Category Archives: International Business

The new generation of millennial entrepreneurs: A review and call for research

Jingting Liu, Ying Zhu, Manuel G. Serapio, and S. Tamer Cavusgil
International Business Review, Volume 28 Issue 5

Entering the third decade of the new millennium, the millennial generation is stepping into their most productive stage of life. We have witnessed a number of exemplary millennial entrepreneurs, such as Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook. The world’s economy is evolving fast and presenting distinct entrepreneurial opportunities to millennials across the globe. It is critical that scholars of international entrepreneurship explore the new breed of millennial entrepreneurs and contrast them across generations and countries. Regrettably, the extant literature comes up short in fully addressing the new generation of entrepreneurs. We call for immediate scholarly attention on millennial entrepreneurs as they are in substantive ways unlike all earlier generations. We urge researchers to explore the unique characteristics of millennial entrepreneurs, their influence on entrepreneurial motivation, orientation …

Covered in Gold: Examining gold consumption by middle class consumers in emerging markets

Jingting Liu
International Business Review, Volume 25, Issue 3, Pages 739-747

As wealth and status rise for middle class (MC) consumers in emerging markets (EMs), they increasingly acquire gold for both consumption and investment. The authors delineate a conceptual map for gold consumption drawing insights from the context of MC in EMs. Perceived benefits of gold and disposable income directly determine the attractiveness and availability of gold for individual consumers. Cultural, institutional and economic factors account for country variations in gold consumption. Based on theoretical considerations and empirical evidence, we contend that gold consumption and disposable income have a curvilinear relationship: as EMs mature and MC consumers’ shopping baskets become more diverse and sophisticated, their gold consumption decreases and eventually stabilizes.

Apology Strategies for Informal Complaints in Service Recovery and CRM Systems

Deborah L. Kellogg and Lawrence F. Cunningham
International Journal of Information Systems and Social Change, Volume 5 Issue 3

This paper reports the results of a quasi-experiment designed to identify linkages between customer attributes and apology types in service recovery in informal resolution settings. Understanding these relationships is critical for enabling more effective and dynamic social relationships between the service provider and the customer/client with the use of technology, namely Customer Relationship Management Systems (CRM). The authors find that simple apologies decrease anger, restore distributive and interactional justice, and increase satisfaction. More importantly, the paper suggests that there are significant nuances in apology types and complex relationships between customer types and effective deployment of the apology in informal resolution settings. Further, the analysis suggests that apologies with explanations are more effective among customers with service experience and that apologies with compensation are most effective for all customers. When apologies are used with successive failures there is some evidence that the apology explanations are not equally effective for all customer types. The paper concludes with a discussion of the linkages between apology, service recovery and CRM systems in informal complaint resolution to improve senior level decision making, employee performance in service recovery, and customer satisfaction in for profit and non-profit organizations.

Foreign ownership mode, executive compensation structure, and corporate governance: Has the literature missed an important link? Evidence from Taiwanese firms

Kang Rae Cho, Chia-Hsing Huang, and Prasad Padmanabhan
International Business Review, Volume 23, Issue 2, Pages 371–380

We propose an alternate context-based extension to the agency theory-grounded explanation of foreign ownership mode choices proposed in the literature. Using a sample of Taiwanese firms investing in the greater China region over the 2001–2009 period, we show that both economic and non-economic factors influence the choice of foreign ownership mode. In addition, we document that higher institutional ownership percentages motivate Taiwanese firms to select shared ownership in the greater China region. Further, no long term compensation mix/ownership structure link is found. These findings run counter to a theory provided for foreign ownership mode choices of US based firms. Our findings provide support for the validity of stewardship and social capital theory, but not financial incentives-based agency theory, for Taiwanese firms investing in the greater China region.

