals. This variability is intriguing, because it is reasonable to assume that the size of the pool of female faculty available and willing to serve on editorial boards is similar for all management journals. Thus, we focus on the character...

The Dutch Economics top-40, based on publications in ISI listed journals, is— to the best of our knowledge—the oldest ranking of individual academics in Economics and is well accepted in the Dutch academic community. However, this ranking is based on publication volume, rather than on the actual impact of the publications in question. This paper th...

Our contribution seeks to (1) outline how cross-cultural management and, more recently, language studies developed as two interrelated subareas within international business research; (2) discuss the changing paradigms and orthodoxies under which empirical research in cross-cultural management and language studies has been executed, focusing in par...

Chinese and foreign organizations operating in China employ overseas Chinese employees, believing they can better transfer knowledge between China and foreign countries. Mechanisms affecting their performance and interaction with local Chinese employees are not understood. Focusing on overseas Chinese expatriates' shared ethnic identity with local...

In this perspective paper we challenge the explanatory power of one of the primary concepts in International Business (IB): the concept of distance. Although in our study we focus on cultural distance and its alleged ability to explain entry mode choice, we hold that our conclusions are equally valid for other distance concepts (such as institution...

This study systematically investigates how language barriers influence trust formation in multinational teams (MNTs). On the basis of 90 interviews with team members, team leaders and senior managers in 15 MNTs in 3 German automotive corporations, the authors show how MNT members’ cognitive and emotional reactions to language barriers influence the...

Harzing (Scientometrics, 2013) showed that between April 2011 and January 2012, Google Scholar has very significantly expanded its coverage in Chemistry and Physics, with a more modest expansion for Medicine and a natural increase in citations only for Economics. However, we do not yet know whether this expansion of coverage was temporary or perman...

Within the field of bibliometrics, there is sustained interest in how nations “compete” in terms of academic disciplines, and what determinants explain why countries may have a specific advantage in one discipline over another. However, this literature has not, to date, presented a comprehensive structured model that could be used in the interpreta...

This study draws on theories of opportunity, motivation and ability to investigate the conditional effects of language proximity in HQ-subsidiary relationships for subsidiaries' knowledge flows from and to corporate headquarters. Building on a large-scale empirical study of 817 subsidiaries located in nine different countries/regions, we find suppo...

We apply an organizational embeddedness perspective to examine international assignees’ retention with the organization. Specifically, we hypothesize that assignees’ social ties within and their perceived fit with the host unit positively relate to two sacrifices on leaving the organization: their firm-specific learning during the assignment, and t...

Thomson Reuter’s ISI Web of Knowledge (or ISI for short) is used in the majority of benchmarking analyses and bibliometric research projects. Therefore, it is important to be aware of the limitations of data provided by ISI. This article deals with a limitation that disproportionally affects the Social Sciences: ISI’s misclassification of journal a...

With the increasing globalisation of knowledge and management education, it is important that we build on our scanty understanding of trends and levels of geographic diversification in editorial board membership of management journals. Our study examines geographic diversity in editorial boards in Management over a 20-year period. It uses secondary...

Most governmental research assessment exercises do not use citation data for the Social Sciences and Humanities as Web of Science or Scopus coverage in these disciplines is considered to be insufficient. We therefore assess to what extent Google Scholar can be used as an alternative source of citation data. In order to provide a credible alternativ...

The importance of language differences in multinational companies (MNCs) can hardly be overlooked. This paper therefore provides the first large-scale quantitative overview of language competencies, policies and practices in MNCs. It is based on data from more than 800 subsidiaries, located in thirteen different countries with headquarters in more...

When conducting international research projects, scholars face a myriad of challenges that reach beyond those encountered in domestic research. In this paper, we explore the specific issues related to international survey research, focusing on the different stages of the research process that include defining the study population and gaining data a...

International Management researchers often rely on surveys to collect their data. However, responses to survey questions can be biased by response styles, a respondent's tendency to provide a systematic response to questions regardless of their content. Response styles vary across countries and individuals, but there is limited systematic research...

With the increasing globalisation of knowledge and management education, it is important that we build on our scanty understanding of trends and levels of geographic diversification in editorial board membership of management journals. Our study examines geographic diversity in editorial boards in Management over a 20-year period. It uses secondary...

As the academic world has become smaller through developments such as international exchanges and electronic communication, editorial boards of management journals should have become more geographically diverse. However, we do not know what contributes to increased geographic diversity in editorial boards. This paper examines geographic diversity i...

With multinational corporations increasingly adopting English as a corporate language, the issue of language management and the pros and cons of language standardization have been widely debated in the literature. Our 17-country study considers whether the use of English as a common corporate language causes difficulties. We empirically examine whe...

Using interview data from managers in eight German and Japanese corporate HQs and their subsidiaries in Japan or Germany, we provide the first large-scale empirical analysis of the language barrier and its solutions. We found that language is an important barrier, slowing down and increasing the cost of decision-making. Our research suggests twelve...

This paper explores three arguments. First, cultural accommodation by living in another culture for a while may have a long-lasting but partially dormant influence on behavior. Second, foreign language is a prime, activating behavior associated with this language. Third, a foreign language is expected to be a particularly forceful prime for those w...

A companion to the Publish or perish software program, which retrieves and analyzes academic citations, illustrating the various uses of the program.