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THE 2018 JIBS DECADE AWARD 

 

The Selection Committee for the JIBS Decade Award is pleased to announce
that the 2008 JIBS article “Comparing capitalisms: Understanding
institutional diversity and its implications for international business” by
Gregory Jackson and Richard Deeg, has been selected as the winner of the
2018 JIBS Decade Award. 

 

The award, sponsored by Palgrave Macmillan, is designed to recognize the
most influential paper published in the Journal of International Business
Studies ten years prior and is presented at the annual AIB conference. In
order to be considered for the JIBS Decade Award, an article must be one of
the five most cited articles published in JIBS for the year being
considered.  

 

This year’s Selection Committee members were Keith D. Brouthers (Chair,
King’s Business School, London), the current AIB Program Chair J.T. Li (Hong
Kong University of Science and Technology), and immediate past AIB Program
Chair Sarianna Lundan (University of Bremen, Germany). JIBS Editor-in-Chief
Alain Verbeke was an ex officio, non-voting committee member.

 

In recommending the award-winning article, the committee noted that,
“Jackson and Deeg (2008) examine the construct of institutions from the
comparative capitalism (CC) and international business (IB) perspectives.
They are thoughtful and go much beyond a synthetic review. They provide
insights and directions for research on institutional changes and
institutional entrepreneurship. While it was not the most widely cited paper
in the year, it was among the top five and provides new theoretical insights
into an area of research (institutional theory) that is central to the
international business area.

 

“Jackson and Deeg offer a very thoughtful and comprehensive review of the
different institutional perspectives that are of relevance to IB.  It
presents a balanced and well-considered view of institutional theory from
the sociological and political science perspectives, and contrasts that with
the view on institutions from the IB literature, which owes more to economic
approaches. It is sensitive to the limits of institutional analysis, and it
is pointing the way to the future in the discussion on institutional change
and the role of MNEs as institutional entrepreneurs.

 

“Overall, this paper offers an interesting comparison of two distinct
approaches to institutions and how they impact the strategies of firms. It
contrasts and compares the IB approach with a CC approach offering insights
from both that can help us improve our understanding of how institutions
change and how MNEs deal with them. Notably, two concepts can aid IB
scholars as we try to understand the impact of national institutions on firm
behavior. First, the concept of institutional dynamics explores how
governments and firms impact and deal with changes in national institutions.
This should be of primary importance to the large number of scholars looking
at activities into and out of emerging markets, as these markets have very
dynamic institutional settings. Second, the of concept of institutional
configurations suggests that instead of thinking of the institutional
environment being composed of regulative, normative and cognitive components
we need to look for how the configurations of these components work together
within each nation/state. By conceptualizing and testing institutions as a
bundle of factors (instead of different components) we can gain greater
insights about how MNEs can use the variety of institutions offered in
different countries to support an overall strategy.

“For all these reasons, the selection committee recommends the Jackson and
Deeg (2008) paper, which has become a widely cited and highly impactful
article, for the 2018 JIBS Decade Award.” 

 

A session will be held at the upcoming 2018 AIB Annual Meeting in
Minneapolis, in which the authors and invited discussants, namely JT Li
(HKUST) and Sarianna Lundan (University of Bremen), and Ruth Aguilera
(Northeastern University) and Birgitte Grøgaard (BI Norwegian Business
School),  will comment on the paper. A reception honoring the Decade Award
winning paper and its authors will also be held as part of the closing
reception at the conference. We hope that you will join us in Dubai to
attend these events; the date and times will be available at
https://aib.msu.edu/events/2018/ <https://aib.msu.edu/events/2017/>  when
the conference program is finalized.

A retrospective by the authors, together with the discussants’ commentaries,
will be published in the first issue of the 2019 volume of the Journal of
International Business Studies. 

 

 


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