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How has international business (IB) research evolved to account for the politicization of the context in which multinational corporations (MNCs) operate? To address this question, we review research at the nexus of location, politics, and the MNC from 2000 through 2021. Rooted in classic IB theories, our review reveals three directions in current IB research: (i) expansion of MNC agency in shaping the political environment, (ii) a wider diversity of actors involved in the business–government–society interface, and (iii) extension of the levels of analysis from country level to sub- and supra-national levels. This three-fold evolution has moved IB research closer to the field of political geography, but the shift has remained largely implicit and its theoretical linkages are few. Drawing on key theoretical insights from political geography, we discuss the opportunities and challenges of bringing political geography into IB research.

One of the raging debates in organization study concerns the use of “templates” in qualitative research. This curated debate brings together many of the players in that debate, who make statements of position relative to the issues involved and trade accusations and counter-accusations about statements they have made that in their view have been misinterpreted or misconstrued. Overall, it is quite a lively debate that reveals positions, points of tension and grounds for disagreement. Denny Gioia wrote the triggering essay that prompted other players to weigh in with their personal and professional views.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explain the reversal of language hierarchy in a Finnish multinational corporation (MNC) from a political perspective. This paper situated the language hierarchy in the historical context of the colonial-style relationship between Finland and Russia. From a post-colonial perspective, the colonial legacy of Russia has had an influence on language strategy and everyday translation work in the Finnish multinational until the present day. Design/methodology/approach This paper undertook a case study based on qualitative secondary analysis of existing data sets. These data sets originated from two previously conducted studies of the same Finnish MNC. Findings The findings revealed a reversal of the traditional corporate language hierarchy. Russian, as the host country language of powerful local subsidiaries, rose to the top of the hierarchy at the expense of English, the common corporate language, and other languages. The colonial-style relationship was enacted by professional and paraprofessional translators who collaborated by using “the master’s language and imitating the master’s voice” to reap the strategic benefits of local responsiveness. Originality/value In contrast to previous work drawing on post-colonial theory in the study of MNCs, this paper represents the headquarters in Finland as the “colonised” party and the Russian subsidiaries as the “coloniser.” Owing to its colonial legacy, Russian, the host country language, became very powerful and influenced the language strategy of the entire MNC. This paper conceptualized translation as a multilevel phenomenon and offers a holistic explanation of why the language hierarchy in the Finnish MNC was reversed.

The Covid‐19 crisis makes the study of languages in management even more relevant and timely than before the crisis. This “black and brown epidemic,” as Joseph Betancourt from Massachusetts General Hospital called it, brings to the fore social divisions and hardship, accelerating and magnifying processes and practices of linguistic inequality with fatal consequences (Goldberg, 2020).

Researchers are exposed to multiple interpretive challenges in the journey from field data to theoretical understanding. A common response to these challenges is to turn to the guidance of templates such as the Gioia methodology—currently a preferred template for interpretive management research. Given its popularity, we examine how this methodology approaches the interpretive process of fieldwork. We find that the inductive route to theory that it offers does not address the challenges of interpretation. As an alternative, we propose a return to the epistemological tradition of hermeneutics. We argue that fieldwork informed by a hermeneutic orientation is able to generate credible and novel theory by confronting the challenges of interpretation head on. This process cannot be represented by the orderly steps of a template. We argue that a return to a hermeneutic orientation opens the way to more plausible and insightful theories based on interpretive rather than procedural rigor, and we offer a set of heuristics to guide both researchers and reviewers along this path.

doi: 10.1177/26317877221098766 Organization scholars have increasingly looked to the multinational corporation (MNC) as a convenient research site for testing and developing general hypotheses applicable to any organization. In this essay, we argue that theorizing about organizational processes in the MNC needs to treat the MNC itself as a research object: that is, to recognize that the complex multidimensionality of the MNC will influence the phenomena under investigation and needs to be incorporated into research design and conceptual framing. To do so requires what we term contextualized explanations: styles of theorizing that view context as constitutive of organizational phenomena. We reanalyse an existing study of identity work in the Carlsberg Group to demonstrate the theoretical insights to be gained from a contextualized approach. Our case analysis illustrates how integrating the MNC into the explanation changes our theoretical understanding of the phenomena being investigated.

