EIBA-zine - Issue No. 3 - October 2006

1. Letter of the President

   1. Letter of the President 

      Dear colleagues,

      It is a great pleasure to announce that the 32nd EIBA Annual Conference will be held at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland from the 7th to the 9th of December 2006.

      The EIBA Annual Conference offers all members a great opportunity for presenting and discussing on-going research work in order to reach a synthetic understanding of the main questions of this year’s conference theme: “Regional and National Drivers of Business Location and Competitiveness”. This theme invites reflection on the major challenges faced by industrialised countries in the context of globalisation of productions and markets. The issue will be addressed at the Opening Plenary Session with the presence of the former President of Switzerland and former Minister of Economics, Mr. Joseph Deiss, John Dunning, Emeritus Professor University of Reading (UK) and Rutgers (US), and the CEO of Ernst &Young Switzerland, Mr. Peter Athanas.

      A second plenary session, chaired by Gaston Gaudard - former rector of the University of Fribourg-, will be dedicated to Outstanding Issues Regarding International Business Competitiveness and will count with the participation of Jean-Pierre Roth, Chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank and of the Board of Directors of the Bank for International Settlements; of Christian Ketels, Member of the faculty at the Harvard Business School and of Lars Oxelheim, professor at the University of Lund and affiliate of the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IUI), Stockholm.

      This year’s EIBA Fellows session will be held in honor to Prof. Sanjaya Lall. Organized by Francesca Sanna-Randaccio and chaired by John Dunning the session will discuss about Multinationals, Technology and Development together with John Cantwell (Professor, Rutgers University), Anne Miroux (Chief of the Investment Issues Analysis Branch, UNCTAD) and Karl Sauvant (Executive Director, Columbia Program on International Investment, Columbia University).

      Other interesting panel sessions will also be organised, some of which will commemorate particular events and research contributions to the International Business area. Together with these sessions, presentations of many interesting papers selected from the 294 papers submitted this year, will configure the program of the Conference.

      Thanks to the great help of the track chairs and the efforts of the reviewers we intend to organize an academically and socially successful EIBA conference. The conference venue will be the new campus of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences of the University of Fribourg which is only 10 minutes walk from the city center and the main Conference hotel, the NH Hotel. For further details on the conference program, accomodation and other practical information please visit the conference web page: http://www.unifr.ch/pes/eiba2006/

      I am looking forward to welcoming you in Fribourg.

      Kindest regards,

      Philippe Gugler
      EIBA President 2006
      Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences
      University of Fribourg
      

2. Letter of the Chairman

   1. Letter from the Chairman, Danny Van Den Bulcke 

      Up to FrEIBAburg, Switzerland, for EIBAs 32nd Annual Conference
      
      Three years ago changes were carried out in the organisational structure of EIBA and its relationship with EIASM which takes care of the EIBA Secretariat. Since the successful conferences in Athens, Copenhagen, Ljubljana and Oslo, EIBA has found a new 'élan' and has been able to improve its financial situation. The Executive Committee and the Board, which now counts 20 national representatives, is getting useful support from the EIBA Fellows who not only offer their experience but also took new important iniatives under its first Dean John Dunning. Klaus Macharzina has been elected as his successor and is certainly going to continue along the same lines (see further for more news on the EIBA Fellows)
      
      The theme of this year's conference is 'Regional and National Drivers of Business Location and Competitiveness'. Maybe it is not a coincidence that the term 'location' figures in the conference theme title. The EIBA meeting is taking place in Fribourg, the French speaking part of this multilingual country. The German speaking inhabitants refer to it as Freiburg. There is little chance that the international business experts who will travel to Fribourg-Freibourg from far away places, will end up in Freiburg, Germany, even though originally there was some confusion about the country in which the 32nd Annual Conference of EIBA was going to be organized. To avoid any possible confusion in December 2006 a request will be made to the mayor of this beautiful city to change the name into FrEIBAburg and FrIBAburg phonetically, as some members of EIBA pronounce the 'ei' as the French 'i' and the English 'e'...
      
      To be serious again, it has to be stressed that Philippe Gugler and his young and enthusiastic team are sparing no efforts to make the upcoming conference into another academically and socially successful event. The members of the EIBA Board were able to admire the new faculty building of Dean Philippe Gugler during their visit to the conference site at the end of April, when the interim Board meeting was held in Fribourg (see group picture).

      

      EIBA Board 2006

      This will be the first time that EIBA will meet in Switzerland. It might have been the second time if an American professor at IMEDE (now called IMD) would have gone through with his plans to host EIBA in Lausanne for its 12th Annual Meeting. However, only one year before the conference had to take place, it was cancelled for reasons that never became very clear. To avoid that EIBA would have to skip an annual conference, Neil Hood - who had hosted the 1985 conference in Glasgow - and myself - who had accepted to organize the 1987 meeting in Antwerp, decided to look frantically for another venue for 1986. Thanks to Ian Jones and City University it became possible to have the conference in London. This joint effort between Neil, Ian and myself allowed us to assure continuity in EIBA's expansion at that time. It is very sad that Neil Hood, one of the main pillars of EIBA during the 1980s, passed away last February (see In Memoriam further in this issue).
      
      As a result of the 'last minute' cancellation of Lausanne twenty years ago, the Board realised that EIBA needed more long term planning for its future conferences. This is why both the Board and the General Assembly have already approved the location of the next two conferences, i.e. Catania, Sicily in 2007 and Tallinn, Estonia in 2008, of which respectively Grazia Santangelo and Enn Listra as organizers and future EIBA presidents will take care of. Although several members and national representatives have expressed interest in hosting a future EIBA conference and inviting EIBA members to their university and country, 2009 has not yet been decided upon. While organizing an EIBA Conference is hard work, it is also highly rewarding in terms of recognition and exposure for one's alma mater and long lasting professional contacts and friendships.
      
      With its plenary sessions, special panels and presentation of papers the Annual Conference clearly is the mainstay of EIBAs activities. Yet, also the Doctoral Tutorial has become an essential part of the Conference. In Fribourg the Doctoral Tutorial will be organized tor the 20th time. To commemorate this anniversary a panel will be organized with the participation of both Faculty members and former winners of the so-called Best Thesis Proposal. The new conveners of the Tutorial John Cantwell and Udo Zander, received no less than 50 applications of Ph.d. students. While the Doctoral Tutorial awards the best thesis proposal, the prestigious Gunnar Hedlund Award granted by IBB from the Stockhom School of Economics consecrates the best thesis. After one year of interruption it will be back on the agenda. And of course there are other awards like the Copenhagen Prize and a new Elsevier IBR award. Since Jorma Ollila received the first such award in Oslo, he has been nominated as Manager of the Year 2006 (see further). During the last two conferences a number of commemorative sessions were organised in which recognition was given to some IB scholars. Sketches of their careers, based on speeches or introductions to 'festschrifts' are included in this issue of EIBA-zine.
      
      See you in FrEIBAburg!!!

      Danny Van Den Bulcke

3. In Memoriam

   1. In Memoriam Neil Hood (1943-2006) 

      Neil Hood who died on February 2, this year, was President of EIBA in 1985 and 1986. In an obituary the Scottish Herald wrote: 'His untimely death has deprived Scotland of one of his most influential and remarkable citizens; he represented the true embodiment of the Strathclyde University ethos of Useful Learning'. His close friend and co-author Stephen Young wrote in the AIB Newsletter, 2nd Quarter 2006: 'He will be remembered as one of the pioneers of the academic study of international business in the United Kingdom...'.
       
      It is not possible to capture the enormous versatility that Neil Hood has shown during all those years in a few lines. He was not only a gifted academic researcher and teacher, but also a policy maker and adviser, an entrepreneur, a preacher and religious writer. Few people are able to simultaneously lead so many different lives or careers in an enthusiastic, caring and efficient way. His influence extended far beyond Scotland and the United Kingdom and during the 1980s EIBA was glad to be able to benefit from his academic insights and his entrepeneurial drive. When he accepted a public policy appointment at the end of the 1980s as Director of the investment promotion agency Locate in Scotland, and could no longer be actively involved in EIBA, he continued to follow its development with great interest.
       
      Neil Hood started his academic career at the Glasgow University and Paisley College of Technology and from 1979 onwards was linked with the University of Strathclyde - where he hosted EIBA's 11th Annual Conference in 1885 - first as a full time professor in international business and later on as a part time lecturer after he entered into government service. Together with Stephen Young he developed Strathclyde International Business Unit into one of the leading research centres on multinational entreprises. As a result of his involvement in the world of financial management Neil also held several directorships in private companies. In recognition of his contributions to the public and private sectors in Scotland, Neil was awarded the CBE and an honorary doctorate of the University of Strathclyde in 2003. Until 2004 he was Deputy Chairman of 'Scottish Enterprise'. It is during his time with Scottish Enterprise that he co-founded Scottish Equity Partners Ltd which he helped develop into a major venture capital company.
       
      Even before ethical and moral issues became important in international business studies, Neil Hood had already persuaded many board members and managers that short time financial gains should not be given priority to these more relevant concerns. His Christian convictions were written out in 5 religious books, which he completed during the last years of his life.
       
      I had the privilege to work closely together with Neil as co-organizer of the EIBA Conference in London in 1986 and I will never forget his warm personality and management qualifications. When I heard that he had to undergo cancer therapy I got back in touch with him and was relieved after his recovery, which sadly enough was very short. When he heard that I was becoming emeritus professor he sent me the following optimistic mail (January, 10, 2005) about a year before his death.
       
      "Danny, its great to hear form you!...and to know that you have reached that exalted age. It was entirely fitting that you should have been honoured by your university, you have made a great contribution to them and to international business over many years.
      Since I formally left my post at Strathclyde in August 2003 (at which time they made me an honorary doctor which was kind), my health has been poor but my spirit has been great! As you know I have devoted my writing time to Christian books since then and have now completed four, the latest of which will be published in May 2005. I have wanted to do this for years and it is an offspring of my Christian faith. They have sold very well in different parts of the world. The desire to write for the Christian cause plus my health, has led me to 'park' academic work at the moment. I'll need to sort out my intentions soon!!"
       
