Mohammad Yamin

The University of Manchester

Extant international business (IB) literature on Headquarter (HQ)-subsidiary relationships has established that where decision-making occurs, it influences a firm’s performance. Existing studies propose that the degree of autonomy in decision-making at subsidiary level is not the same for all value chain activities, paying more attention to upstrea...

This paper sets out to investigate the role of religion and spirituality in a business network context, with an empirical focus on the international business development of Turkish SMEs. By drawing on the concept of homophily and tie strength, we argue that, while religion can act as a bridge and thus create a multitude of weak ties within a busine...

Purpose This study aims to utilise key insights from social network theory (SNT) to enhance understanding of overcoming the liability of outsidership as a prerequisite for firm internationalization. Specifically, it seeks to examine the influence of structural attributes of networks on the motivational stance of both network insiders and outsiders...

The traditional economic perspectives have considered individuals as the perfectly rationale and argued that their network commitment was driven by utilitarian, profit- and utility-maximizing motivations and economic self- interests (Blau, 1964; Provan and Milward, 1995; Ring, 1997). However, humans, who are the core actors of network relationships...

This paper investigates the role of spirituality in network commitment and trust building through a focus on the specific network context of Anatolian Tigers from Turkey. Despite the previous research employing utilitarian perspectives to explain the antecedents of commitment, the aim here is to understand the role played by spirituality, a higher-...

In the information age, the firm’s performance hinges on combining partners’ specialist knowledge to achieve value co-creation. Combining knowledge from different specialties could be a costly process in the international technology alliances (ITAs) context. We argue that the combination of different specializations requires the development of ‘tra...

Information technology (IT) as an international marketing tool has been acknowledged in several studies (Beccera et al. 2013; Chang and Chen 2008; Jarvenpaa et al. 2000; Mukherjee and Nath 2007; Safari et al. 2013), and the Internet as an alternative path for firm internationalisation has been explored recently (Kim 2003; Lim et al. 2004; Pezderka...

The notion of ‘networks’ has been applied by a growing number of researchers in different business and management sub-disciplines including organisational studies (Salancik, 1995; Uzzi, 1996; Zaheer and Bell, 2005; Kilduff and Brass, 2010; Tichy et al., 1979), knowledge management (Cross and Parker, 2004; Reagans and McEvily, 2003), innovation (Fre...

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to introduce the notion of ?rising power firms? and how these firms offer developmental promises and challenges to the face of international business (IB). We suggest that rising power firms offer novel capabilities, connect IB to global value chains (GVCs) and then introduce the papers in the special issue. D...

Although Hymer is acknowledged as the pioneer of modern analysis of the multinational enterprise (MNE) (Dunning, 1996; Pitelis, 2002), his analysis of the nature of the multinational as an emerging organizational form has not received the attention it merits. His insights on this issue are contained in writings which have attracted attention primar...

There is an inevitable tension between standardization and adaptation within Marketing, whether domestically or internationally.

Globalization is best described as a process of deepening internationalization.

Marketing adaptation is the opposite of standardization and conveys the idea that marketers may tailor their marketing program to the specific conditions of the different countries in which they operate.

An alliance is any contractual or cooperative relationship between two organizations for a specific purpose.

The global economy and society contains a number of regions which share a degree of commonality in Culture, language, political outlook, and, to a lesser degree, economic circumstance.

The treatment of the structural issues within International Marketing is highly influenced by the dominant paradigm in organizational theory.

The Marketing Environment is commonly defined as the set of actors and forces that influence the success of a company's marketing program.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how specific features of social network analysis (SNA) can sharpen our knowledge about firm internationalization from a network perspective; particularly in the context of liability of outsidership (LOO) approach. It aims to build a more comprehensive understanding of overcoming LOO through revea...

This paper presents an exploratory study of how social value creation and business models may be interrelated in the context of the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) business formation. We develop our analysis around five case studies of actual businesses set up in rural India by people in the BOP. We attempt to draw implications from the performance of...

There is recognition that some emerging economies, in particular China, India and Brazil and their economic dynamism have the potential to change the face of international business (IB). Both in terms of theory but also in terms of the amount of empirical evidence that is currently generated in the domain. Terminology and acronyms such as BRICs, MI...

This article analyses R&D cooperation strategies by foreign subsidiaries of MNEs located in South Korea. It differentiates between foreign subsidiaries with no R&D cooperation and those which favour internal or external R&D cooperation. Providing country-specific discussion in the context of South Korea, this enables comparison and contrast of the...

PurposeThis chapter revisits the paper by Yamin and Sinkovics (2009) on the paradoxical relationship between MNE current strategies and economic development. There is evidence that positive developmental impacts of FDI flows are conditional on high levels of human capital and thus on the existence of ‘good’ infrastructure in recipient countries. De...