This paper develops the idea of neocolonialism as organizational identity work in multinational corporations (MNCs). We argue that neocolonialism – the ethos and practice of colonialism and western superiority in contemporary society – is a means through which identity is worked on at MNC headquarters (HQ). In contrast to extant neocolonial studies of western MNCs, which focus on the subsidiaries (the colonized) and how their identities are shaped by the HQ (the colonizer), we analyse how the HQ is shaped by the subsidiaries. We elucidate two versions of neocolonialism at play: a traditional neocolonial ethos, which prevails at HQ, and a more contemporary version, which is silenced. Our findings show that nurturing a shared and enduring organizational identity across all units of an MNC is a quixotic task. Nevertheless, HQ managers in western MNCs keep attempting to do this, suggesting that neocolonial ethos and practice continue to be relevant in these organizations.

Organizational scholars refer to translation as a metaphor in order to describe the transformation and movement of organizational practices across institutional contexts. However, they have paid relatively little attention to the challenges of moving organizational practices across language boundaries. In this conceptual paper, we theorize that when organizational practices move across contexts that differ not only in terms of institutions and cultures but also in terms of languages, translation becomes more than a metaphor; it turns into reverbalization of meaning in another language. We argue that the meeting of languages opens up a whole new arena for translator agency to unfold. Interlingual and metaphorical translation are two distinct but interrelated forms of translation that are mutually constitutive. We identify possible constellations between interlingual and metaphorical translation and illustrate agentic translation with published case examples. We also propose that interlingual translation is a key resource in the discursive constitution of multilingual organizations. This paper contributes to the stream of research in organization studies that has made translation a core aspect of its inquiry.

doi: 10.1177/0170840620934065 In this paper we report on how middle managers in a Russian subsidiary translate empowerment, a ‘western’ management concept imposed by the Finnish headquarters. The analysis shows that in their discursive struggles these middle managers mobilised proverbs to address competing discourses that reflected imported and local ideals of good management. We advance organisational translation research by highlighting the value of proverbs as an understudied discursive resource in translation activities on the ground. The paper also examines the dual role of middle managers as both translators and implementers of an imported and imposed concept in a multinational corporation. Translation work carried out by middle managers in multinationals has received limited attention in previous research. Finally, by bringing together the discursive and the interlingual, we join recent efforts to broaden the definition of translation to encompass translation work undertaken in multilingual organisations.

The field of International Business (IB) has traditionally focused on the crossing of national boundaries. In this Perspective, we argue that organizational, knowledge domain, and language boundaries are equally important for understanding translation activities in cross-border business. We integrate three kinds of translation (organizational translation and knowledge translation from Organization Studies and interlingual translation from Translation Studies) to deepen our understanding of core IB phenomena and pose new research questions. We introduce the framework of a translation ecosystem for integrating the micro perspective of translating agents, the meso perspective of organizational units, and the macro perspective of the larger social and linguistic contexts that influence translation. This framework allows IB scholars to identify important but invisible boundaries in cross-border business. The translation ecosystem requires the kind of multi-level research that has been recognized as crucial for taking the field forward and offers the potential for making contributions both to IB and to translation research beyond the disciplinary boundaries of IB. publishedVersion

Discursive voids in emerging markets present opportunities and challenges to debate meanings and taken-for granted assumptions. This article uncovers various strategies used by the researcher and the research participants to address the discursive void and to negotiate shared meaning about employee empowerment in Russia. In the absence of a concept for empowerment in the languages of the study, the researcher and the research participants engaged in joint sensemaking to bridge discursive voids. We contribute to the discussion of qualitative cross-language research in emerging markets by identifying the strategies used not only by the researcher, whose view has dominated previous research, but also those of the research participants. The researcher in our study addressed the discursive void by taking on the dual role of researcher-translator, engaging in contextual approach to translation, consulting external interpreters, and using iteration and flexibility in the course of the research process. Our research participants resorted to proverbs to address the discursive void, make sense of empowerment, and render it locally meaningful. Proverbs are a valuable methodological tool for sensemaking and theorising about context-specific phenomena in IB research.

