In an attempt to learn more about the early years of EIBA, I have tried to get some comments from the founding fathers and former Preidents of EIBA. In one of the last issues of EIBAzine Jim Leontiades, the 1st President of EIBA  explained how the  European International Business ‘Association’, as it was called at that time, came about and why EIBA went its separate way.

John Stopford was the 5th President of EIBA and organized the Annual Conference at the London Business School where he was one of the leading scholars. Although he retired a few years ago, his letter shows that he is still very active.

(Danny Van Den Bulcke)

Dear Danny,

You have asked me to add my thoughts to those of Jim Leontiades about the early days of our Association.  You also asked me to write a bit about what I have been doing in recent years.  I suspect the second question has a more personal angle to it, for you too have retired and are curious about what others have done after severing their formal ties to a university.

One the first question, I have little to add to Jim’s memory of the early years, other than to emphasise the desire of many of the original members to break the ‘American Hegemony’ of the field.  Even though I was a member of the AIB – and later became one of its Vice-presidents – I was acutely aware that much of what was then deemed to be ‘good’ research in JIBS and other leading journals was US-centric.  We stopped short of founding our own journal, but the early years of EIBA were marked by a flowering of empirical work in Europe. 

The fifth – I think it was the fifth - annual meeting was held in London when it was my turn to be President.  In addition to the many usual papers, there were several notable reports from various working groups that EIASM had sponsored.  The idea was to produce a distinctively European theory of management.  The working party on which I served was enormously good fun.  We had meetings all over Europe, mixing thought with tourism.  I don’t think we really succeeded in making much progress on the specifically ‘European’ aspects, though we all learned a good deal about the challenges of managing in a very complex environment.

EIBA’s period of being self-consciously European meant that many of us worked on such books as European Approaches to International Management, which Klaus Macharzina and Wolfgang Staehle edited in 1986.  Yet, the membership was never restricted to Europeans.  Rather it became a most interesting group of internationally minded people working on difficult cross-border issues.  Having started with a need to recognise the different context of Europe and so become separate from the older AIB, EIBA seems to me to have become more relaxed in its relationships.  Many scholars are now members of both and I think we gain from such a cosmopolitan set of relationships.

As for your second, more personal question, I have been extraordinarily lucky to be able to explore new avenues, building on what I learned from all those decades labouring in the IB field.  IB is special in that it combines perspectives from multiple disciplines affecting both business and government to inform our efforts to construct better theory.  I have long tried to live up to the old adage that there is nothing so practical as a good theory.  Now I have to deliver on that promise both as consultant and as coach. 

Much of my current portfolio of activities was in place well before I retired.  I was helped in that effort by the fact that my classroom was my laboratory: my clients came to speak; my students went out and did projects with them, and I wrote about both.  I remain active as a consultant to multinationals and governments and still give talks to many different types of audience.  Yet, I wanted to add a new skill and went back to school to train as an executive coach.  I had two reasons.  One was that I had long been advisor to many boards and individual board members of multinationals and was curious to find out whether my instincts had been on the right lines.  The other was that my company, The Learning Partnership, was getting more involved in executive development at senior levels where many firms are beginning to tie coaching to more formal learning.  I felt that, as Chairman, I ought to know what that part of the market wanted.  Now I coach a few CEOs and have great joy doing so.

Coaching has spurred me to look further into the question of how we can do a better job of delivering executive education.  We need to find ways to do two things together: to teach techniques that can be applied to work; and to build perspective and inspire people to be curious about the world around them as they prepare themselves for greater responsibilities.  Experiments with new combinations of subjects, new technologies of delivery and new types of exercises in partnership with the firms themselves are exciting.  I am convinced it is possible to make executive education a requirement in firms as part of their strategy process, rather than keeping it as a nice-to-have option when times are good.   The complexity and diversity of Europe makes it, I find, the ideal place to live while on this quest.

So, you see Danny, there is a great deal to do after retirement.  My quest keeps me young – and still travelling - and having fun.

John Stopford

by Danny Van Den Bulcke

On behalf of the EIBA members, the EIBA Fellows decided to award  to John Dunning EIBA’s first and only ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ for his influential contributions to International Business. The award was presented during the Ljubljana Conference in December 2004.

