The Scope and Scale of MNE Strategies: In Commemoration of Alan Rugman's Contribution to International Business Research
通过正反方辩论形式，探讨跨国企业战略的区域与全球维度，强调区域视角的重要性，并指出未来研究应整合本地、区域和全球视角，对国际商务和管理学者有参考价值。
The sudden passing of Alan Rugman has abruptly cut short the academic career of one of the most prominent, contemporary international business (IB) scholars. Alan was one of the 10 most cited researchers in IB and an influential advisor on international business strategy issues to both businesses and governments. During his distinguished academic career Alan has published numerous journal articles, book chapters and books that represent a tremendous reading list for aspiring IB researchers. To acknowledge Rugman's scholarly contribution, we have invited two teams of leading IB scholars to engage in a Point – Counterpoint (PCP) discussion, providing a constructive dialogue associated with Rugman's work and its implications for the IB and management research fields. In this introduction to the PCP, we first highlight Rugman's core contributions to IB studies. Subsequently, we summarize the core arguments of the Point and Counterpoint articles. Finally, we reflect on the implications of this PCP for future research in the areas of international business strategy and its connection with other research streams. One of Alan's main contributions to research on multinational enterprises (MNEs) has been his exploration of their strategies in terms of geographic scope, in addition to technological scale. More specifically, he studied the spatial dispersion of MNE supply chains, as reflected in the distribution of these firms’ assets and sales across borders. Beginning with the work of Levitt (1983), considerable research in international management and strategy has been based on the implicit assumption that the largest MNEs compete for global dominance and do so by operating on a global scale. Early research on global expansion builds on the assumption of MNEs commanding ‘non-location-bound’ firm-specific advantages (FSAs). These FSAs can be stand-alone ones such as R&D outputs and brand names, or higher-order ones, such as managerial routines and capabilities allowing recombining extant knowledge with newly accessed resources in host countries. In their critique of these over-simplified assumptions Rugman and Verbeke (1992) argued that many MNE FSAs are actually location-bound, and deployable/exploitable in a limited geographic space only. Operating successfully in host countries by being nationally responsive thus requires creating new location-bound FSAs. This line of argument was further explored in more recent papers by Alan and his research collaborators. Using detailed firm-level evidence, Rugman and Verbeke (2004) documented that even the very largest MNEs undertake significant operations in at most two of the three major economic regions of the world (North America, Europe and Asia). In other words, despite describing their own strategies as ‘global’, many MNEs are actually home-region based or bi-regional, but certainly not global in the sense of having a balanced distribution of their sales and assets across the globe. The lack of globalization appears to be even stronger for multinational service firms than for manufacturing firms, both in terms of geographic sales and asset distribution (Rugman and Verbeke, 2008). This work has emphasized the importance of the regional dimension in the context of MNEs, and it has set in motion an important debate in the IB, international entrepreneurship and strategic management fields regarding both the theoretical and empirical foundations of international management and strategy. It complements another major research tradition (also highlighted in the pages of JMS) that points to the key role of local context (Meyer et al., 2011), and the well-known integration-responsiveness (I-R) model, which emphasizes the importance of linking the local to the global. The question then arises as to whether the notion of global strategy has any theoretical or empirical content. Researchers involved in this debate have drawn on a diverse range of theoretical frameworks going beyond Dunning's ‘eclectic’ paradigm. As a result, the IB discourse has been considerably enriched by inclusion of regional studies with specific conceptual angles grounded in economics, regional studies, resource-based-view theory, resource-dependency theory, governance research and institutional theory. This debate has not only proven to be a fertile ground for the existing conceptual conversations in the MNE domain, but it has also become an important platform for further theory development in IB as a research field. In these two Point-Counterpoint papers, the authors address key theoretical and empirical foundations of the divergent views on the drivers of MNE strategic decisions, and suggest possible avenues for theory building that are important not only for IB scholars but also a wider community of management researchers. In the Point article, Verbeke and Asmussen follow Alan Rugman in emphasizing the merits of considering a regional perspective on the internationalization, organization, and management of the firm. It discusses how the concept of regional strategy emerges from – and is informed by – different conceptual perspectives, including internalization theory; theory of economic geography; resource-based thinking in strategic management; and the broader academic work on the importance of distance (in particular geographic, cultural, and institutional distance). In the