Unlike previous research that has largely focused on the influence of national institutions on human resource management practices in China, our study taps into the role of sub-national institutions. We demonstrate, via a qualitative configurational analysis, that foreign subsidiaries of multinational corporations still adapt HQ compensation practice to the local context despite low regulatory pressure and low mobility of skills at the sub-national level. This adaptation is facilitated by a decentralized structure in the multinational corporation. Our study also shows that high regulatory pressure and high portability of skills at the sub-national level alone are sufficient to induce local adaptation of compensation practice. Our explanation points to the significant role played by sub-national institutions in large and rapidly changing emerging economies and contributes to research on local adaptation of HRM practice in China. It offers an insight into forms of institutional agency by political and economic actors at local levels of governance as they attempt to influence the skills and human resources available for MNCs through regulatory means.

The paper reviews 105 contributions published in journals pertinent to the field of International Business (IB) between 1991 and 2014 and details four main conceptualizations of gender: how women are compared against men, how gender is treated as a control variable and a cultural macro variable, and how gender is 'done' in international organizations. The review reveals that positivist epistemological assumptions dominate the IB field and that the current understanding of gender is limited. To advance the research, the paper develops the notion of MNCs as gendered social spaces and explains why the IB field would benefit from a more nuanced understanding and incorporation of gender relations into its analyses and discussions. The paper outlines theoretical and methodological advances associated with the reconceptualization of MNCs as gendered social spaces.

This chapter asks and explores the question of how to study a phenomenon for which there is no comparable word in the language(s) used in fieldwork? The authors were faced with this question in a qualitative interview study of employee empowerment in Russia. In the absence of a concept for empowerment and an accompanying meaning system the research participants resorted to proverbs as a means to address the lack of any equivalent term or meaning system; in doing so, they began to make sense of empowerment and render it locally meaningful. The researchers, in turn, relied on their dual researcher-translator role in co-constructing meaning with research participants and on flexible iteration between data and theory, openness and self-reflexivity.

Educating business students in language diversity is an orphan of management education. Few programmes devote an entire course or even a session to this topic in spite of its obvious relevance for companies in a globalised world. This chapter presents insights from a transformative teaching and learning experience of putting language diversity at centre stage. The one-week seminar delivered to an international group of MSc students at the London School of Economics contributed to transforming these students’ views of what it means to manage language diversity in business contexts. They reported a more holistic, critical, self-reflexive and resource-oriented view of multilingualism than at the start of the seminar. The chapter also offers a range of suggestions for educators teaching this topic.

Based on a case study we identify sources and contexts of linguistic challenges that academic and university services staff perceive at a multilingual workplace. Some of these challenges produce subjective perceptions of language misfit—a concept that refers to a sense of inadequacy in the social context through which professionals communicate specialized knowledge. Professionals who experience misfit have limited language skills or their skills are inconsistent with the language policies and practices of the university and/or the region where the university is embedded. Our findings suggest that language misfit and fit form a dualistic pair of concepts which is dynamic and context-specific. We offer a contribution to person-environment (mis)fit research and the study of multilingual organizations, which has to date focused on private, for-profit organizations.