      During the last year of his life he wrote a fifth volume, which was delivered to the publisher a few days before his death. To the EIBA members who have known Neil personally and the many scholars who have studied his (often reprinted)  influential 1979 book  'The Economics of the Multinational Enterprises' (with Stephen Young) and his  many other important contributions to international business, Neil Hood is indeed a great loss.
       
      Danny Van Den Bulcke
       
       

4. The EIBA Fellows

   1. New Dean 

      When the EIBA Fellows were started, John Dunning was elected as its first Dean. Together with John Cantwell as Secretary, he made the EIBA Fellows' first term into an extremely successful period with the organization of interesting and relevant panel sessions at the Ljubljana and Oslo conferences and the special award for a young scholar.
      
      The EIBA Fellows have elected Klaus Macharzina as John Dunning's successor. Klaus is a longstanding member of EIBA who co-organized the Berlin meeting in 1988 and was in charge of the 1990 conference at the University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, of which he was Vice Rector and Rector between 1994 and 2002. He is now Emeritus Professor of his university and received no less than three honorary professional degrees. Professor Macharzina has left a big footprint in international business by his editorship, especially of the well known Management International Review (MIR) which he developed in to one of the leading journals in our area during 35 years. A remarkable achievement.
      

   2. New EIBA Fellows 

      Congratulations to Krysztof Obloj from Warsaw University, School of Management, and Mats Forsgren from Uppsala University, who have been elected as new Fellows of EIBA.
      

   3. Wandel and Goltermann Foundation EIBA Fellows Award 

      At the EIBA annual conference in Ljubljana in December 2004, the EIBA Fellows announced a new EIBA Fellows Research Award for a Promising Young Scholar in International Business. This Award has been kindly sponsored for 2005-06 by the Wandel and Goltermann Foundation, based in Germany. The winner of the Young Scholar's award was to receive € 15,000. The purpose of this award is to help to broaden the research programme of promising younger scholars in the international business field, to widen their network of research contacts and open a new research collaboration for them at an early stage of their academic careers, and to enhance the formation of international research exchange arrangements amongst international business scholars. The award is given for the conduct of some specified piece of original research in a new host institution, and not for the completion of any coursework requirements. Currently registered doctoral students who are working on an international business topic, or those that have successfully defended such theses within the last three years, were eligible to apply.

      In May 2005, it was resolved to make the EIBA Fellows Award to a Promising Young Researcher to Jahan Peerally for her project to be conducted at the Richard Ivey School of Business in the University of Western Ontario in Canada on the topic of 'International versus National R&D Collaborations: A Study of Canadian Manufacturing SMEs'. The decision to make this award to Jahan was made by a committee of the EIBA Fellows chaired by Professor Klaus Macharzina. Jahan is a doctoral candidate of the University of Mauritius, who holds an MSc in International Business from Birkbeck College, University of London. In this project Jahan will collaborate with Tony Frost, Associate Professor of International Business in the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario, with further support from Paul Beamish, Professor of International Business at the Ivey School. The project began in August 2005, and will run for the academic year 2005-06. Since Jahan was unable to attend this year's EIBA Conference owing to visa problems, a presentation to her was received on her behalf at the gala dinner on Monday 12th December.
      

5. The EIBA Doctoral Tutorial

   1. 19th EIBA Doctoral Tutorial in IB - Experiences and Impressions from last year's winner 

      by Katharina Kretschmer
      ESCP-EAP European School of Management Berlin, Germany
      katharina.kretschmer@escp-eap.de

      Having participated in the 19th EIBA Doctoral Tutorial, I would like to share some experiences and impressions on this challenging event with you. It all began long before the actual tutorial took place when doctoral students were invited to hand in their proposals by the beginning of September 2005.
      
      Twelve doctoral students were chosen out of 35 applicants. Thereby, the faculty tended to favour dissertation proposals in an intermediate state: the candidates should neither stand at the very beginning, nor have yet finished their thesis. The background of the participants was as international and diverse as the topics and methodology of their dissertation projects. The doctoral students were from business schools in Austria, Germany, Finland, the UK and the US and came originally from Austria, China, Finland, Germany, Greece, Japan and South Africa. The research interests ranged from the macro-level (e.g. FDI-flows into developing countries) to the micro-level of the whole MNC (e.g. internationalization of Chinese MNCs or R&D management in MNCs) and its subsidiaries (e.g. opportunity identification in subsidiaries or control of foreign subsidiaries). Intended methodology ranged from quantitative surveys to qualitative interviews or integrated both in a mixed-methodology approach. Despite of diverse topics and methodology, the common IB ground was easy to observe.
      
      The Doctoral Tutorial was held in Oslo on December 10th to 11th, 2005, preceding the 31st EIBA Annual Conference. The international faculty consisted of a number of well-known and established professors in the field of international business: John Cantwell, Peter Buckley, Jean-François Hennart, Marina Papanastassiou, Torben Pedersen and Udo Zander. The faculty members warmly welcomed us and it was great to get to know the persons behind the famous names we had read on many publications. In the following, each participant had 20 minutes to present his or her proposal to the faculty and the other participants. It was evident that all doctoral students had put much effort and time into their work. After each presentation two main commentators from the faculty provided intense feedback and then all other faculty members joined in with their comments. Usually, there was not much disagreement among the faculty. The main shortcomings of each proposal became transparent. Thereby, one hint seemed to emerge over and over again: “Focus, focus, focus!” Still, the presenters were not left alone with the comments; instead, the faculty members provided insightful explanations and helpful suggestions.

      

      
      
      All in all, the EIBA Doctoral Tutorial was a great opportunity for all doctoral students! I would like to thank Danny Van Den Bulcke and his colleagues from EIBA and EIASM for establishing this event and organizing it for years. I would also like to thank all faculty members for carefully reading and constructively commenting on our papers and presentations. You let us know, “what to do on Monday morning”☺. Thank you! Last but not least, as the winner of 2005’s Best Thesis Proposal Award at the EIBA doctoral tutorial, I would like to thank my supervisor Stefan Schmid, professor of International Management and Strategic Management at ESCP-EAP Berlin, for his support for my dissertation project. Stefan Schmid is challenging and questioning my research plan and thus keeps me going on this (sometimes tough) journey towards the Ph.D. I also would like to thank ESCP-EAP Berlin and our dean, professor Herwig Haase, for supporting my participation at the EIBA doctoral tutorial in Oslo.
      

   2. Updated Guidelines for Applicants 

      (1) General guidelines for applicants

      We are particularly keen to encourage applications from doctoral students that, although not yet being close to having completed their theses, have already developed a clear idea of the data they will use (or are in the process of collecting), and of their intended research design. That is, we welcome especially applications from doctoral candidates that are mid-way through the process of research for their thesis. However, despite this preference we do still tend to accept for the tutorial a mix of students at different stages of thesis preparation. We are also keen to encourage applicants from schools that do not as yet have established IB faculty research groups, but again with the aim of ensuring a reasonable mix of participants from different backgrounds in the tutorial.

      We recommend that applicants divide their 3 page abstracts into the following sections in roughly the proportions shown as a guideline: (1) the central research question addressed (to include a brief statement of the topic, and of the issue or problem that motivates the research) [10%]; (2) theory and literature review [20%]; (3) research design, data and methodology (to include hypotheses in the case of quantitative methods, and the methods of measurement and the generative questions that will guide grounded theory building in the case of those using qualitative methods) [30%]; (4) expected results and summary of the evidence of the study thus far (to include if applicable an outline of any preliminary findings) [20%]; (5) expected contribution and its significance to scholarship in the IB field [10%]; and (6) conclusions, and remaining concerns or problems to be overcome [10%].

      
      (2) Guidelines to be issued to applicants accepted for the tutorial

      We require that papers should be a maximum of 10 pages long (excluding bibiography), and that PowerPoint presentations for the tutorial itself consist of a maximum of 10 slides. We strongly advise students that their 10 pages and 10 slides in each case should be divided into 6 mandatory sections in the following proportions: (1) the central research question addressed (to include a brief statement of the topic, and of the issue or problem that motivates the research) [1 page or 1 slide]; (2) theory and literature review [2 pages or 2 slides]; (3) research design, data and methodology (to include hypotheses in the case of quantitative methods, and the methods of measurement and the generative questions that will guide grounded theory building in the case of those using qualitative methods) [3 pages or 3 slides]; (4) expected results and summary of the evidence of the study thus far (to include if applicable an outline of any preliminary findings) [2 pages or 2 slides]; (5) expected contribution and its significance to scholarship in the IB field [1 page or 1 slide]; and (6) conclusions, and remaining concerns or problems to be overcome (to include any areas in which help would still be useful, and any questions for the faculty panel) [1 page or 1 slide].

      John Cantwell & Udo Zander, Co-Chairmen EIBA Doctoral Tutorial
      

6. The Oslo Conference 2005: An Evaluation Report

   1. Oslo 2005 

      The 31st EIBA Annual Conference
      Oslo, Norway - December 10-13, 2005

      The conference
      The general theme of the 2005 EIBA conference was “Landscapes and Mindscapes in a Globalized world”, which pointed to the wide-ranging and ever evolving domain of International Business. The theme provoked quite a lot of interest among IB scholars and many actually submitted papers that picked on the theme, some even giving it a new twist: e.g. a paper launched the term “Seascapes” (alongside landscapes and mindscapes) in a paper about the maritime sector!

      The conference was held at BI Norwegian School of Management, and was organized in a ½-1-½ day structure, like in Copenhagen 2003. The conference was preceded both by the EIBA Doctoral Tutorial on December 10-11, and by two Nord-IB activities (the Nord-IB is a Nordic Doctoral School in International Business) on December 9-11. The latter were integrated into the EIBA conference scheduling as pre-conference activities, which represents a novelty in the context of EIBA conferences.

      The conference featured three plenary sessions, which were all held according to plan. The opening keynote session on Sunday, December 11, was on the theme of “Research Programs in International Business” and featured Witold J. Henisz, Jean- François Hennart and Anand Swaminathan as keynote speakers. Henrich R. Greve had a key role in organizing it. On Monday, December 12, the three finalists for the Gunnar Hedlund Award presented their doctoral work that earned them the nomination to this prestigious prize. Renata Kosova won the award. The closing session of the conference was held on Tuesday, December 13, when John Dunning chaired the EIBA Fellows panel, in which John Cantwell, Jan Fagerberg, John Hagedoorn, Knut Haanæs, and Franscesca Sanna-Randaccio presented their views on ”The Internationalisation of R&D - Implications for Countries and Firms”.
      