This paper examines two aspects of the internationalisation of innovation in Finnish multinational companies, the growing innovativeness of foreign subsidiaries ('creative subsidiaries') and the phenomenon of 'cross-fertilisation', between R&D labs in Finland and those in foreign subsidiaries, in the innovative process of Finnish MNEs. We review ex...

Purpose – The purpose is to construct an analytical framework that encapsulates implications for the marketing offering of service firms as a result of observed intra-national ethnic diversity in these firms' markets of operation. Design/methodology/approach – This is a conceptual approach which promotes the idea that acculturation matters for ser...

This paper investigates the impact of social and business interactions on firm internationalisation within the context of an industrial cluster created from scratch by policymakers. Based on in-depth interviews with firms in Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor cluster, our findings suggest that a permanent cluster of this nature may not be able to...

We propose and test two hypotheses on how multinational (MNC) parents can use different financial contracting arrangements when financing their subsidiaries in order to constrain the rent-seeking behavior of subsidiary management. Furthermore, we also examine how the MNC parent can effectively enhance the monitoring of their subsidiaries by delegat...

Drawing on case studies of two leading UK service firms in five host countries (Argentina, Brazil, China, Korea and Malaysia), we examine how the strategy and organization of service multinationals shape the development of linkages with local firms in host economies. We find that there is reduced autonomy of subsidiaries to engage with local firms...

The aim of this contribution is to assess the impact of innovation policy on foreign subsidiaries’ innovation performance. The South Korean government has implemented a series of policies to enhance the innovation capabilities of private firms, whether foreign or locally owned. With more FDI in the country, the position of foreign subsidiaries as m...

What is the nature of headquarters-subsidiary relationships in service multinationals? What factors, including sectoral and national features, affect these relationships? Drawing on a study of eight major UK service multinationals operating in four countries with distinctive institutional environments – China, Korea, Brazil and Argentina – we devel...

• Developing an analytical framework to help examine the impact of HQs direct involvement in lateral innovation transfers on efficiency and effectiveness of • Develop hypotheses which are tested by multiple regression analyses on data relating to 129 lateral innovation transfers in multinational corporations • Three key findings: dyadic will...

Peter Buckley’s writings on the global factory with specific reference to the paper in this focused issue are discussed in this commentary. The commentary points to the possible vulnerabilities of the global factory as an organisational form and links these vulnerabilities to features of the governance regime that supports the global factory. The p...

This paper addresses the issue of how a subsidiary's internal and external embeddedness interact in generating the importance of the subsidiary vis-à-vis the MNC as a whole. We take previous findings of the positive impact of external embeddedness on a subsidiary's importance as our starting point and consider two questions: (a) how does the intern...

Inter-firm collaboration, including inter-firm joint ventures, has been researched extensively in the business and management literature (Delios and Beamish, 1999; Hennart and Larimo, 1998; Pan, 1996; Yan and Gray, 1994). In the international business (IB) context, cross-border joint ventures (IJVs) have been highlighted as a key element of interna...

Purpose – This research aims to understand inter-subsidiary innovation transfers from a subsidiary business network perspective. We examine transfer performance with particular interest in the influence of subsidiary business networks in innovation development stage. The moderating effect of knowledge inputs, that is, external and internal business...

Applying a resource-dependency perspective to intra-multinational enterprise (MNE) power [53,54], this paper examines the effect of the deployment of advanced ICT and particularly the implementation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Although subsidiaries in the multinational do not have authority-based or ‘structural’ power with respec...

Mental orientations characterising a consumer's approach to making choices – in short, consumer decision styles – have attracted considerable interest from researchers and practitioners for their value in predicting purchasing behaviour. As a result, they play a key role for marketing activities such as market segmentation, positioning, and tailori...

This paper develops and tests hypotheses linking cultural distant to the ownership distribution of equity capital across the partners in international joint ventures (IJVs). The paper's underpinnings are linked to the role of equity shares in providing performance guarantees in joint ventures (JVs). It argues that for IJVs based in the home country...

A close reading of Adam Smith’s works, “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of Wealth of Nations” and “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” indicates that he would not support the advocacy of free markets wholeheartedly. His view on market systems, although “free,” implies strong institutions and regulations. Adam Smith would have been particularly c...

This paper explores the paradoxical relationship between MNE current strategies and economic development. There is evidence that positive developmental impacts of FDI flows are conditional on high levels of human capital and thus on the existence of ‘good’ infrastructure in recipient countries. In this paper we suggest that current MNE strategies h...