Since the publication of our 2011 article, social scientists have increasingly criticized induction for not being able to explain how theory is generated from case data and offered alternatives such as abduction, which emphasizes the role of pre-existing theory and the non-linear nature of theorizing processes. Inductive theory building is no longer seen as the only option—narrative or process-based theorizing, thick description, Qualitative Comparative Analysis are viable alternatives, because they combine contextualization with causal explanation.

This paper explores the assumptions underlying the core concept of language used in the growing field of language‐sensitive research in international management. We reviewed 92 articles on the topic of language(s) in multinational corporations published during the period 1997‐2015, and applied a linguistic lens to uncover how these articles ‘talk about language’. The assumptions found in these articles can be grouped into three complementary categories that take a structural, functional or social practice view of language. We go beyond the review by also reflecting on the consequences that these underlying assumptions have for the study of language in multinationals. We consider the social practice view the most promising one, and propose a future research agenda for advancing it and thereby contributing to theorizing about the multinational corporation more broadly.

The fluidity of regional headquarters (RHQ) mandates is a core aspect of disaggregating HQ activities in MNCs. While ‘slicing' of global value chains has received attention in previous research, the parallel disaggregation of management activities has not. Our longitudinal study of 374 RHQ between 1998 and 2010 redresses this omission by asking why RHQ lose their mandates. We apply the concept of absorptive capacity and find two different explanatory mechanisms for full and partial mandate loss driven by RHQ-specific capabilities and location-specific capabilities. Full mandate loss is associated with deficient RHQ-specific capabilities and realised absorptive capacity. By contrast, partial mandate loss is driven by an RHQ's lack of the location-specific capabilities to respond to local changes, leading to removal of mandates for some subunits only. The distinction between full and partial loss offers a more nuanced and granular explanation of how geographic regions of MNCs are composed. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

In this paper, we initiate a debate about evaluative criteria (such as validity) which are – or should be – in use to assess the quality of qualitative manuscripts in International Business (IB). We identify three generations of evaluative criteria, each derived from different philosophical orientations. Based on an analysis of published articles in two IB journals, expert interviews and sample reviews, we show how these generations shape what the scholarly community considers to be “good” qualitative research. As an alternative to rigid application of a single set of quality procedures, we advocate a pluralist, contextual approach, reflecting the inherent characteristics of IB as a field.

Research summary For nearly five decades, international business (IB) research in general and the literature on organizational design and staffing of multinationals in particular have treated ethnocentrism mainly as an adverse attribute. Limited attention has been paid to the disciplines that originally established the concept—anthropology, sociology, and psychology. These disciplines have examined ethnocentrism as a positive, neutral, or negative phenomenon with a complex hierarchical structure. IB literature, in turn, has almost exclusively adopted a negative view, suggesting that ethnocentrism hinders adoption of a global strategy. This article borrows insights from the three base disciplines to rethink the concept of ethnocentrism in IB research and to draw implications for global strategy research. The article also calls for a more careful borrowing of concepts from other disciplines. Managerial summary This article is about ethnocentrism. Ethnocentric people tend to believe that their group, organization, culture, or ethnicity is superior to others. Ethnocentrism can exist in international business, for instance, where home country staff consider themselves superior to foreign staff in other countries. In international business research, ethnocentrism is usually considered undesirable, something that should be eliminated. However, sociology, anthropology, and psychology, where the concept was originally established, have adopted a wider, far more nuanced and intellectually richer view that also acknowledges the neutrality and benefits of ethnocentrism. We draw on this more refined view to rethink ethnocentrism in international business and show implications for global strategy research.

This multi-year study examines the relationship between financial performance and language use, observing 405 partnerships between microfinance banks and their international financial partners in 74 countries. Drawing on language research in international business, we find that microfinance banks based in English-speaking, French-speaking, and Spanish-speaking countries have higher performance. Furthermore, the linguistic distance between the home country of a microfinance bank and the home country of its international partner(s) is negatively related to its financial performance. Our large-scale study confirms the effect of language use on organization-level financial performance and extends research on language in multinationals from intra-firm to inter-firm relationships.