      A total of 192 papers were presented in 26 competitive paper sessions and 25 workshop paper sessions across 10 different tracks. 31 papers were accepted for the poster session. In addition, eleven panels were also accepted for the conference.

      The review process for conference papers was much facilitated by the electronic systems for reviewer-signups and paper submissions. The call for reviewers was highly successful with more than 250 colleagues around the world signing up as reviewers. The overwhelming majority of paper submissions were made electronically. A few were handled outside the system, mainly due to problems with their uploading into the system.

      Participants
      There were 345 registered participants (not including the local organizing committee and the invited key note speakers), of which 104 were students. Eight publishers had exhibitions at the conference. Europeans dominated with 80% of the participants, but the share of participants from non-European countries has increased somewhat: up from 15% in 2004 to 20% in 2005. The geographical distribution of participants is shown in Table 1. The largest contingents came from the United Kingdom with 44 participants, Finland with 42 participants, and Norway with 41 participants. Compared to the 2004 conference two elements in particular stand out: (i) there are almost twice as many participants from the USA in 2005; and (ii) there were only half as many participants from East and Central European countries.

      Table 1. Distribution of participants according to country

      Country	# participants
      Australia	15
      Austria	9
      Belgium	7
      Brazil	4
      Canada	7
      China	1
      Czech Republic	1
      Denmark	14
      Estonia	3
      Fiji	2
      Finland	42
      France	4
      Germany	15
      Greece	5
      India	1
      Ireland	4
      Israel	4
      Italy	18
      Japan	2
      Lithuania	2
      Netherlands	11
      New Zealand	4
      Nigeria	11
      Norway	41
      Poland	2
      Portugal	7
      Russian Federation	1
      Singapore	1
      Slovenia	4
      Spain	10
      Sweden	19
      Switzerland	7
      United Kingdom	44
      United States of America	23
      In all	345

      Academic epilogue
      As a result of the agreement between EIBA and Elsevier/North-Holland, the new serial Progress in International Business Research will be published, preferably annually, as a selection of papers presented at the EIBA conferences. The first volume, which is currently being edited by Gabriel R.G. Benito and Henrich R. Greve, will comprise nine articles (the three key note essays and six regular articles). The process has been highly selective and based on peer review. The volume is scheduled to be available in time for the coming EIBA conference in Fribourg, December 2006.

      Gabriel Benito
      

7. Future Conferences

   1. Catania 2007 

      Grazia Santangelo, the Conference Chair and EIBA President-Elect 2007, will organize the EIBA Annual Conference 2007 from 13-15 December in the building of the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Catania.

      The theme of the conference will be “International Business, Local Development and Science-Technology Relationships”.

      Some practical information:

      • The international airport is located 15/20 minutes from the city centre and the faculty.
      • All conference hotels are located in the city centre.
      • There are also several ‘bed & breakfast’ for doctoral students.
      • At the conference venue, all meeting rooms have online facilities.

      The social events will include:

      • a welcome cocktail to be held at the Faculty of Political Science;
      • the Friday dinner to be organised at the Grand Hotel Excelsior;
      • the gala dinner to be held at the Palazzo Biscari.

      The tentative conference tracks are the following:

      1. International Business and Science-Technology Relationships
         Chair: John Cantwell (Rutgers University – USA)
      2. International Business and Local Development
         Chair: Pervez Ghauri (University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology – UK)
      3. Theory of MNCs
         Chair: Antonello Zanfei (University of Urbino – Italy)
      4. Management, Organisation and Cultural Issues
         Chair: Ram Mudambi (Fox School of Business & Management – Temple University – USA)
      5. International Corporate Strategies
         Chair: Björn Ambos (Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration – Austria)
      6. Corporate R&D and Knowledge Transfer
         Chair: Lucia Piscitello (Polytechnic of Milan – Italy)
      7. International Finance
         Chair: David M. Reeb ((Fox School of Business & Management – Temple University – USA)
      8. Corporate Governance, Ethics and Sustainable Development
         Chair: Ans Kolk (University of Amsterdam Business School – The Netherlands)
      9. Economic Policy Issues
         Chair: Rajneesh Narula (University of Reading – UK)
         

   2. Tallinn 2008 

      Enn Listra, Dean of the School of Economics and Business Administration of the Tallinn University of Technology will organize the 34th Annual EIBA Conference. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Bank of Estonia and until the summer 2007 the President of the Estonian Economic Association.

      Organizing partners will be the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of Tartu University (Estonia) and Vaasa University (Finland). .

      The tentative conference theme is “Globalising Business – Virtuous Circle of Collaboration”.

      At the time of the conference, the university may have a new building. As it is now, the university is located quite far from the city centre. Therefore the conference is planned to be organised in one of the hotels with the most up-to-date conference facilities in town.
      

8. Publications

   1. International Business Review (IBR) - Now an ISI Journal 

      We would like to share the good news with colleagues and friends that IBR has now been approved by ISI for Social Sciences Citation Index. We take this opportunity to thank all the colleagues for their support over the years and for placing their confidence in IBR. We also thank the Editorial Board of Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS), who has always been very supportive to us for this achievement.

      IBR is now in volume 15 and getting stronger every year. This development will help us to take it to new heights in respect to quality of the papers, review process and the outlook of the journal. This comes at the right time, as starting from the next EIBA conference (December 2006), we will be offering “The Best Paper of the Year” award, to be selected by a committee appointed by the EIBA Board.

      Professor Pervez Ghauri
      Editor
      International Business Review
      p.ghauri@mbs.ac.uk
      

   2. Progress in International Business Research - New Book Series 

      PROGRESS IN INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS RESEARCH

      Editors of the Book Series:
      Ulf Andersson, Uppsala University & Torben Pedersen, Copenhagen Business School

      A new book series – Progress in International Business Research – is launched. The book series consist of papers coming out of the annual conference of the European International Business Academy, EIBA. Each conference contains a significant number of interesting manuscripts that are worthwhile publishing. Considerable energy is spent on writing and reviewing the manuscripts for the conference, but for various reasons some of the best manuscripts may never get published in a high-quality journal although they contain novel important ideas and/or data material. This new serial will be a much-needed channel for dissemination of new knowledge in international business research.

      Scope of the serial. Progress in International Business Research is intended to be a publication outlet for high quality research presented at the annual conference of the European International Business Academy. It will encompass empirical as well as conceptual research over a broad range of international business topics, and no preference will be given to particular theoretical and/or methodological perspectives. The target audience of the serial is foremost scholars in international business and related fields such as strategic management, marketing, and organization studies, but the serial also aims to reach policy-makers and the business community.

      The aim is to have an impact on development of the field of International Business by publishing interesting papers and research ideas that for different reasons might not reach the usual publication outlets including our own journal – International Business Review.

      Topic or theme. While the serial will be broad in scope each volume should preferably have a focus on particular topic or theme. Each volume could be organised around the theme of the annual conference and it could include keynote speeches, panel presentations etc. as well as some of the best papers from the conference.
      
      Guest Editor of the annual volume. The organiser of the annual EIBA-conference will typically be the editor (or co-editor) of the annual volume, since he/she will be responsible for organising the reviewing process for the conference. The initial selection of appropriate manuscripts will be based on the outcome of the reviewing process for the annual conference. The editor is responsible for the further selection and reviewing of the manuscripts for the book.

      The first issue of the book series is edited by Gabriel Benito and Henrich Greve, BI, Oslo. It is based on papers presented at last years EIBA Conference in Oslo and will be available at the coming EIBA Conference in Fribourg.
      
      

9. Calls for Papers

   1. 34th Annual Conference AIB UK 

      ACADEMY OF INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS (UK CHAPTER)
      34th Annual Conference

      King’s College London, University of London
      April 13th -14th 2007

      Corporate Governance and International Business
      http://www.kcl.ac.uk/management/aib2007/

      
      Call for Papers
      Theoretical and empirical papers are invited on the whole range of international business issues. Contributions focusing on the following issues would be particularly welcome:

      • The effects of corporate governance factors on the internationalisation process.
      • The effects of changes in (foreign) ownership on strategic decisions and corporate performance.
      • Comparative studies of corporate governance systems.
      • Foreign ownership and corporate governance reform.
      • Finance strategies and foreign direct investment.
      • The management of financial risk exposure by MNEs.
      • The governance of global commodity chains.
      • Outsourcing and offshoring strategies and implications.
      • Cross-border mergers and acquisitions.
      • Entry into emerging and transitional markets.
      • The international expansion of firms from emerging markets.
      • Network strategies
      • Human resource management within MNEs.
      • SMEs, entrepreneurship and innovation.
      • E-commerce and international business.
      • Social and environmental issues, non-governmental agencies and public policy.

      Proposals for specialist panel sessions are also welcomed. One is already planned on corporate governance in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) economies.

      • The deadline for submissions is Monday January 15th 2007.

      Doctoral Colloquium
      The purpose of the colloquium is to provide doctoral researchers with the opportunity to present and discuss their research with a panel of distinguished scholars in interactive sessions that are open to all conference delegates. Further details about the colloquium, the submission of papers, and prizes are provided on the conference website.

      • The deadline for submissions is Friday February 16th 2007.

      Submission of Papers
      All papers will be refereed. Abstracts of all the accepted competitive papers will be published in the CD-Rom of the Conference Proceedings. Selected papers will also be published in an edited volume in the Palgrave-AIB Book Series in International Business.

      Detailed guidelines for the submission of papers are available on the website.

      • All papers should be submitted electronically.

      The Conference Venue
      The conference will be held in central London, at the Franklin-Wilkins Building on the Waterloo campus of King’s College London (http://www.kcl.ac.uk). The Franklin-Wilkins Building is located on the South Bank of the River Thames, close to the National Theatre and the Royal Festival Hall, and within walking distance of Waterloo rail, underground and Eurostar stations.

      Contact Information
      Detailed information about the conference will be posted on the conference website. Please e-mail all queries to aib2007@kcl.ac.uk.