The description of the following stages of John Dunning’s career are based on his own article in the Journal of International Business Studies, 2004, No 4,  with the title: ‘Perspectives on International Business Research: A Professional Autobiography Fifty Years Researching and Teaching International Business’. The following  is a shortened and slightly adapted version of the JIBS paper which was written in the first person.

Nicole Coopman and John Dunning
EIBA Conference Oslo 2005

The decennia from the 1950s to the 1970s were discussed in the 2006 October Issue of EIBAzine. The 1980s and 1990s are presented in this  issue as the second part of John Dunning’s long career. It is hoped that he will accept to write out his experiences during the first decennium of the new millennium and update the conclusions of his JIBS article - which are not included in the following  adaptation of his original paper –  as a third part for the next issue of EIBAzine.

John Dunning has been an important contributor to EIBA conferences for almost as many years as EIBA exists. Yet, it would  seem that he was even more active in EIBA during the last few years, e.g. as Dean of the Fellows of EIBA as well as member and organizer of plenary sessions and special panels. He also was a Faculty member of the EIBA Tutorial and the Hedlund Award for the Best Doctoral Thesis during most of the years of the existenxce of these activities.


THE 1980s: A MORE INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVE

For much of the 1980s, John Dunning’s  contribution to IB scholarship continued to take the economic perspective and use the analytical tools of the economist. His closest collaborators in jointly authored publications were also economists. He remained Head of the Department of Economics at Reading until 1987, but only towards the end of his  tenure, did the teaching of management related topics (apart from finance and accounting) enter into the curriculum. It was not until 1981 that he attended the first annual meetingof the Academy of International Business (AIB) in Montreal. As a result of this meeting and many others which followed, he  gradually came to appreciate the interdisciplinary nature of international business. Indeed, as Jack Behrman has pointed out, the distinctive feature of IB as an area of study rests precisely on an appreciation of how different cultures, political systems, and exchange rate policies affect our understanding of the cross border decision taking of firms and the environment in which they operate.

In 1986, with Art Stonehill, he helped organize the annual conference of the AIB in London—the first time it had been convened outside the U.S.  For this meeting the disciplinary compass of the programme was extended to include sessions on international business history, economic geography and political science. Since then, he tried to broaden the lens of IB scholars to embrace these and other related subjects not normally taught in business schools.

In a book published in 1988, he tried to convey some of the multi-disciplinary richness of IB as an area of study; and, while accepting the unidisciplinary bias of our training and scholarly perspective, pleaded that it  should be better recognised that we are part of a complex mosaic of understanding of how, why, where, and by what means corporations cross national boundaries and their impact on the economies in which they operate. In the last decade, or more, he stressed the need for a closer and  broad-based interdisciplinary approach in furthering scholarly research in IB.

John Dunning ‘s research interests in the 1980s were largely devoted to exploring two new areas of IB activity and in initiating an exercise in data gathering. First, his work for the UNCTC focused on the determinants of MNE activity in the service sector—a previously neglected area of interest in the literature. In particular, he was given the enviable task of exploring the role of MNEs in the international tourist industry, which naturally required him to do some field research in some of the more exotic locations in the world! He  also became interested in the reasons why and where MNEs established regional offices. Second, in 1984, he was commissioned by the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry to undertake a study on the role of Japanese manufacturing affiliates in the U.K. At the time, there were only 26 of these, but more were expected to enter Europe in the following decade, and the U.K. government was anxious to attract as many of these as possible. He found that with a few exceptions, which were primarily of a culture-specific nature, the perceptions of the managers of the Japanese affiliates, and those of their suppliers, customers and competitors in the U.K., on the impact of this new form of inbound MNE activity were exactly the same as those identified in his study on U.S. FDI in the U.K. 30 years earlier.

His  foray into data gathering and interpretation arose from his  dissatisfaction with the published statistics in FDI anMNE activity. Earlier in the 1970s, he analyzed, together with Robert Pearce, the industrial, geographical and growth patterns of over 800 of the largest industrial corporations listed by Fortune (Dunning and Pearce, 1975, 1981). Also , jointly with John Stopford and Klaus Haberich, and with the cooperation of the firms in question, he edited the first edition of The World Directory of Multinational Enterprises, which contained detailed company profiles of each of some 430 major MNEs. At the same time, with  John Cantwell he embarked on an ambitious project for the Geneva based Institute for Research, and Information on Multinationals (IRM) to assemble and present as much statistical data as possible on the level, structure and growth of inbound and outbound FDI in some 80 countries. Subsequent and enlarged editions of this directory were produced and published by UNCTAD in a series of World Investment Directories.

