Domestic market context and international entrepreneurs’ relationship portfolios

The importance of relationships to international entrepreneurs’ internationalization is well recognized, but we still know little concerning how entrepreneurs find, develop and use different types of relationships for their internationalization. In a study based on international entrepreneurship and network theories, we examine how having or not having a domestic market affects the relationship portfolios developed by born global software entrepreneurs. We find it profoundly influences the personal relationship strength they seek in new international relationships, and their activeness towards developing new relationships that are embedded in foreign markets. Further, the analytical model we develop shows how and why the presence of a domestic market influences international entrepreneurs’ portfolios of relationships.     

Firms’ internationalization and alternative approaches to the international customer/market selection

While the theoretical development and empirical studies on exchange transaction modality to international markets have been impressing, relatively few researchers have focused on the process by which firms select where or with whom the transactions should be performed. This paper is an attempt to establish a research agenda on the selection of foreign market or customer. The characteristics of the ‘traditional’ approaches—systematic and non-systematic—are examined and compared with a relationship approach. Furthermore, this paper emphasizes the interrelationship between the choice of entry mode and choice of foreign market/customer. The authors develop research propositions suggesting circumstances under which a relationship approach is more likely than a traditional approach. Future research directions are illuminated.     

On market forces and adjustments: acknowledging consumer creativity through the aesthetics of ‘debadging’

Abstract

This paper explores the social dynamics by means of which market forces are enacted at the level of everyday consumption. In particular, it draws on Holt's (2002 Holt, D.B. 2002. Why do brands cause trouble? A dialectical theory of consumer culture and branding. Journal of Consumer Research, 29: 70–90. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) notion that as ‘unruly bricoleurs’, consumers kick-start processes of market adjustment and innovation through improvising ways to negotiate the demands of daily life. In this way, consumers can become active players in realising new possibilities for identity construction and empowerment that involve the creative re-appropriation of marketer-based meaning. To investigate those issues, we turn to a virtual community in the empirical setting of car customisation. Over an eight-month period, an internet-based methodology generated textual observations of online posting activity on five internet newsgroups attracting those interested in the particular pursuit of car modification. Participants used those web-forums to share information, passions, and enthusiasms. Analysis shows that grounded aesthetics function as vehicles for creativity and the reworking of dominant market logics (Vargo & Lusch, 2004 Vargo, S.L. and Lusch, R.F. 2004. Evolving to a new dominant logic for marketing. Journal of Marketing, 68: 1–18. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). We conclude that online discussion threads offer valuable access to the emergent interplay of discursive resources in circulation among virtual communities and that this has implications for the conduct of environmental scanning. The paper illustrates how the discursive resource-base is nurtured, sustained, and transformed through various interpellations, including performing claims to prestige and self-defining distinctions, as well as constructing narratives of personal history and social dynamics.     

‘Murketing’ and the rhetoric of the new sincerity

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that marketing scholars should be paying a lot more attention to the rhetorical form which the economic historian Philip Mirowski – following the novelist David Foster Wallace – calls murketing. Combining philosophical, historical, economic and fictional resources, the paper first produces a synthetic account of what murketing is. Blurring calculated dishonesty with impassioned sincerity, murketing operationalises a double-truth dialectic which treats consumers as both subjects and objects within the process of their own persuasion. In order to indicate how murketing works, the paper then considers recent examples from murketing practice where allusions are made which are both cynical and gnostic, both conceited and intimate, and both earnest and ironic. The paper closes by indicating how its account of the theory and practice of murketing might inform the future study, consumption and regulation of advertising and marketing communications.     

Broadening the concept of international entrepreneurship: ‘Consumers as International Entrepreneurs’

We integrate theories from international business, entrepreneurship, innovation, marketing and network economics to develop a four-part typology of ‘consumers as international entrepreneurs’. This broadens the concept of international entrepreneurship and complements the firm-level focus customary in research on international new ventures and entrepreneurs within those ventures. We develop our arguments in the context of the new economy and discuss areas for investigation in this emerging area of inquiry.     

Making the ‘handmade’ bike and trying to make a living: market objects,field-configuring events and some limits to market making

In line with growing interest in craft and maker economies, I examine the resurgence of handmade bicycle fabricators (“framebuilders”) in the U.S. since the early 2000s. I provide an account of one of the driving elements of this framebuilding renaissance, the North American Handmade Bicycle Show, considered as a “field-configuring event” through – and around – which forms of market-making and market object stabilization processes were achieved. I focus in particular on the way in which the “handmade bike” as a market object was stabilized and defined. Expanding on the “markets as practice” literature, I take up a larger concern with how these market-making and field-configuring dynamics connect to the material position of those within the field and their pursuit of livelihood. I find that, paradoxically, the particular successful stabilization of the “handmade” bicycle achieved around the show was difficult to sustain as a business model for many framebuilders.     

Mill's ‘proof’ of Utility and the composition of causes

John Stuart Mill proposed that all policy precepts, be they in the areas of morality or prudence or aesthetics, are all subordinate to the precepts of the Art of Life. The value which he assumes in defining the Art of Life is the Principle of Utility. This principle, being normative rather than fact, can admit of no proof based solely on deductive inference. Yet Mill proposed considerations that he believed capable of rationally persuading one to accept his principle as the basic principle for the Art of Life. This paper aims to evaluate this argument. In particular, it tries to show that a crucial step, often thought to be a logical howler, is not to be so simply dismissed. It is shown that if one accepts certain theses from Mill's philosophy of science and of social science, concerning the composition of causes, then the crucial step is fully justified. It is also suggested that these theses of Mill's philosophy of science are mistaken. So Mill's proof of utility is, after all, unsound, but the reconstruction proposed shows it to be much more plausible and much more philosophically interesting than is often thought.     