      Conference Organiser: Roger Strange
      

   2. Special Issue of the Journal of Teaching in International Business 

      CALL FOR PAPERS

      A SPECIAL ISSUE OF THE JOURNAL OF TEACHING IN INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS
      on
      Learning and Teaching International Business:
      Evolving and Emerging Issues Affecting the Content of International Business Curricula a Decade Ahead

      
      Guest Edited by
      Zsuzsanna Vincze, Turku School of Economics, Finland
      Peter Zettinig, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
      Foster Ofosu, Turku School of Economics, Finland

      Introduction
      
      The idea for this special issue originated from discussions about the core and fringe of international business research and its implications for the teaching and development of international business curricula.

      A Delphi study undertaken over a six month period, generated over 400 initial factors and issues that experts believe will be most significant in the teaching and learning of international business subjects a decade ahead. After 5 rounds of this process, the experts selected a set of most significant issues affecting international business subjects, and theories/concepts, methods and skills thought to be most important to equip graduates of international business programs for future success in the business world. The results of this Delphi study provide the framework for this call for papers in a special issue of the Journal of Teaching in International Business:

      Topics of Interest

      1. The evolution of big emerging market economies, their importance as both resource-rich countries and important markets for growth oriented internationally operating firms. Further the interactions (i.e. competition, M&As, cooperation) between MNEs originating from long-established market economies and from big emerging market economies.
         
      2. The role of knowledge of cultural differences and commonalities for international business (i.e. development of business innovations, cross-cultural teams, international human resource management). Importance of trends of ‘cultural convergence’, ‘clashes of culture’ and ‘dominant cultures’ and its implications for skill development. Importance of including skill forming projects and programmes which engage students in cross-cultural interactions and which allow them to succeed across institutional and mindset boundaries.
         
      3. The importance of innovations in business models and alternative approaches to international business strategy. Development of capabilities to think dynamically about innovations of complete business systems and stimulating the creation of capacities to produce sustainable systems and processes.
         
      4. Challenges of increasing global integration of business systems, operations and processes while increasing the level of service for localised needs. Challenges of coordination and governance in the internationally operating firm and its contributions to democracy and economic development in developing countries. Development of capabilities to form sustainable global strategies, which serve local or personal needs and to leverage knowledge in order to generate a long-lasting competitive advantage.
         
      5. The study of inter-organisational relationships (i.e. international joint ventures, mergers, strategic alliances, looser network types) including futuristic organisational frameworks that provide for the development of new organisational innovations. Discussions about useful competencies that provide for innovation in such complex relationships.
         
      6. The study of the role of the entrepreneur in the process of business expansion and internationalisation. The management and internationalisation of the resource constrained small and medium-sized firm and the international commercialisation of innovations. Approaches for forming entrepreneurial mindsets, capabilities (i.e. ‘collaborative entrepreneurship’) and initiatives for the development of programmes that focus on international entrepreneurship activities.
         
      7. Concepts and determinants for international business strategy including theories and approaches to understand the social dimension of globalisation. Mindsets and approaches for the selection of input- and output markets and the analysis of institutional environments.
         
      8. Risk assessment and crisis management. Frameworks and methods for analysis, identification and measurement of risks in international business. Skill development that support the management of international crisis (i.e. avian flu, tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, terrorism). Holistic approaches to assess the impact of international business decisions (i.e. manufacturing, transportation) on externalities (e.g. environmental issues, social changes, dependencies).

      Submissions and Review Process
      
      Papers should be submitted to peter.zettinig@vuw.ac.nz before the submission deadline (2nd of March 2007). Please indicate in the subject line ‘Submission for the Special Issue of the Journal of Teaching in International Business’. All papers will be reviewed according to a double blind process and must follow the submission guidelines viewable at: www.haworthpress.com. The maximum length of a paper might not exceed 25 pages (12 pt), double spaced, including all tables, figures, references (American Psychology Association Style, APA)

      Time Line
      Submission Deadline: 2nd of March 2007
      Notification of Authors (for inclusion in review process): 19th of March 2007
      Review Feedback: 1st of June 2007
      Deadline for Revised Papers: 24th of August 2007
      Publication of Special Issue: Autumn 2007
      

10. Events

    1. 1st Iberian International Business Conference 

       The first Iberian International Business Conference (IIBC) took place in Porto, Portugal, on the 30th September and 1st of October 2005. The venue was the Faculdade de Economia, Universidade do Porto (FEP). The conference was chaired by Ana Teresa Tavares, working closely with Francisco Castro, Aurora Teixeira (all three from CEMPRE/FEP), Juan José Durán Herrera (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and Vítor Corado Simões (ISEG-Universidade Técnica de Lisboa).
       
       The conference’s main objective was to bring together the increasing number of Portuguese and Spanish scholars researching actively in topics related to Multinationals, Foreign Direct Investment, and Internationalisation. It aimed to provide an opportunity so that people working in the field in these two countries get to know better each other, to share and get feedback on their recent work, to stimulate Ph.D. students and recent graduates to present their research, and to increase awareness of EIBA among Iberian IB scholars.
       
       Over 40 delegates attended the conference, from 11 universities in Portugal, 2 in Spain and from the Portuguese Investment Agency (the policy-making institution in charge of promoting large-scale investments). Twenty one papers were presented in sessions on themes such as: Determinants of firms’ internationalisation; Spillovers; Linkages and Networks; FDI and Trade; FDI Determinants and Deterrents; Relocation and Divestments; Management and Multinationals.
       
       What really stood out from the event, possibly due to its relatively small scale and the fact of being only focused in themes of common interest to all participants, was the high degree of feedback and productive discussions that characterised all sessions.
       
       Due to the good results achieved, it was agreed to organise the conference annually, alternating a Portuguese and a Spanish location. In 2006, Juán José Durán will host the second IIBC in the historical city of Toledo, in Spain (20-22 October). We expect that this event, a truly successful partnership with EIBA, will contribute to bring more Iberian researchers to EIBA, as well as to increase the commitment of current members.
       
       Ana Teresa Tavares
       

    2. 2nd Iberian International Business Conference 

       The second Iberian International Business Conference (October 20-22, 2006) aims to bring together the growing number of Spanish and Portuguese scholars researching actively in topics related to Multinationals, Foreign Direct Investment, and Internationalisation. The event aims therefore to provide a privileged forum to discuss recent work done by researchers in these areas. Papers do not have to be focused on the cases of Portugal and Spain, although these are welcome. As we are at the beginning of the organisation of such specific, large-scale gathering of Iberian scholars in International Business, your participation in this iniciative is very important.
       
       Topic: MULTINATIONALS, FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT AND INTERNATIONALISATION

       Organizers
       Juan José Durán, Chair (Centro Internacional Carlos V, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
       Miguel Ángel Galindo (Universidad de Castilla La Mancha)
       Timoteo Martínez Aguado (Universidad de Castilla La Mancha)
       Ana Teresa Tavares (CEMPRE, Faculdade Economia, Universidade do Porto)
       Vitor Corado Simões (CEDE, ISEG, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa)
       Fernando Úbeda Mellina (Centro Internacional Carlos V, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
       
       Venue
       Facultad de Ciencias Jurídicas y Sociales, Universidad de Castilla La Mancha (Toledo)

       Juan Jose Duran
       

11. Personalia / Careers

    1. John H. Dunning, EIBA's Lifetime Achievement Award 

       EIBA’s Lifetime Achievement Award to John H. Dunning, Ljubljana, December 2004

       When the EIBA Fellows decided to award John Dunning’s influential contributions to International Business with the first and only Lifetime Achievement Award the question was raised of organizing an academic session either in Ljubljana or the year afterwards in Oslo. However, John himself thought that there was no particular need for this and wanted to postpone this for another special occasion like his 80th birthday.
       
       John Dunning received his award during the gala dinner. The EIBA members gave him a standing ovation that lasted for almost five minutes. John Cantwell presented some short considerations about his academic work, while Rajneesh Narula provided the audience with some insightful observations about the non-academic aspects of working under and with John Dunning.

       The description of the following stages of John Dunning’s carreer are based on his own contribution in the Journal of International Business Studies, 2004, No 4 with the title:Perspectives on International BusinessResearch: A Professional Autobiography Fifty Years Researching and Teaching International Business. It describes his career until the 1970s, meaning that the other decades will be taken up in the next issue of EIBA-zine.

       Danny Van Den Bulcke

       
       THE EARLY YEARS: The 1950s
       
       John Dunning left school at the end of 1942, worked first in an insurance broker’s office, and then in a Spanish bank in the City of London. Prior to joining the Navy towards the end of World War II, he had sat, and passed, the first part of the Institute of Banker’s Examination, with the full intention of returning to banking as a career, after his naval service. However, this was not to be. In his final years in the Navy he took advantage of a government-sponsored scheme intended to help finance ex servicemen with their university studies.
       
       Professor Dunning graduated in 1951 at the University College London, and became research assistant of Professor Allen, who had been asked by the (then) Board of Trade to evaluate the U.K. government’s post-war strategy of siting newly emerging radio and TV plants, in regions of above average unemployment, rather than in locations around London and the South East where the existing industry was then concentrated. With Douglas Hague, then a young lecturer on the staff of UCL, he visited some 23 factories in Scotland, the North East of England and Wales. It was his first, but by no means his last exposure to field research. The findings were later published as an article in the Review of Economic Studies in 1954.

       In the summer of 1952, he was offered a lectureshipat the University of Southampton in Southern England, and one at Adelaide University in Australia and chose the former. Following his earlier work at UCL his research program took two main thrusts. The first was in the area of locational economics, and more especially on the role of U.K. government policy in the development of new regional clusters of economic activity. The second, which directly arose from his observations—when visiting mid-Scotland—of the concentration of American owned factoriesin that area, was on the contribution of these and other U.S. affiliates in Britain to post-war U.K. industrial development.