We explain why a group of Tanzanian medical doctors decided to stay in their home country despite a massive brain drain and pressure to migrate. We argue that purpose-driven behaviour among medical doctors serves as a counterforce to brain drain, fostering human stickiness in a developing country context. A sense of purpose provides a novel lens to understand voluntary non-migration of highly-skilled professionals under extreme conditions. Furthermore, incoming expatriate doctors build local capacity by sharing skills and expertise with Tanzanian doctors. This affects the medical doctors’ motives to migrate, further reducing brain drain. These individual-level decisions not to migrate find their application in policy. We advocate policies that support purpose-driven behaviour and generate long-term commitment to a location, while advancing short-term mobility for knowledge sharing. The policy initiatives are targeted at actors in the sending and receiving countries as well as in international organisations, covering concerted multi-layered policies to support family and community embeddedness, to facilitate the incoming of expatriate doctors and foreign exchange, and to cultivate benefits of circular migration. We argue that migration behaviour is more individually grounded and socio-emotionally constructed than what dominant economic-based explanations suggest.

Building on the neo‐institutional organizational translation approach and on interlingual translation studies, we undertake an historical case study of the movement of Japanese organizational practices to the USA from the 1970s through the mid‐1990s. Both American and Japanese translators struggled to bring Japanese management models into the USA, reversing the dominant translation flow and bridging wide differences between the sending and receiving contexts. We use the translation ecology approach to look at the interactions over time between translators, translations, and translation processes studied separately in much translation research. Our paper makes two contributions to research on organizational translation. First, it develops more precise and theoretically‐based categorizations of the elements of translation ecology – translators, translations, and translation processes. Second, it challenges the generalizability of the decontextualization/disembedding and recontextualization/re‐embedding processes that are widely accepted as a necessary process in moving management models and practices across contexts.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to shed new light on carrying out “at-home” ethnography by building and extending the notion of roles as boundary objects, and to elucidate how evolving roles mediate professional identity work of the ethnographer. Design/methodology/approach In order to theorize about how professional identities and identity work play out in “at-home” ethnography, the study builds on the notion of roles as boundary objects constructed in interaction between knowledge domains. The study is based on two ethnographic research projects carried out by high-level career switchers – corporate executives who conducted research in their own organizations and eventually left to work in academia. Findings The paper contends that the interaction between the corporate world and academia gives rise to specific yet intertwined roles; and that the meanings attached to these roles and role transitions shape the way ethnographers work on their professional identities. Research limitations/implications These findings have implications for organizational ethnography where the researcher’s identity work should receive more attention in relation to fieldwork, headwork, and textwork. Originality/value The study builds on and extends the notion of roles as boundary objects and as triggers of identity work in the context of “at-home” ethnographic research work, and sheds light on the way researchers continuously contest and renegotiate meanings for both domains, and move from one role to another while doing so.

The paper investigates how corporate language influences the career mobility of MNC employees in Russia. We apply human capital theory to show how language may be valued in an organizational context. In our work we use a framework that demonstrates that corporate language may act as a glass ceiling. The results show that employees in Russian MNCs with a lower level of corporate language skills will be less likely to consider vertical and horizontal career mobility than employees with a higher level of these language skills. Equally, employees in Russian MNCs with a lower level of corporate language skills will be less likely to consider internal and external career mobility than those employees with a higher level of these language skills. We prove that corporate language may act both as a barrier and as a facilitator for the career mobility of employees in Russian MNCs who have different levels of corporate language skills.

The inability to define and understand rigor in qualitative research has led to a number of issues that require further thought and movement towards resolution. These include, among many others, th...