Three other inter-related events of the mid 1980s are worth mentioning, which, to some extent at least, reoriented Professor Dunning’s career path in the years that followed. The first was a request by the UNCTC to prepare a syllabus on the role of TNCs in economic development, that would form the basis of intensive courses for teachers of international and development economics in the Asian and Pacific region and later on in Lesotho. The fact that there was no contemporary comprehensive text on the economic role of MNEs in the global economy, prompted him  to write up his  notes into a fully fledged monograph. It was made possible to continue this line of research was made possible in 1986 when, as a direct result of an article he had earlier penned in Lloyds Bank Review — at the time, one of the U.K.’s most popular and respected applied economics journals —caught the attention of the then Chairman of Imperial Chemicals Industry (ICI), John (later Sir John) Harvey Jones. The  ICI Chairman believed that there was an inadequate appreciation and understanding by governments of the implications of the growing interdependence of the world economy and of how inward and outward MNE activity might aid the restructuring and competitiveness of national economies, and he offered to finance a four year Research Professorship in International Business at the University of Reading that allowed John Dunning  to concentrate his research efforts in this particular area.

In 1986 he was asked to consider a Seth Boyden Visiting Professorship of International Business at Rutgers University, USA, for a period of 12-18 months, which allowed him to solve a dilemma about his retirement and  pension from the University of Reading in 1992. The timing of the visit to the U.S. was also propitious, because in 1986 he was elected President of the AIB for the two years 1987-8.

At the end of 1986,  he resigned the Headship of the Department of Economics after serving in that capacity for 23 years. During that time the Department had not only become the largest in the University (in terms of numbers of students and faculty), but one of the most respected in institutional and applied economics and one of the top research and graduate teaching centers in the economics of FDI and MNE activity.  Mainly due to the efforts of Mark Casson, John Cantwell, Geoffrey Jones and Bob Pearce, it further expanded in the 1990s, and became one of the largest and most prestigious of its kind in Europe.

THE 1990S: THE RUTGERS YEARS

According to John Dunning serendipity has always played an important role in his academic career. His  appointment at the University of Reading, when there were several equally strong contenders for the post; the invitation in 1972 to serve on the UN Group of Eminent Persons, (sparked off,  by a 10 minute presentation he  gave at a conference at Dusseldorf at which Philip de Seynes was present); the lunchtime meeting with John Harvey Jones in 1986; and a friendly conversation with Farok Contractor in the same year. He feels that these events all led to important watersheds in his career.

He left England for  Rutgers University in New Jersey in January 1987,  to teach an MBA and two Ph.D. courses in international business although at the time there was no specialist concentration in this subject. Dean, David Blake, was determined to encourage this as part of a wider effort to internationalize the curriculum and research agenda.

In the Spring of 1989, the Dean  of the Graduate School of Management offered him  one of the chairs at Rutgers. However, as he did not want to emigrate to the U.S., but  he ptoposed  to spend every other calendar year at Rutgers, initially for a period of five years. The Dean agreed to this suggestion, and so began an eleven-year fruitful association with the Faculty of Management at the Newark Campus of the University. John Dunning  quickly got the Ph.D. program under way, and by the time he  resigned from Rutgers in 2000, 16 of  his  students had already obtained their doctorates.

By early 1992 he had completed the manuscript of Multinational Enterprises and the Global Economy. It was published by the U.K. arm of Addison-Wesley in January 1993. He  then proceeded to direct his  research to another of the earlier interests of ICI—that is, the interaction between MNEs and governments in upgrading the productivity and promoting the structural transformation of the indigenous resources and capabilities within the latter’s domain. More generally, the early 1990s witnessed a reappraisal of the significance and tasks of national and subnational governments, as economies were becoming more knowledge-based and internationalized. In particular, governments were then being increasingly perceived as market-facilitating entities in an innovation-led globalizing economy. This being so, economists and others were giving increasing attention to the ways in which
national and/or regional administrations might upgrade their location-specific assets to attract and retain more global business.