       He obtained a Marshall Fund grant to undertake a thorough study of the extent and pattern of U.S. direct investment in the U.K. manufacturing industry, and its effect on indigeneous productivity. This was an ambitious project for a young scholar as it was the first of its kind since Frank Southard had undertaken two similar studies on U.S. direct investment in Europe and Canada in the 1930s (Southard 1931, 1936). With h the help of two research assistants he visited over 150 U.S. subsidiaries and 75 of their suppliers, competitors and customers in the U.K. These subsidiaries, together with 56 others providing data in response to questionnaires, embraced more than 90% of the universe of U.S. manufacturing affiliates in Britain at the time. Though the study did not pretend to offer a theory of FDI, it did attempt toshed light on a different, but no less interesting, issue. Other research around this time had shown that, on average, manufacturing firms in the U.S. recorded a 21⁄2-4 times higher productivity than their U.K. counterparts (Rostas, 1948).

       The question that intrigued J.H.Dunning was how far this was due to the superior management, entrepreneurship and technological skills of U.S. firms (what he termed the (nationality of) ownership(O) specific contribution to productivity); and how far did it reflect the superior immobile resource endowments of the U.S. economy (what he called the location (L) specific contribution to productivity). He reasoned that the closer the productivity of U.S. subsidiaries in the U.K. was to that of their parent companies in the U.S., the more Anglo-U.S. productivity differences might be ascribed to the superior O specific characteristics of U.S. firms. If, however, the productivity of the U.S. affiliates was broadly in line with that of their indigenous competitors, then the Anglo-U.S. productivity differences were more likely to be due to the more congenial, but location bound, characteristics of the U.S. economy. In
       the event, he found that, on average, U.S. subsidiaries recorded a productivity of around three quarters that of their parent companies. This then, suggested that a greater part of the industrial productivity gap between the U.S. and U.K. was due to the superior 0 advantages of U.S. firms. So was born the O and L component of the eclectic paradigm, but the last leg of the tripod had to wait another 18 years. But, the main thrust of the volume was more to do with the effects of inbound foreign direct investment (FDI). Many of the costs and benefits of FDI, as identified by the U.S. and U.K. executives I interviewed, are now commonplace in
       the literature. Certainly, later in the1960s and early 1970s they were confirmed by several other country case studies.
       

       The 1960s: NEW DIRECTIONS OF TEACHING AND CONSULTANCY

       John Dunning’s initial foray into assessing the significance and impact of transatlantic FDI, both widened and deepened in the 1960s, although he also continued to pursue his my interests in industrial and locational economics. In the mid-1960s, he was asked by Brian Reddaway of the University of Cambridge to participate in a major study he was undertaking for the U.K. government on the impact of British outward FDI on the U.K. economy. At the same time, together with his a colleague David Rowan at Southampton University, he did further work on the comparative efficiency of U.S. subsidiaries in the U.K. and their U.K. competitors, for the National Economic Development Office (NEDO)—a U.K. government department.

       In 1964, he was appointed to the Foundation Chair of Economics at the University of Reading.
       
       It was the challenge of building a new department—almost from scratch—that tempted John Dunning to move to Reading. He decided to concentrate the research interests of the department in the area of applied economics. The strategy proved to be a successful one. During the following decade, the size of the student intake and faculty quadrupled and as a result of new programmes; Reading was raised in the pecking order of U.K. Economics Departments.
       
       In the Spring of 1968, he was invited by Grant Reuber, then Head of the Department of Economics at the University of Western Ontario (UWO) to spend a sabbatical year in Canada. This was at the warm recommendation of Harry Johnson, whom John Dunning regarded very much as his mentor at the time. Two other doyens of international economics—Charles Kindleberger and Raymond Vernon—and by Austin Robinson, then, President of the International Economics Association asked him me to prepare papers for conferences they were organising, the first two in the U.S. in the spring of 1969 and the third in the Algarve, Portugal, in the fall of that year. In the event, these conferences played a critical role in the formation of Dunning’s ideas. The one organized by Kindleberger at MIT in Cambridge, and subsequently published as a book (Kindleberger, 1970), was probably the first on the economics of the multinational enterprise—or international corporation as it was then called. The Vernon conference, held in New York at the National Bureau of Economic Research focused on the role of technology in international trade. By asking him to look at the extent and ways in which direct investment in the U.K. had fashioned the (post-war) technological development in the U.K., Vernon steered John Dunning’s thoughts to examining, in more depth, the knowledge-based advantages of the U.S. and U.K. economies, and the way in which these were internalized by U.S. and U.K. firms, and then transferred—by way of FDI and licensing arrangements—across the Atlantic. His contribution for the IEA Conference, which centered on the impact of transatlantic FDI on the economic development of the U.S. and Western European economies in the 19th and 20th centuries. His stay in North America and his contacts with the leading researchers during this period greatly enriched, according to John Dunning his understanding on the determinants of FDI and of how the foreign affiliates of MNEs impinge on the productivity and growth of their indigenous competitors. He put together some papers he had written in the 1960s, into a book entitled Studies in International Investment (Dunning, 1970). This was the first of seven volumes of his essays that Allen and Unwin later Unwin Hyman, and later still Routledge have published, and which trace the evolution of his thoughts and writings on international business related topics.
       

       The 1970s: NEW CHALLENGES IN INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS RESEARCH
       
       The 1970s were particularly important in steering John Dunning’s career path into two new directions. The first was the request to serve as the U.K. member on the so-called Group of Eminent Persons, which was set up by the UN Economic and Social Council (UNESOC), to study the impact of MNEs (later to be called transnational corporations [TNCs]) on economic development and international relations. The initiative for this study group was sparked off by ITTs interventionist role into the political affairs of Chile in the late 1960s.
       
       The report of the study group of which John Dunning was one the principal authors, was published in 1974 (UN, 1974) and a Commission on TNCs was set up and supported by a research and secretarial staff of the Center on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC). The task of the Center, which in 1989 became part of UNCTAD, was (and is) two-fold. First, it is to collect and interpret data, and to undertake research on various economic and social aspects of the activities of TNCs, particularly, as these affect developing countries. Second, it is to advise governments of developing countries on how they might best negotiate with TNCs and/or their affiliates, and pursue the appropriate macroeconomic and macro-organizational policies in order to get the maximum (net) benefit from their presence.

       Throughout the Center’s existence, J.H. Dunning has been closely associated with many of its activities. In particular, over the past 15 years, he was Senior Economic Adviser to the Director of the Investment and Technology Division of UNCTAD in Geneva, which, under the direction of Karl Sauvant, has been responsible for the publication of the annual World Investment Reports. These are highly valued both by governments and by the international business community for their comprehensive description and analysis of the interaction between TNCs and the economic and social interests of developing countries.
       
       Another major new thrust in his research agenda in the 1970s was to look more closely at the theory of FDI and MNE activity. Up to the early 1970s, my interests had primarily focused on the economic consequences or effects of FDI. He decided to turn to examining its motives and determinants. In the first half of 1976, during a semester’s leave at Boston University in the U.S. He was introduced me to a path breaking paper by J.C. McManus that argued that firms chose to engage in FDI rather than form a non-equity alliance with a foreign firm whenever the (net) transaction costs of engaging in the former form of cross border rent seeking activity were perceived to be lower than those of the latter (McManus, 1972). At the same time, two of his younger colleagues at Reading—Peter Buckley and Mark Casson—were researching along similar lines, as indeed were Birgitta Swedenborg and Nils Lundgren in Sweden, and Jean Francois Hennart in the U.S.. Out of their research was born the internalization theory of the MNE, which essentially was (and is) an extension of the Coasian approach to understanding the origin of the firms, but applied to their foreign value adding activities. This was the missing piece of the jigsaw Iprofessor Dunning was looking for. Later in 1976, some he presented the eclectic paradigm (then called theory) of international production (i.e. production financed by FDI) at a Nobel symposium on the International Allocation of Economic Activity, in Stockholm, which was attended by a group of senior economists and economic geographers. To the O and the L dimensions of the competitive advantages of firms and countries, he added the I., also known and quoted as the OLI-paradigm.

       Two other events in J.H Dunning’s my academic journey occurred in the 1970s. First, in September 1972, he organized a workshop at the Rockefeller Foundation center at Bellagio, on Lake Como, at which authors contributing to a volume he was editing on
       Economic Analysis and the Multinational Enterprise presented papers about the impact of the growth of MNE-related activity on the received wisdom of various branches of economic thought. The second, and perhaps the more significant, event occurred in 1979, when I was invited to present a paper at a conference on Third World MNEs (probably the first of its kind) at the East West Center in Honolulu. More specifically, he was asked to discuss the relevance of the eclectic paradigm to understanding the emergence of outward FDI from developing countries. Based on some thoughts that Peter Buckley and John Dunning had shared a couple of years earlier about the relationship between the level and significance of inward and outward FDI of countries and their stages of development, he formalised this idea and offered some casual evidence of the ways in which the international direct investment position of countries was related to a number of country specific variables, including GNP per head, economic structure, government policy, degree of openness and environmental risk. Hence the concept of the investment development path (IDP), or cycle as it was then called, was born. This concept was later subjected to more rigorous statistical testing (Dunning, 1981) and further modified and extended it in the 1980s and early 1990s Dunning and Narula, 1996). Over the years, it has proved a popular tool for IB scholars in their understanding of the role inbound and outbound MNEs activity can make to the structural transformation of both developed and developing countries.

       (to be continued)
       

    2. Jorma Ollila, European Manager of the Year 2006 

       The participants of the 31st Annual EIBA Conference in December 2005 in Oslo will certainly remember that John Dunning, as Dean of the Fellows oof EIBA, handed to Jorma Ollila, Chairman of NOKIA, the first EIBA Award of Distinguished Honorary Fellow. The speech delivered on this occasion by this famous recipient of the EIBA award sent some important messages about the importance of innovation and education in international business which were extremely relevant both for academics and practioners.
       
       That the EIBA Fellows made an excellent choice was confirmed six months after the Oslo Conference when Jorma Ollila received the title of 'European Manager of the Year' for having changed his company from a local conglomerate into a global firm. Under his guidance and inspiration NOKIA developed into a world leading corporation both in terms of technological achievements and expansion in market share. Mr. Ollila is recognized as a courageous and visionary manager who carried out impressively successful strategic decisions.
       
