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Dear friends and colleagues, 

We are delighted to announce the publication of the December 2023 issue (volume 32, issue 6) of International Business Review. This issue is a real treat to finish 2023. Plenty to warm up those of us who are enduring winter in the northern hemisphere, and beach reading for those further south!  

The lead paper – the fourth in our occasional series of Perspectives - is authored by Randi Lunnan, Klaus Meyer, Ram Mudambi & Qin Yang on “The impact of knowledge and financial resource flows for MNE strategy: a typology of subsidiary roles.” The authors discuss the antecedents and implications of HQ-subsidiary financial and knowledge flows. They point out that these flows differ as the deployment of knowledge hinges on numerous contextual characteristics, whereas financial flows are relatively fungible. They emphasise that both flows are needed for subsidiaries to succeed, identify four distinct types of subsidiary roles based upon the juxtaposition of these flows, and discuss the implications for subsidiary competitiveness and MNE risk. 

Next there is a Special Section on “The Tech Cold War & IB Research”, guest edited by Rosalie Tung, Ivo Zander & Tony Fang. The section contains eight insightful commentaries on this vital contemporary topic and its implications for IB practice and scholarship. The articles cover the multipolarization and fracturing of the global economy, the competitive production of technology, global decoupling in the global semiconductor industry, Chinese technology-driven acquisitions, the likelihood (or not) of China becoming the global technology leader in key industries, the increasingly negative media coverage in the West of the activities of EMNEs and specifically Chinese MNEs (with a focus on Huawei), and indigenous innovation by EMNEs. 

Finally, there are six regular articles on springboard internationalization in times of geopolitical tensions; the developmental process of early internationalizing firms; the internationalization of social enterprises; location advantages and cross-border M&As; CEO wealth and cross-border acquisitions; and legitimacy issues related to the governance of sovereign wealth funds.  

We end this update with a reminder of 31 March 2024 deadline for the IBR Special Issue on “How MNEs adjust their strategies and operations in response to a turbulent IB environment”, guest edited by Farok Contractor, John Cantwell, Gary Gereffi, Karl Sauvant & James Zhan. As the editors state, “The past few years have witnessed significant rises in both the complexity and the risks of international business stemming from (a) more assertive nationalism, protectionism and screening or scrutiny on foreign firms, with government policies increasingly skewed in favor of the host nation; (b) the realization that the extreme optimization of global value chains (GVC) has gone too far and more resilient redesigns of GVCs are called for; (c) globalized or transborder mandates and pressures increasing on multinational enterprises (MNEs), on issues ranging from climate change, environmental, social and governance (ESG), sustainable development goals (SDG), and international tax avoidance; and (d) macroeconomic changes or volatility occurring in interest rates, commodity prices and exchange rates.” Further details are available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/international-business-review/about/call-for-papers#how-mnes-adjust-their-strategies-and-operations-in-response-to-a-turbulent-ib-environment  

Best wishes 

Roger Strange & Fang Lee Cooke (IBR Editors-in-Chief) 

International Business Review 

Volume 32, Issue 6, December 2023 

Perspective Article 

The impact of knowledge and financial resource flows for MNE strategy: A typology of subsidiary roles 

Randi Lunnan, Klaus Meyer, Ram Mudambi, Qin Yang 

Article 102190 

Special Section on “The Tech Cold War & IB Research”.  

Guest edited by Rosalie L. Tung, Ivo Zander & Tony Fang 

The Tech Cold War, the multipolarization of the world economy, and IB research 

Rosalie L. Tung, Ivo Zander, Tony Fang 

Article 102195 

Corporate reactions to the fracturing of the global economy 

Peter J. Buckley 

Article 102014 

Societal knowledge quality as catalyst for the competitive productivity of technology: One in a set of several universal processes in trajectories of societal progress. 

Gordon Redding 

Article 102096 

Co-evolutions in global decoupling: Learning from the global semiconductor industry 

Hongzhi Gao, Monica Ren, Tsui-Yii Shih 

Article 102118 

Facilitator or inhibitor? The effect of host-country intellectual property rights protection on China’s technology-driven acquisitions 

Molin Wang, Haifeng Yan, Francesco Ciabuschi, Cong Su 

Article 102165 

The Tech Cold War: What can we learn from the most dynamic patent classes? 

Manuel Mira Godinho, Vítor Corado Simões 

Article 102140 

The legitimacy defeat of Huawei in the media: Cause, context, and process 

Anlan Zhang, Yue Xu, Matthew J. Robson 

Article 102080 

The pursuit of indigenous innovation amid the Tech Cold War: The case of a Chinese high-tech firm 

Ling Eleanor Zhang, Shasha Zhao, Philipp Kern, Tony Edwards, Zhi-Xue Zhang 

Article 102079 

Regular Articles 

Springboard internationalisation in times of geopolitical tensions 

Daniella Fjellström, Wensong Bai, Luis Oliveira, Tony Fang 

Article 102144 

Liminality and developmental process of learning advantage of newness of early internationalizing firms 

Emmanuel Kusi Appiah, Tamara Galkina, Peter Gabrielsson 

Article 102176 

The internationalization of social enterprises: The impact of business model characteristics 

Filip De Beule, Johan Bruneel, Kieran Dobson 

Article 102188 

Multinational enterprises, intra-regional cross-border M&As, and performance: Location advantages of market versus knowledge 

In Hyeock (Ian) Lee, Eunsuk Hong, Jong Kook Shin 

Article 102177 

CEO wealth and cross-border acquisitions by SMEs 

Flladina Zilja, Gabriel R.G. Benito, Hamid Boustanifar, Dan Zhang 

Article 102192 

Sovereign wealth fund governance: A trade-off between internal and external legitimacy 

J. Amar, C. Lecourt 

Article 102193