What Does this Gift Say about Me,You, and Us? The Role of Adolescents’ Gift Giving in Managing their Impressions among their Peers

This study examines adolescents’ gift giving using a qualitative methodology, based on impression management theory. Gift‐giving motives and the characteristics of the chosen gifts indicated that adolescents use gift giving instrumentally to manage and protect their impressions among their peers. The study extends the literature on adolescents’ gift giving, and provides evidence regarding different types of gifts such as joint, neutral, and twofold gifts. Additionally, some gifts are aimed at strengthening similarity and bind the extended selves of givers and receivers.     

The power of international marketing functions: antecedents and consequences

Purpose: This paper addresses intra-organizational power of international marketing (IM) functions. While IM functions play an important role in firms that operate in continuously changing international environments, their power has been under-explored. Importantly, IM managers need to understand their function’s power and its implications for business performance.

Methodology/approach: Drawing on resource-dependency and interaction theories, we contend that IM functions’ power is affected by the power of non-marketing functions and coordination and conflicts with them. Additionally, IM functions’ power should affect international performance. However, contingency factors may change this effect. The empirical study uses data from senior managers of B-to-B international firms. The model is tested using multiple regression analysis and extensive post-hoc tests.

Findings: While IM functions are powerful, their power is enhanced by coordination with other functions and is reduced by the power held by non-marketing functions. Surprisingly, conflicts with other functions increase IM functions’ power. Finally, IM functions’ power enhances international performance but its effect is weakened by intra-IM conflicts and differs across hi- and low-tech firms.

Research implications: This study provides insights about drivers and outcomes of IM functions’ power based on their relationships with non-marketing functions. Performance consequences of IM power are dependent on contingencies. The study extends knowledge on the under-researched phenomena of marketing power in a B-to-B international context.

Practical implications: IM managers should manage sources of relative functional power and unique intra-firm interactions to sustain or promote their power and thus benefit their firms’ international performance. Practitioners recognize mechanisms to control IMs’ power.

Originality/value/contribution: The study is the first to focus on the interactions of IM functions with non-marketing functions in B-to-B firms and thus complements prior research on IM, general marketing, and non-marketing functions.     

Explicating the Reverse Internationalization Processes of Firms

ABSTRACT

Reverse internationalization (RI) is a crucial phenomenon in a world of globalization; however, research on RI remains scarce. In light of the 2008–2009 economical global crises, many internationalizing firms worldwide have deinternationalized. Given that scholars and functionaries have been sending warning signals about imminent global crisis, revisiting the RI domain and its drivers is a timely and important research area.

This study uses a qualitative approach with a prime objective of exploratory work and theory development of RI. The study explicates the RI phenomenon further, proposes a broader RI conceptualization and an operational definition, and develops propositions and a model to direct future research and assist managers. Grounded in data emerged from field in-depth interviews of senior managers, findings show that RI emerges as a multifaceted formative construct reflecting a reduction in firms’ activities on one or more explicit dimensions. Various internal and external factors foster RI. Since firms apply sophisticated forms of international involvement, RI domain should address its wide-ranging forms with a clearer and richer view that facilitates its conceptualization. Managers learn to pay attention to likely scenarios where episodes in internationalization may arise and lead to RI and of ways to approach them.