       Per day NOKIA produces in all of its factories (located in 8 countries: Finland, Germany, Hungary, Mexico, USA, China, South Korea and India) 725,000 mobile phones, which comes to 9 per second. In each telephone there are between 300 to 350 components. The company employs almost 60,000 people of 128 different nationalities. About one third of its employees are engaged in research activities and the worldwide market share amounts to 35 per cent. It has been estimated that about 800 million people run around with a NOKIA phone. The Finnish firm came a long way since it started out as a paper producer in 1865 and developed from a holding company producing many different products (from television sets to rubber boots) until at the beginning of the 1990s it went into the telecom sector and mobile phones under the leadership of Jorma Ollila. One of the revolutionary managent decisions that he took was that NOKIA would not keep any stocks anywhere in the world... Ollila's salary was €4.9 million, exclusive of the stock options.
       
       The European Manager of the Year Award is granted by the European Business Press (EBP), an association which groups 51 European business papers and magazines from 21 countries. The EBP Award was given for the first time in 1991. Previous winners include Ingvar Kamprad (IKEA) and Bernd Pischetsrieder (ex BMW, now VW).
       
       Shortly after having received the EIBA Award, Mr Ollila moved to the Netherlands as Chairman of the Board of Royal Dutch Shell. It is worthwhile to recall that Mr. Miko Kosonen, Vice President Corporate Development of NOKIA was on the EIBA Fellows' Panel about 'Nationality' of Global Firms. Does it Matter? in Ljubljana in December 2004.
       
       Danny Van Den Bulcke

    3. Alan Rugman, Contributions to International Business 25 Years Later 

       Another special session organized at the 30th Annual EIBA Conference in Ljubljana was about 'International Expansion, Geographic Diversification and the Multinational Enterprise: Alan Rugman's Contributions to international Business 25 years Later'. The session was chaired by Danny Van den Bulcke. The panel members were John Cantwell, John Dunning, Rob Grosse and Jean François Hennart. Alan Rugman reacted to the comments of the members of the panel and explained how this book was the starting point for his carreer. A number of papers presented at the session, together with some other contributions were publidshed in 2005 by JAI Press in a volume edited by Alain Verbeke. The following introduction to this book was written by Danny Van Den Bulcke and Alain Verbeke.
       
       The research volume ‘Internationalization, International Diversification and the Multinationhal Enterprise’ edited by Alain Verbeke and published by Elsevier, 2006, honours Alan M. Rugman, who is the L. Leslie Waters Chair in International Business (IB), Professor of Management and Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. The work contains a set of essays developed to celebrate the Academy of Management’s (AoM) recognition of Professor Rugman as the ‘Booz Allen Hamilton Strategy and Business Eminent Scholar in International Management’ at the AoM 2004 Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana. Booz Allen Hamilton established this award to recognize eminent scholars whose research and writing have contributed significantly to international management scholarship and whose work has had an effect on the practice of international management.

       This great honour was not the only one Professor Rugman received in 2004. The European International Business Academy (EIBA) organized a special panel honouringProfessor Rugman’s 25-year old landmark study on international diversificationand the multinational enterprise (MNE) at its 2004 Annual Meeting in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

       Alan M. Rugman will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the founders and intellectual fathers of the modern field of international business studies. He has devoted most of his life to convincing other scholars and the public at large that the MNE is the most important organizational business form worthy of academic study in our globalizing society. MNEs are an efficient response to the economic opportunities provided by the growing interdependence among nations. They are also the key conduit for the transfer of ideas, values, innovative technology and best practices across national borders. Subject to a number of boundary conditions, mainly a well-functioning institutional structure at the macro-level and the presence of workable competition, MNEs permit developing and developed countries to move to a higher stage of economic, social and ecological development.

       Through literally hundreds of conceptual and empirical studies, Professor Rugman has developed an impressive scientific oeuvre on the MNE. Unlike other influential scholars, Professor Rugman did not limit himself to publishing in ‘A’ journals only. His impatience to disseminate his insights, his ambition truly to span the fields of economics, public policy studies, management and law, and his uncommon eagerness to engage in intellectual debates led to numerous appearances in non-mainstream venues and publication outlets with limited citation count impacts. But Professor Alan M. Rugman is what any great scholar should aspire to be: a person consumed by the goal of describing and explaining phenomena critical to the future of human society, and ready, at any time and place, to articulate and to defend what he believes is true. Simply stated, Professor Rugman studies what the world’s largest business organizations really do, and why this matters to society at large.

       In several university institutions, inter alia Dalhousie University in Halifax, the University of Toronto and Oxford University, his approach to research and teaching legitimized IB studies as a credible, mainstream area of academic inquiry. His spirited interventions at many academic meetings, especially the Academy of International Business, the AoM and EIBA, always focused on the ethical responsibility of IB scholars to describe accurately what MNEs do in the real world, and to assess their impacts from a comparative institutional perspective.

       We can distinguish among four stages in Professor Rugman’s intellectual and professional career. The first stage includes his 1979 book on International Diversification and The Multinational Enterprise, and that published a year later, Multinationals in Canada: Theory, Performance and Economic Impact. The contribution of this early work is that the performance impact of diversification is measured in terms of return and risk, with the outcome that more internationally diversified firms do not earn higher returns but do achieve a risk reduction. This outcome is intuitively appealing provided two conditions are satisfied. First, the home country does not provide the same opportunities to buy inputs or sell outputs as those available in international markets.

       Second, most international activities occur in an environment characterized by external market imperfections that hinder trade and simple contracting across borders. Professor Rugman’s early work culminated in what is to date his best-known book, the influential Inside the Multinationals, published in 1981 by Columbia University Press.

       In this work, Professor Rugman sets forth the foundations of modern internalization theory, i.e., the transaction cost economics perspective (TCE) on the MNE. Interestingly, rather than focusing on transaction cost minimization, Professor Rugman articulated his understanding of the need for MNEs to maximize the net present value (NPV) of their foreign projects through the choice of a particular entry mode. In addition, he focused on the public goods nature of knowledge, rather than the danger of opportunistic behaviour as the key driver of internalization. By focusing on the NPV and on the public goods nature of knowledge, Professor Rugman avoided two of the key problems identified by critics of transaction cost economics more than a decade later. Indeed, those critics wrongly state that TCE scholars focus solely on transaction cost minimizing rather than value maximizing, and that they inappropriately adopt opportunism as a behavioural assumption. In fact, Professor Rugman always did focus on value maximization, and has been much more interested in the managerial challenge of knowledge appropriability than in assuming particular behavioural characteristics of the individuals involved in IB transactions.

       The 1980s represent the second stage of Professor Rugman’s distinguished publishing career. Here, the focus was on Canadian MNEs as the empirical basis for MNE theory development. The contribution of this work has three components. First, it identified the importance of downstream rather than upstream firm-specific advantages (FSAs) of Canadian resource based MNEs. Second, it also focused on the important role of subsidiaries, even if they are branch plants, in MNE networks. Third, it demonstrated the need for MNE market access (double diamond thinking) as the driver of the Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement (C-US FTA) and the subsequent North-American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Through this work, Professor Rugman realized even more than before the need to link economics, public policy, law and management in a pro-active fashion.

       The third stage in Professor Rugman’s career as an IB scholar covers most of the 1990s, and is characterized by extensive new theory development. He conducted various studies on the effects of trade and investment liberalization on MNEs. Importantly, he observed that trade and FDI are often complements rather than substitutes after regional trade and investment liberalization. Another area of research developed by Alan M. Rugman in this stage is that of environmental regulation and corporate strategy, culminating in an influential article in the Strategic Management Journal in 1998. Perhaps Professor Rugman’s most important contribution is the resource-based analysis of the conventional national responsiveness-integration dichotomy, and the related ‘transnational solution’ concept. Here, the key distinction is that between non-location bound (or internationally transferable) FSAs and location-bound FSAs. The former FSAs lead to benefits of integration (scale, scope and exploitation of national differences), whereas the latter FSAs, which cannot be deployed across national borders, lead to benefits of national responsiveness.

       The fourth stage in the development of Professor Rugman’s scientific oeuvre starts in the year 2000 and continues today. Here, a dual research agenda is apparent. First, Professor Rugman is adopting a descriptive focus on regionalization rather than globalization. Second, his analytical focus is on extending TCE/internalization theory to permit improved dialogue with the strategy field. This important work includes the development of radically new ideas, including the concept of subsidiary-specific advantage in MNEs, the revisiting of Edith Penrose’s true significance for the development of the resource-based view, and the study of internal mechanisms to economize on bounded rationality in network MNEs. It is safe to say, given the importance of both the descriptive and analytical perspectives in Professor Rugman’s new work, that the best is yet to come!

       Danny Van Den Bulcke and Alain Verbeke
       

    4. Danny Van Den Bulcke, Emeritus Professor University of Antwerp 

       Danny Van Den Bulcke, Emeritus Professor University of Antwerp: an Academic Internationalization Model

       In Ljubljana in December 2004 a special session was organized about ‘Transnationals and Economic Development: From Internationalization to Globalization’ Essays in honour of the Inauguration of Daniel Van Den Den Bulcke as Emeritus Professor.
       
       The session was chaired by Filip De Beule and presentations were made by Vitor Simoes, Alain Verbeke, Juan Duran and John Hagedoorn. A few days before the 30th Annual EIBA Conference in Slovenia an International Conference was organized in Antwerp, the Institute of Development Policy and Development, during which papers were given by John Dunning, Juan Duran and Belgian colleagues and collaborators of Danny Van Den Bulcke.
       Those and other papers (also Peter Buckley and John Cantwell contributed) were published in a volume edited by Ludo Cuyvers and Filip De Beule under the above mentioned title (Palgrave, 2005). The following introduction comes from this volume and highlights some aspects of the carreer of Danny Van Den Bulcke.

       
       The subtitle of this volume “From internationalization to globalization” is very appropriate as it somehow reflects the stages in the longstanding academic career in the international business field of Daniel (Danny) Van Den Bulcke. Along the lines of the Scandinavian internationalization model his activities started from a local or national interest in international economics and international business and gradually moved into activities abroad, first in some neighbouring countries and later in faraway continents. And as Danny Van Den Bulcke has always been very versatile this internationalization process is evident, not only in his research record, but also in his teaching career and his active participation in academic networking with colleagues and doctoral students from all over the world. Although other aspects of his career might be highlighted this introduction will be limited to the three aforementioned dimensions.