This chapter addresses the issue of language standardization from two perspectives, bringing together a theoretical perspective offered by the discipline of sociolinguistics with a practical example from international business. We introduce the broad concept of standardization and embed the study of language standardization in the wider discussion of standards as a means of control across society. We analyze the language policy and practice of the Danish multinational, Grundfos, and use it as a “sociolinguistic laboratory” to “test” the theory of language standardization initially elaborated by Einar Haugen to explain the history of modern Norwegian. The table is then turned and a model from international business by Piekkari, Welch and Welch is used to illuminate recent Norwegian language planning. It is found that the Grundfos case works well with the Haugen model, and the international business model provides a valuable practical lesson for national language planners, both showing that a “comparative standardology” is a valuable undertaking. More voices “at the table” will allow both theory and practice to be further refined and for the role of standards across society to be better understood.

Managers leading strategic change processes have to be skilled language users in order to convince others of the necessity of change and to shape the interpretations of their followers in a preferred direction. This paper asks how and why managers employ certain forms of language in their sensegiving during strategic change, and when these managers are effective in their language use to change the sensemaking of others in the organization. On the basis of a longitudinal case study of a European multinational corporation, we find that effective sensegiving is about providing organizational members with a pragmatic form – a way of making sense rather than, as previous research suggests, about providing them with pre-packaged meanings. We extend prior research by distinguishing the effects that the different linguistic forms of managerial sensegiving have on organizational sensemaking. Furthermore, the managers we studied were effective in their sensegiving when they combined framing and narratives. These two forms of language supported each other by amplifying the overall effect on organizational sensemaking. This notion of a combined use of framing and narratives complements previous research, which has largely studied them separately.

The question of whether trust complements or substitutes control continues to be debated in the literature. We contribute to this debate by adopting a communicative perspective on the trust-control link in Russia. Our qualitative study reveals dialectics in the trust-control link. Russian managers used various communicative activities to simultaneously nurture trust and exercise control towards their subordinates, indicating complementarity. By contrast, from an intercultural communicative perspective the Finnish expatriates failed to see this complementarity and regarded trust and control as substitutes. The dialectical perspective reveals the interplay between content and context of a message and their complementarity in communication.

The present paper establishes a relationship between language skills and career mobility. Due to increased internationalization, reduced job security, and a shift in career ownership to the individual, language skills represent a key career competence today. Using qualitative and quantitative data collected with a survey in Finland, we uncovered multiple career-related meanings for language skills. Language skills permeated the basic components of career competence – “knowing how,” “knowing why,” and “knowing whom” – and enabled respondents to cross boundaries. The respondents who possessed the best language skills also demonstrated the highest levels of both psychological and physical career mobility.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to previous research on intraorganizational power in multinational corporations (MNCs). It shows that a subsidiary manager may use language and acts of translation to resist control from headquarters and to (re)define his and his unit’s power position in a headquarters-subsidiary relationship. It also uncovers the interplay between natural languages and “company speak” as a specialized language. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on a single case study of a European MNC undergoing strategic change. The data were drawn from company documents, personal interviews and focus group discussions. Findings – The findings show that actors at both headquarters and in the focal subsidiary employed language and translation to exercise power over meanings; headquarters exerted control over “mindsets” and practices, while subsidiaries responded by resisting these meaning systems. The authors argue that the crossing of language boundaries offers a window onto shifting power positions and micro-politics in the MNC. Research limitations/implications – The study was limited to a single translation act in a focal headquarters-subsidiary relationship. Practical implications – From the managerial perspective, any process of communication in a multilingual context needs to be sensitive to power (re)definitions associated with language and translation. Originality/value – This study sheds light on translation as a political act and hidden activity in the MNC.

The multilingual MNC provides a promising territory for enhancing the dialogue between organization theory and International Business. We draw parallels between research on the multinational corporation and that on the multilingual corporation. Our review shows that the changing conceptualizations of the MNC toward a network model have carved space for language-sensitive research in International Business. We scrutinize this stream of research from the viewpoint of three organization theory lenses: the role of language in organizational design and architecture, in identity building and culture, and in organizational political systems, and comment on future research.