Funded by a grant from the Carnegie Bosch Institute, he organized a workshop at Georgetown University in Washington in 1994 at which the topic of Governments, Globalization and International Business was discussed by a group of senior political scientists, strategic analysts and economists. Among the scholars participating were Richard Lipsey, Michael Porter, Susan Strange, Stephen Kobrin, Sanjaya Lall, John Stopford and Bruce McKern; and a volume based upon the workshop was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A subsequent volume, which was an outcome of a conference held at Rutgers University in 1998, and attended by economists, regional geographers and business strategists on Regions, Globalization and the Knowledge Based Economy, was published under Dunning’s  editorship in 2000.

As the 1990s progressed John H. Dunning , like other scholars,  became increasingly conscious that some of the extant explanations for the presence and growth of MNE activity were no longer persuasive. In particular, the then-occurring merger and acquisition (M & A) boom, which primarily involved firms located in the Triad of North America, Western Europe and Japan, was causing scholars to reappraise the motives for FDI. Earlier in his 1993 book, he  had introduced the concept of strategic asset-seeking FDI—namely, MNE activity designed not to exploit the existing competitive advantages of the investing firms, but rather to protect such advantages or acquire new ones. This idea was subsequently taken up by a number of scholars later in the decade, and there was a good deal of empirical research—including  e.g. Dunning (1997), on the extent to which firms perceive their competitive advantages are enhanced as a direct result of their foreign owned activities, and, in particular, the contribution of their affiliates. At the same time, it was also becoming clear that global economic and political events were compelling corporations to engage in an increasing range of cooperative relationships, both along and between value chains. What implications did this have for the theories about the causes and consequences of international production, and particularly that of the resource based theory of the (international) firm? This idea of “alliance capitalism,” first put forward by Michael Gerlach (1992) to explain the Japanese brand of capitalism, became a major inspiration for his work in the 1990s (see particularly Dunning, 1997), and continuesto interest him today.
 
Throughout the 1990s, John Dunning  continued to play an active consultancy role in UNCTAD and other international organizations, notably OECD and the European Commission. His  duties at UNCTAD included the general editorship of a 20 volume series on Transnational Corporations and Economic Development. The idea of this venture was to reproduce some of the seminal contributions to our understanding of the different aspects of MNE activity over the past three decades or so with especial reference to its consequences for developing countries. More recently, his  task at UNCTAD has been to give general advice on the contents and form of the annual World Investment Reports.

In 1992, he officially retired from the University of Reading, but continued his biannual visits to Rutgers. Between 1992 and 2002, Rutgers’ Ph.D. students produced three books and over 50 single or jointly authored articles or chapters in books. In broad terms, such publications had three major themes: (i) MNEs, governments and structural transformation, (ii) the internationalization of services and (iii) strategic alliances and cross-border knowledge transfers.

The geographical radius of John Dunning’s international travel also widened in the 1990s; as he also spent as much time in Asia and the Pacific — notably Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Republic of China, and Australia — as he  did on the European Continent. Most of these visits to the East were associated with his  advisory work for UNCTAD and other UN agencies and to present papers at conferences and symposia, or to lecture and advise Faculty and students at universities. At the same time, the focus of his  research and consultancy continued to remain in Europe and North America. In the mid-1990s, for example, he co-ordinated a large-scale research project for his  London-based consultancy — EAG — on the consequences of the completion of the European Internal Market on both extra and intra EC FDI. This work was later published by the European Commission (1998).  He finally revisited and updated his  first book, American Investment in British Manufacturing Industry. The wheel of his scholarly endeavours had, indeed, turned full circle.

Towards the end of the 1990s, his research interests underwent a major shift. In his  quasi-retirement he  was looking for a way to combine his  accumulated professional expertise with his Christian beliefs. John Dunning was brought up in a Baptist family — both his  father and uncle were Baptist ministers — and the moral principles and behavioral patterns taught  by his parents, and his faith, have stood him – based on his own saying - in good stead throughout his  life.When he realised that the emergence of globalcapitalism, though fostered primarily by technological, economic and political imperatives, was posing huge moral challenges, if it was to be both socially acceptable and geographically inclusive.

In December 1998, he  organized a plenary session at the annual conference of the European International Business Academy (EIBA) in Jerusalem at which he offered a Christian perspective of the challenges of global capitalism, alongside Jewish and Muslim speakers who set out their own views. The interest that this special session generated among his colleagues, together with the rising criticism of globalization and global capitalism in the mid- to late- 1990s, prompted him  to think more seriously about the moral ecology of the economic and social systems now emerging in the world economy.