       RESEARCH
       After a fellowship of six months in Canada as Laureate of the Prize of the Belgian Minister of Foreign Trade and MA studies at the University of Toronto, Danny Van Den Bulcke was asked by Professor Vlerick at the Ghent University to carry out a major research project about ‘Foreign Enterprises in the Belgian Manufacturing Industry’. The project was sponsored by the Belgian Agency of Productivity, an offspring of the Marshall Plan. The study was published in 1971, regretfully only in Dutch and French, and was one of the first thorough researches about the impact of foreign enterprises on a national economy (Van Den Bulcke, 1971). Later on he used the extensive database set up for this project to analyse the newly ’discovered’ phenomenon of the Multinational Enterprise (MNE) for his doctoral thesis (Van Den Bulcke, 1974).
       
       When he moved to the University of Limburg in 1972 he continued his research activities at Ghent University and carried out a new major empirical research project that was not only limited to inward FDI in the Belgian manufacturing sector, but also included services and outward FDI (Van Den Bulcke, 1978; Haex, Halsberghe and Van Den Bulcke,1979; Haex and Van Den Bulcke,1979; Halsberghe and Van Den Bulcke,1981).
       
       Danny Van Den Bulcke was one of the very first researchers to tackle new emerging issues in international business - often at the request of international organizations and national ionstitutions - such as disinvestiment (European Centre for the Study and Information on Multinationals), employment aspects (International Labour Organisation), restructuring (Belgian Ministry of Economics) decision making (Institute of the Enterprise), regional headquarters (Ministry of Brussels Affairs), coordination centres (Federation of the Coordination Centers), American direct investment in Belgium (American Chamber of Commerce), etc….
       
       When he moved full time to the University of Antwerp in 1985 Danny Van Den Bulcke’s research interests spread also in their geographic scope. In a report about the Globalisation of the Belgian Economy (1997-1999) the so-called Asian connection received most attention because by that time he had found another challenge i.e. the study of the Chinese economy. Together with his collaborators he wrote extensively about European Direct Investment in China, Chinese outward FDI, state owned enterprises and corporate restructuring, clusters. During this whole period he maintained his interest in FDI in Belgium, especially American investments, and the activities of MNEs in Europe

       TEACHING
       When Danny Van Den Bulcke got started in his academic career, the subject matter of international business did not yet exist in Belgium and most other European countries. The first courses he was asked to teach at Ghent University dealt with European Economic Integration and International Aspects of Economic Development. It was only after he left Ghent University and was appointed at the University of Limburg that he was able to launch a special course about issues of FDI and MNE. During the second half of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s he was one of the few professors in the Benelux who had been following up on IB matters. Consequently he was asked to kick-start such courses in other universities. At one particular time he taught at seven different institutions and universities in Belgium and the Netherlands in three different languages. Although he had taken on some of those courses on the condition that someone would replace him after two or three years he actually taught for more than 10 years at the College of Europe in Bruges and ICHEC in Brussels. During his long career he taught at no less than ten Belgian institutes and universities, including the Universities of Leuven, Ghent, Brussels and of course Antwerp, which at that time consisted of three separate universities. As the University of Antwerp itself he was asked to teach at the Institute of Development Policy and Management (IDPM), the Faculty of Applied Economics, the Institute of Transport and Maritime Management (ITMMA) and the Management School (UAMS).

       Like his research, his teaching followed the gradual learning route of the Scandinavian internationalization model and spread from Belgium to, first the Netherlands, where during the 1980s he lectured at five Dutch universities, o.a. Tilburg University, Maastricht University. He was also active in Poland. His first intercontinental teaching assignment took place in Indonesia in 1986 (University of Padjadjaran) and would extend later to the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and India. Together with his colleague Prof. Ludo Cuyvers he was responsible for institutional support of 5 universities in South East Asia for the development of the business curriculum and research as part of the development programmes of the Flemish Interuniversity Council.

       At the beginning of the 1990s Danny Van Den Bulcke also taught for several years an International Management course at the China Europe Management Institute in Beijing, the predecessor of the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai, and at the Institute of European Studies in Macau. He was also responsible for institutional development of the Xian Institute of Finance and Economics and also lectured there. His contribution to the educational development of Chinese universities won him the Sanqin Prize of Shaanxi Province in China and the Friendship Prize awarded by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Experts in 2000.

       OTHER ACTIVITIES
       Already as a student Danny Van Den Bulcke was involved in AIESEC, an international student organization that provided traineeships for students in companies abroad. He was president of the local Committee of AIESEC (Association Internationale des Etudiants en Sciences Economiques et Commerciales) and member of the Board of the Belgian National Committee. It was in this capacity that he participated in his first international conference in Marseilles where he was a member of the committee that decided the applications of the universities to become part of AIESEC.
       
       In 1974 together with a number of colleagues from other Belgian universities he founded the ‘International Tradeinvest Institute’ (ITI). He was president of ITI from 1981 to 1984. The objective of ITI was to establish more cooperation between academics active in international trade and practitioners both from business and the government by organizing seminars and colloquia. It was on his insistence that issues about FDI and the transfer of technology were incorporated in the mission of ITI.
       
       From the end of the 1970s most of Danny Van Den Bulcke’s energy went out to two international academic organizations, i.e. the European International Business Academy (EIBA) and the Academy of International Business (AIB). He was national representative for Belgium for EIBA from 1979 to 2004 and President from 1985 to 1987. In AIB he was chapter chair of the Western European Region from 1987 to 2000 and vice president during 2000-2002. During his term as AIB vice president he succeeded in bringing India under the AIB umbrella and was instrumental in creating the conditions for bringing China into the organisation. Both academic associations recognized Danny Van Den Bulcke’s contributions by electing him as a Fellow (AIB in 1992, EIBA in 2003).
       A major imprint of Danny Van Den Bulcke’s mark are the doctoral tutorials he organized for EIBA and EIASM from 1987 until 2004. Together with five other Faculty members he gave advice and suggestions to about 200 PhD students from all over the world. At the Belgian level he was scientific director of the ‘Intercollegiate Centre of Management Science (ICM) from 1988 to 1993 that awarded doctoral scholarships to promising Belgian students in management. He was a member of doctoral committees in Belgium, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Australia and member of the Faculty of the Danish Summer Research Institute which was also organized on behalf of PhD students at the beginning of the 1990s.

       The chapters in this volume were presented in two different locations, i.e. in Antwerp, Belgium and Ljubljana, Slovenia. The Institute of Development Policy and Management organized a colloquium on the occasion of Professor Van Den Bulcke’s retirement on December 3, 2004, while on December 6, during a special session of the 30th Annual Conference of the European International Business Academy, a second set of essays were presented in honour of Danny Van Den Bulcke as Professor Emeritus.

       Ludo Cuyvers and Filip De Beule, University of Antwerp
       

    5. Laurence Welch, Thirty Years of Internationalisation Research 

       Over the years EIBA Conferences have greatly benefited from the contributions of a number of regular participants from Australia and New Zealand. Very early on Lawrence and Denice Welch came to the EIBA meetings. It was therefore quite appropriate that a special session was organized at the EIBA-Conference in Oslo to honour Lawrence’s contributions to international business studies. Lawrence has been the linchpin between Scandinavia and Australia during several decades and was at the basis of Faculty exchanges between Europe and Australia. Together with Denice he has been teaching in Helsinki, Oslo, Copenhagen and a few other places in Europe. According to some sources Lawrence trips were largely location determined, meaning that there had to be snow. If that is indeed the case, and I am sure that many of his colleagues would agree with this, it is also largely recognized that there have been important benefits to IB from these snow-inspired trips to Northern Europe by the Welch family (Lawrence, Denice and now also Catherine).
       
       The session was chaired by Peter Buckley and had as other panel members: Gabriel Benito, Pervez Ghauri, Peter Liesch, Reijo Luostarinen, Bent Petersen and Rebecca Piekkari. The following presentation, a personal view of Lawrence Welch’s ‘leaps in the dark’ was made by Peter Liesch. While I find that this title is most appropriate, it leaves out the fact that Lawrence sometimes left some of his colleague quite literally in the dark. Having been invited to accompany Lawrence on a skiing outing in the mountains around Melbourne many years ago, I was shocked to find out that I had to stay behind to play with a toboggan while he went on a langlauf trip for more than two hours and only returned when it was getting dark. While my first ski trip ever ended in shivering disappointment and became a non-event, Lawrence claimed that he had set a new record. Judging on the time I had been waiting in the snow for his return, I doubted this however.

       Danny Van Den Bulcke

       
       Lawrence Welch : Uncertainty and Internationalization
       Peter Liesch, Oslo, December 2005

       It is truly an honour to be invited to contribute to this Panel, amongst this company, to offer a few words in recognition of Lawrence’s contribution to firm internationalisation research. I have elected to say a few things about Lawrence, and about Lawrence, uncertainty and internationalisation.
       
       

       

       I wonder whether Lawrence recalls, and whether his colleagues here today are aware, that Lawrence's PhD thesis, awarded by the University of Queensland (UQ)on 1 June, 1978, carries the cover title of "The Internationalism Process of the Firm" !!!!!! Was Lawrence even then coining a new expression …. “the internationalism of the firm”…. no , it was actually a printing error as the title within the thesis is “the internationalisation process of the firm”, but one can never be sure ….. as we will see shortly. Lawrence is prone to “leaps in the dark”!!!!!

       Thirty years ago in November 1975, in Working Paper 10 published by the Department of Economics at The University of Queensland, titled "Before the first export order: A behavioural model” by Finn Wiedersheim-Paul, University of Uppsala, L. S. Welch, DDIAE and H. C. Olson (University of Uppsala) (forerunner to the JIBS 1978 paper "Pre-export Activity: The first step in Internationalization"), it is written:
       "The model which has been presented (in the 1975 Working Paper) constitutes a basis for a continuing program of empirical research into issues surrounding the export start".
       Of the three specific areas of interest for their future efforts, the first of these is listed as:
       "The Nature of the information environment of the firm as it bears upon the export decision".