Large-scale incoming tourism potentially creates a multinational market within the domestic economy of the recipient countries. More specifically, in a number of countries, there is a large influx of ‘foreign’ consumers, or tourists, from many countries and for a significant part of the year. In countries such as France, Spain, Austria, or Greece t...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to highlight the ICT‐enabled enhancement of control capability in MNEs. The literature on MNE structures acknowledges the role of ICT as a support system, but the specific changes facilitated by ICT have remained significantly underdeveloped. The paper seeks to address this issue conceptually and link contempora...

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The standardization vs. adaptation debate in international marketing is still ongoing, yet, in the online realm the discussion is only just emerging. While practitioners are excited to jump on the online communication and commerce bandwagon, empirical research on the issue of online standardization vs. adaptation is still relatively limited and mos...

Devoting a special issue of CPoIB to the ‘paradoxical nature’ of the internet in International Business was deemed appropriate and timely, as the role of the medium is often unjustly exaggerated in relation to both International Business theory and practical application. The aim of this issue of CPOIB was to bring together research that provides a...

This volume deals with 'anxieties' in international business and their managerial ramifications. A key actor in the international business environment is the multinational enterprise (MNE) and one can make the case that the organization and politics of the MNE is a potential pool of anxiety. Anxieties are also manifest from the perspectives of coun...

This paper examines the impact of EU harmonization on promoting exports by SMEs. The paper develops hypotheses on the positive impact of EU harmonization in enhancing stimuli and reducing barriers to exporting beyond the immediate or direct effect of harmoniza- tion. The empirical focus of the paper is on the food & beverage sector in Cyprus, emplo...

This paper examines the effects of online internationalisation on the psychic distance perceptions of internationalising firms. Building on extant internationalisation literatures and exploratory interviews, we generate four propositions positing effects of online internationalisation on psychic distance. The propositions indicate a reduction of ps...

This paper links Hymer's later contributions to an important aspect of the literature on the management of the MNE- namely- that on the federative MNE. The key point from this literature is that embeddedness in host country networks is potentially a source of strategic power for subsidiaries and thus a serious challenge to the MNE headquarters' mon...

The objective of this paper is to make a contribution to understanding the nature of opportunity development within the multinational enterprise (MNEs). As explained in Chapter 1, opportunity development is broadly understood as new technological resource combinations and capability development.

This paper examines the influence of inter-and intra organisational knowledge flows on innovative performance in multinational enterprises. It employs a theoretical framework relating to organisational differentiation within multinational enterprises to generate a number of hypotheses linking knowledge flows to innovate performance. The hypotheses...

This paper seeks to investigate how cross-border commerce via online media is affected the incidence of psychic distance. The term psychic distance is normally understood as the degree to which a firm is uncertain about the environment in a foreign market. This uncertainty is important because it is a major cause of marketing blunders, even by firm...

This paper compares customer satisfaction outcomes associated with the consumption of products adapted to the local market and non-adapted imports of washing machines in Turkey. It utilises literature on customer satisfaction to investigate customer outcomes associated with imports and adapted domestic products in developing countries and derives a...

Do multinational enterprises (MNEs) enjoy an advantage over national firms? Clearly, the fact that national and multinational firms do coexist indicates that MNEs do not necessarily enjoy an absolute advantage over national firms. Nevertheless it may be still be true that particular attributes of multinationality create value for MNEs which nationa...

This chapter is intended as a contribution to the understanding of the role of subsidiaries in the development of technological capability in the multinational enterprise (MNE). The analysis is evolutionary in that technological development and innovation are viewed as largely incremental and localized processes. From this position, it is argued th...

Examines the risks that simultaneously arise for buyers and sellers in the process of market exchange and argues that a key role of marketing institutions is that they reduce or modify these risks; without such institutions market the development of market exchange in society has significantly hampered. These observations are crucially relevant to...

This paper proposes minimum conditions for meaningful cross-cultural comparisons of consumer behaviour in terms of concept, culture and context and compares risk-reducing behaviour among a sample of UK and French compact disk purchasers. Few cross-cultural studies have been truly guided by these three considerations, especially in the standardisati...

The paper examines the defence of RBPs advanced by the internalization theory of DFI. RBPs are justified since not only do they have the effect of internalization but also because in their absence transactions-costs imperfections would undermine the effectiveness of technology transfer. The claims made for the efficiency of internalization and RBPs...

The role that TNCs have played has been complex, simultaneously reflecting and also helping to shape major developments in the world economy. The picture that will emerge is one of both continuity and change. With respect to the continuities, they reflect processes that have been at work since the 1950s. An earlier paper (Nixson and Yamin, 1980) co...

This paper examines the inter-industry variation in US transnationals' propensity to invest in export-orientated manufacturing subsidiaries in less developed countries. The results obtained from the empirical analysis indicate that a significant proportion of the variation can be explained by industry characteristics, such as factor-intensity, rese...