Between the firm and the market: An international comparison of the commercial structures of the cotton industry (1820–1939)

This article describes the ways in which cotton goods were commercialised during the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth. Several national cases are analysed: Britain as the Workshop of the World; France, Germany, Switzerland and the US as core economies; Italy and Spain as countries on the European periphery; and Japan as a successful export latecomer. The main question that we address is why some cotton industries vertically integrated their production and selling processes, but others did not. We present a model that combines industrial district size and product differentiation to explain why vertical integration was present in most cases and why there was vertical specialisation of production and selling in Lancashire, Lowell and Japan.     

‘Inequality’ and ‘value’ reconsidered? the employment of post office women, 1910–1922

In the British Civil Service, male workers were perceived more ‘valuable’ by managers owing to their supposed higher productivity and skills. This restricted women’s access to higher grade employment, and placed them on lower and different scales to their male colleagues. Yet women worked alongside men, both in the pre-war, wartime and interwar periods. Through examining the personnel practices of Britain’s largest Civil Service department – the Post Office – this article highlights the vital importance of this institution, and its women workers, to the nation’s war and reconstruction efforts. The inextricable connection between the Post Office and its main funder – the Treasury – brought tensions concerning the provision of labour, together with the short-term and long-term position of women in the department. When the First World War got underway, women’s vital contribution to the department’s efforts became apparent. Thus, when victory was in sight, Post Office managers made women a central component to their post-war plan, although initially it did not include a commitment to address the ubiquitous inequalities affecting male and female opportunity in the department. Yet the Post Office’s commitment to explicitly include women in its post-war plan, primarily owing to the shortage of suitably qualified men, placed it at the cutting edge in renegotiating with the government the position of women in the post-war labour market.     

Identifying the ‘knowledge base’ or ‘intellectual structure’ of research on international business, 2000–2015: A citation/co-citation analysis of JIBS

The purpose of this study consists in analyzing the existing literature on international business from all the research papers published in Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS) during the period of time comprised between 2000 and 2015. The authors apply bibliometric methods to that end –in particular, document citation and co-citation analyses (DCAs)– so that they can try and identify the main research lines within the aforementioned scientific field or domain; in other words, the ‘intellectual structure’ of the discipline examined. Social networks analysis was also used to carry out the representation or visualization of such structure or knowledge base. The highly interdisciplinary nature of the research undertaken, since the study field still keeps its characteristic diversity and interdisciplinarity or the need to integrate a variety of theoretical frameworks or approaches into the development of a widely-accepted theory about the field under study become evident. Amongst these theories would be the new institutional theory, the strategic theory or perspective or others such as the transaction cost theory or the agency theory, applied to the context of internationalization and to the field of international business, on whose integration the future development of this field may largely depend.     

Symbolic consumption,signification and the ‘lockout’ of electric cars, 1885–1914

The paper analyses the sources of meanings attached to consumption of the early automobile to inform analysis of the lockout of electric automobiles in the UK, mindful of related developments in France, and the USA. Data are gathered from archive sources, and include social and technical histories and popular newspapers and magazines from the period investigated (1885–1914). The paper asserts that the association of the early car with specific and particular cultural meanings, as defined by class and gender, led to it becoming an untenable choice for early consumers contributing to the ‘lockout’ of the electric car before it had a chance to establish itself as a viable socio-technical system. The conclusion highlights the limitations of an analytical focus privileging technical accounts of lockout and identifies the contribution of the concepts of symbolic consumption and signification.     

Questioning ‘law and finance’: US stock market development, 1930–70

An important tenet of a burgeoning ‘law and finance’ literature is that stock market development is contingent upon corporate law offering ample protection to shareholders. This paper addresses this claim, using as its departure point developments occurring in the United States between 1930 and 1970. It shows that, contrary to what the law and finance literature would predict, during this period and throughout the twentieth century generally the US lacked corporate law that provided extensive protection to shareholders. It also points out that while federal securities legislation introduced in the mid-1930s bolstered investor protection, this reform effort did not energise the stock market in the manner implied by law and finance analysis.     

‘A knavish people…’: London Jewry and the stock market during the South Sea Bubble

In an era when financial markets were only beginning the move from personal to impersonal relations, this paper examines the role of Jewish brokers in the market for Bank of England stock at a time when their status as recent immigrants, subject to constraints due to religion and ethnicity, made them unlikely intermediaries beyond their own communities. Using formal network analysis, an examination of their activity during the first half of 1720 suggests a marginal role. However, as the Bubble began to burst a few Jewish financiers became disproportionately involved as purchasers of a stock clearly on the decline.     

A socioemotional wealth perspective on how collaboration intensity,trust, and international market knowledge affect family firms’ multinationality

Internationalization theory does not account for the priority family firms place on socioemotional wealth (SEW). This can reshape how critical theoretical dimensions of collaboration intensity, network trust, and international market knowledge exert their effects. Bringing together the internationalization model of Johanson and Vahlne (2009) with SEW theory, our study of 334 German-speaking family firms reveals international market knowledge mediates the relationship between collaboration intensity and family firms’ multinationality. High network trust positively moderates the relationship between collaboration intensity and the acquisition of international market knowledge. Our work expands the predictive ability of Johanson and Vahlne’s (2009) important model.