       As at today, L. S. Welch remains at work, at his bench in his workshop of ideas, beavering away on this very research question – what a master of his own destiny – define a research question that is assured to remain unresolved and create a workspace for oneself for one's lifetime.

       In this 1975 working paper, Lawrence devotes much time to the human factor in the internationalisation process. At one point he defines, in relation to information interpretation in the internationalisation process, individuals as being classified as either systematic or intuitively oriented. Of the systematic person, L. S. writes:
       "They tend to stay in their local, well-known environment, they define the problem, setting its constraints in the light of the method chosen: the method itself becomes the key to assessing and solving the problem……As a result, such individuals find it more difficult to operate and make decisions where there is considerable uncertainty in the environment, e.g. due to the lack of information".
       
       Such is not our L. S. Welch.
       “On the other hand, intuitive individuals are not tied to a precise method – they are far more "loose" in their attempts to solve a problem. They are prepared to shift around in the methods applied, but maintaining a strong focus on the overall problem. They are far better able to operate in a situation of uncertainty ….The seeming "leap in the dark" is not an unreasonable one"!!”
       
       Very much so, this is our L. S. Welch.
       Now …. of "leaps in the dark", our L. S. Welch is a natural master !!
       We all are very aware Lawrence is a fitness fanatic. He runs and skis wherever he may be – subject to the availability of snow. But even then, too, for most of the past 30 years LS has chosen to live in snow countries or at least near to snow. I have been told of some of his "leaps in the dark" and I have experienced some others with him. These are very real "leaps", not mere academic imaginings!!
       
       In the early 1970s, back in my very early associations with Lawrence, while living in Toowoomba, Australia, where Lawrence both taught me as an afro-headed, skinny, somewhat rebellious undergraduate student in a very small class at an otherwise unknown tertiary campus, Lawrence was even then an avid jogger – but even then, a rather ‘…. sight-challenged’ one. Thirty- four odd years ago, Lawrence had difficulties negotiating undulating surfaces on urban footpaths. Running alongside him, I often found myself instantly unaccompanied after he had sprawled spread-eagled on the red soil of Toowoomba's footpaths after leaps of foot insecurity had brought him to the ground. This habit has remained with him, just has his unresolved research problem of the nature of the information environment of the firm as it bears upon the export decision.
       
       Some years later, while visiting with Lawrence and Denice and Runnar Framnes in Oslo, I was enticed unwillingly to accompany Lawrence on a major fun run hosted by Runnar. While this story is a long one, better kept for an evening at the hotel bar, it has been reported and ensconced into Norwegian and Australian folk-law how one mad Australian skier living in Oslo at the time and supposedly well-acquainted with Oslo's street directory, lost his way amidst a very large group of runners only to "head for the hills" and to forfeit what would have been a sure place in the race, and probably a win – not only did he not enter the Oslo stadium at the correct entrance, where thousands of other runners did, but he did so at an entrance on the opposite side of the stadium, and about a hour after he should have.
       
       While this was all done in the full-sun of one of Oslo's better days, Lawrence may as well have been "leaping in the dark". And I have heard of him skiing over ridges in Norway, oblivious to the dangers ahead, only to find himself captured in a freezing lake scantily clad in a high-tech ski outfit near to death, frozen.
       
       Lawrence is a master of "leaps in the dark" – on his own admission, way back in 1975, the stage was set for his excursions into an uncertain future – his own lifetime of uncertainty and internationalisation. Uncertainty and internationalisation are to Lawrence as are mashed potatoes and herrings to the Norwegians.
       
       In L. S. Welch's PhD thesis, on page 2, he draws upon the first paper by Johanson and Vahlne in JIBS to take as his point of departure their thesis of "the sequential cumulative nature of the internationalisation process". His citation in his thesis to this now famous 1977 JIBS paper reads as:
       "A Model for the Decision Making Process affecting the Pattern and Pace of the Internationalisation Process of the Firm" – a very early version of this famous article.
       In the abstract of this thesis, L. S. Welch writes:
       “A basic contention of the model is that for any new expansion decision to be made, the relevant decision-maker must perceive the stimuli as being sufficiently strong to warrant action, provided the risk and uncertainty of so doing has been, or is capable of being, reduced to acceptable levels". (p.i)
       (As an aside, I note that Lawrence achieved a response rate of 8.7% with the survey that provided the empiricism for his PhD). Maybe this early experience with surveys conditioned his reluctance to pursue survey-based research for the remainder of his career ---ummmm, an outcome inconsistent with his uncertainty preferences !!!!).
       
       Lawrence has now, and remained so since the thesis was written, one who has teetered on the edge of undertaking research in that ever-so-difficult patch as is uncertainty. In his thesis, he writes on p.29:
       "It is a major contention on the internationalisation model to be outlined that the level of risk and uncertainty will have a major bearing on the decision-making process… it seems logical to assume that the "more information one has, the less one's subjective evaluation of uncertainty". This is somewhat of an over-simplification though, especially when risk and uncertainty are approached from a cognitive or perceptual point of view. The perceptual approach to uncertainty emphasises that the environment, or any 'bit' of information pertaining to it, only has meaning in terms of the way in which it is perceived by the individual. For this reason, "variations in uncertainty are related to the characteristics of the individual". ….For one individual the availability of more information may affect no change in uncertainty whereas another person perceives a better understanding of the environment and therefore less uncertainty. This approach is an important departure from the economic view of uncertainty for it implies that more information will not necessarily remove uncertainty. The perceptual analysis of uncertainty argues against a simple presumption that more information automatically means a reduction in uncertainty."
       
       In a rather curt scan of Lawrence's publications, I unearthed few references to uncertainty, and those papers in which uncertainty is mentioned, it's done so rather fleetingly. This was to be a “leap in the dark” not yet taken by Lawrence.

       This is in no way a criticism of Lawrence's work – far from this being so – rather, it attests to just how elusive this concept is in our work – albeit being the fundamental that underpins the very nature of internationalisation decisions.
       
       I found mention of uncertainty in the 2002 MIR piece of Petersen, Welch and Liesch… in the 1988 JIM piece by D. Welch, Welch, Young & Wilkinson.. in the 1997 MIR piece by Benito and Welch … and in the 1996 MIR piece by Korhonen, Luostarinen & Welch.

       This is to say, Lawrence, it has come time for you to return to the 70s and your thesis imaginings and to bring forth that long-awaited piece on uncertainty and internationalisation.
       
       In his concluding remarks of the thesis, in a section titled "The internationalisation model as an exercise in theory", Lawrence writes:
       “An even more basic departure from the traditional model of the firm in the theoretical construction of the internationalisation model is represented by the introduction of the role of perception. In the theory of the firm the problem of how any stimulus, or bit of information pertaining to it, is perceived is removed from consideration because the firm responds to the information in the objective form it is received. …. In the internationalisation model the information pertaining to any stimulus only has influence to the extent, and in the form, that it is perceived. The perceptual process is crucial, and any given bit of information may produce a range of perceptions amongst different decision-makers. As a consequence, behavioural response cannot be simply deduced from the existence of a given environment stimulus to the firm.
       The importance of the perceptual process has been noted by economists, although readily dismissed within the mainstream of microeconomic theory. Hahn has commented that "the distinction between the perceived environment and the environment and the consequential importance of the theories which are held by agents seems to me bound to become increasingly important in economic analysis".
       The internationalisation model presented here takes a step in the direction of introducing the role of perception in an essential way into theorising about the firm”.
       
       It is interesting to read in a literature just after Lawrence wrote his thesis in the mid-1970s, published in AMJ, by John Slocum et al, and incited by the emerging interest in contingency theory, discussion on uncertainty. In particular, this management literature asked the research question: Is uncertainty objective or perceived? This work concludes that: "The perception of uncertainty is not to be a direct result of an individual's environment. However, the environment does provide basic inputs into the individual's mapping processes. In addition, the environment is a moderation of sources of perceived uncertainty variability".

       Lawrence was writing about this very same thesis in the internationalisation field, even earlier.

       To a fine colleague and friend, a unknowing mentor of mine, Lawrence, one practised at "leaps in the dark" and one highly internationalised, this is you: uncertainty and internationalisation. If you were to begin your "leap in the dark" into academe today, you might well be messing about in the internationalised world of non-ergodic dynamics within complex industrial networks, where the future is not merely a statistical reflection of the past…… a world where not all is known, and even more instructive, a world in which not all is even knowable ….. a world in which deterministic uncertainty has a place but one in which deterministic uncertainty is not the only uncertainty, and a world where economic and managerial decisions are subject to managerial judgment. This the world of true uncertainty … Knightian true uncertainty ……..You began with that most difficult of all international business variables to understand and manage, Lawrence – uncertainty – and I look forward muchly to messing about in this patch with you, as we have often discussed ….. and joining with you in some “leaps in the dark” once again.
       
       Peter W. Liesch
       

        

12. Special Distinctions

    1. Golden Pen Award for Sylvie Hertrich and Ulrike Mayrhofer 

       Sylvie HERTRICH (IECS Strasbourg, Robert Schuman University) and Ulrike MAYRHOFER (Faculty of International Affairs, University of Le Havre and ESC Rouen), have received; for the fourth consecutive year, the Golden Pen of the French Chamber of Commerce and Industry. This prestigious award is given to authors whose case studies are used by an important number of European Business Schools and Universities. The case studies have been published at the Centrale de Cas et de Médias Pédagogiques, CCMP, see http://www.ccip.fr/ccmp).
       
       The two authors have received two distinctions: (1) the Top Case-Study Award in Marketing for "Audi: le lancement de l'A3 Sportback" (also available in English : "Audi: The Launch of the A3 Sportback"), and (2) the Top Authors Award for the following case studies : "Adidas: le marché des chaussures de sport" (also available in English : "Adidas: The Athletic Shoes Market"), "Hilton : le marché de l'hôtellerie" and "Windsor Palace : le développement d'un nouveau concept marketing dans un pays émergent".
       
       The distinguished case studies have been written in close collaboration with the marketing department of the concerned companies. Their
       relevance can be explained by the synergy of the professional experience acquired by Sylvie Hertrich as a director of a marketing agency and of the research conducted by Ulrike Mayrhofer, author of several articles and books (e.g. "Marketing", Editions Bréal and "Marketing International", Editions Economica).