Comparing Hybrid Services in the United States and China

Lawrence F Cunningham, Clifford E Young, Zuohao Hu
International Journal of Information Systems in the Service Sector (IJISSS), Vol 5 Issue 1, 2013, 17-32

This paper examines how customers view a set of hybrid services (eleven generic and self-service technologies) in the US and China. The data are collected using questionnaires on location in the US and China and are analyzed using multidimensional scaling. The study indicates that two dimensions, customization/standardization and high/low contact, explain over 80% of the variance in the classifications. Although there are differences when comparing the results of the US and China samples, the results are very …

Current issues in International HRM: Alternative forms of assignments, careers and talent management in a global context

Marion Festing, Pawan S. Budhwar, Wayne Cascio, Peter J. Dowling, Hugh Scullion
German Journal of Research in Human Resource Management, Vol. 27 Issue 3, March 2013, P. 161-166

International Human Resource Management (IHRM) has become an important field of research. The first textbook on International Human Resource Management is approaching its 25th birthday (Dowling & Schuler, 1990; Dowling, Festing, & Engle,
2013) and the first journal dedicated to the investigation of human resource management topics in an international context established in 1989, the International Journal of Human Resource Management, is also close to it 25th Volume. Another specialized journal dedicated to international staff mobility, the Journal of Global Mobility, has been established by a group of prominent IHRM researchers this year. A regular conference dedicated to IHRM was established in the late 1980s and for more than 20 years this conference has convened biennially. It still enjoys strong support and the 13th Conference will be organized in Cracow, Poland in 2014.

China’s Sovereign Wealth Funds: origins, development, and future roles

Stephen Thomas and Ji Chen
Journal of Contemporary China, Volume 20, Issue 70, Pp. 467-478

China has established two of the world’s newer large sovereign wealth funds (SWFs): the official China Investment Corporation (CIC), and the non-official and less transparent State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) Investment Company (SIC). Both provide alternative investment opportunities for China’s exploding foreign exchange reserves, at US$2.4 trillion at the end of 2009, the largest in world history. This paper will address how China has accumulated its huge and growing foreign exchange reserves, and what roles these reserves, until 2007 managed only by the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), have played in the establishment and development of China’s two new SWFs. We will look specifically at why China’s foreign exchange reserves have developed, and how the new SWFs are a part of broader efforts to provide investment alternatives for China’s ballooning foreign exchange surpluses, particularly in light of the inflow of ‘hot’ foreign speculative funds. We will then point out some of the difficulties for China’s financial officials of SWFs as they try to pursue multiple and sometimes competing goals, set by boards of directors representing different bureaucratic and economic interests, all within the context of a general lack of transparency and a rapidly growing economy. Finally, we will present our conclusions about the future roles of the two SWFs as well as of the policies being developed to decentralize foreign exchange reserve holdings while at the same time not slowing the growth of China’s foreign trade surpluses, nor its foreign direct investments, nor its overall economic growth. We will also examine the effects of US-promoted Chinese currency appreciation on the future of China’s foreign exchange reserves and its sovereign wealth funds.

Revisiting the role of cultural distance in MNC’s foreign ownership mode choice: the moderating effect of experience attributes

Cho, Kang Rae and Padmanabhan, Prasad
International Business Review, June 2005, Vol. 14 Issue 3, pp. 307-324.

This study investigates potential moderating effects of firm’s experience levels in the relationship between cultural distance and foreign ownership mode choice. Using the well established Japanese FDI data base, it is found that higher levels of experience, particularly decision-specific experience (prior experience with a particular ownership structure mode), mitigates potential impacts of uncertainty and costs caused by the high level of cultural distance, thus uncovering one possible answer to the national cultural distance paradox reported in the literature. These findings reinforce similar findings of interaction effects between key variables and cultural distance in studies involving other important strategic decisions of the MNC. The decision-specific experience-moderated cultural distance variable, and not the absolute cultural distance variable, is found to be an important determinant of a firm’s foreign ownership mode choice. Furthermore, this variable dominates the other experience-moderated cultural distance variables (international business experience and host county experience-moderated cultural distance variables) in the ability to discriminate between full ownership and shared ownership modes. Based on this moderated cultural distance measure, we find strong evidence that cultural distance is positively associated with full ownership of Japanese foreign manufacturing entities.