intersection among these fields, Verbeke and Asmussen address a number of important questions such as: Which additional transaction costs do firms incur as soon as they cross regional boundaries and how should these costs be managed or mitigated?; What factors (internal and external to the firm) ultimately determine whether MNEs can assemble and orchestrate the necessary resources to be successful across different regions and how does this shape the cross-border rivalry among firms?; How do firms take into account transaction costs, resource characteristics and distance dimensions when searching for an optimal geographic scope and organizational structure? The article provides an overview of recent empirical evidence on these questions, illuminating the ‘non-global’ nature of international business, and discusses the managerial implications of these questions and findings. It also points to the avenues for future research that these questions and findings entail. The authors explore modern micro-foundations of management, especially aspects of ‘bounded rationality’ and ‘bounded reliability’ and the related difficulties of managing the innovation process across regions, and they suggest a number of novel extensions with regard to the theory of regional strategy, organizational structure, and management. In the Counterpoint paper, Mudambi and Puck suggest that the arguments and findings presented by the ‘regional strategy’ literature do not capture the full array of global activities of the multinational enterprise. They argue that the regional strategy literature provides a rather narrow interpretation of transaction cost theory and resource based view of the firm by overly focusing on geographical location of downstream activities, while disregarding the location of knowledge creation and other relevant upstream activities in the MNE. In addition, prior studies often associate the firm's value creation only with its internalized activities and do not capture the value created through any activities that are externalized. Using a range of theoretical arguments and illustrative case studies, Mudambi and Puck argue that it is important to holistically incorporate the workings of global value chains (GVCs) inside and outside a firm's boundaries. In terms of the ‘regional-global’ debates, the two papers relate to a number of fast-growing research streams in the IB, organizational theory and strategic management fields to highlight the relevance of regional and global phenomena for internationalization strategy. This includes the impact of the corporate governance parameters of MNEs and their effects on the balance between regional and global internationalization decisions (building on the past theoretical debate in the JMS related to governance of MNEs, Filatotchev and Wright, 2011) as well as the relevance of global scale- and scope effects to recover costs of innovation (e.g., Levitt, 1983). The papers highlight key avenues for future theoretical and empirical research that may bring together local, regional and global perspectives in novel theoretical frameworks. We see a number of important connections between the theoretical debates highlighted by the two papers and various domains in management and business research, including corporate governance, business ethics and organizational theory. The global environment in which multinational corporations (MNEs) operate dramatically increases the complexity of the governance challenges and ethical dilemmas confronting MNEs and their leaders, as well as the diversity of stakeholders whose interests must be considered. However, traditional, agency-grounded studies of corporate governance are free of spatial dimensions by largely focusing on the firm's operations in its local market. In the context of corporate governance research, Filatotchev and Wright (2011) indicate that since the firm's degree of internationalization is an important determinant of the complexity it faces, MNE strategy will depend on its ability to deal with information asymmetries and the potential agency conflicts associated with overseas ventures. Therefore, there is a need to extend our understanding of governance issues in MNEs to embrace strategy and knowledge dimensions together with contextual issues, such as location preferences explored by Verbeke and Asmussen in the Point article. Different knowledge and risk preferences of managers and shareholders may lead to differences in their strategic objectives, leading to a need for a complex governance contract to align their interests rather than governance structures that solely focus on minimizing the costs of effecting a transaction. Therefore, the complexities associated with ‘local-regional-global’ dimensions of international business strategy may have significant relevance in terms of governance theory building. Further, in their paper Mudambi and Puck argue that despite the fact that elements of the value chain may be external, many stakeholders may attribute those parts of the chain to the MNE. The MNE therefore assumes liability and risk for these externalized activities, in particular in the context of ethical leadership and corporate social responsibility (CSR). In this regard, Filatotchev and Stahl (2015) point out that MNEs face a perennial dilemma: how to balance the need for global consistency in CSR approaches and ethical standards across the organization with the need to be sensitive to the demands and expectations of a diverse set of stakeholders spread across the globe? Building on the framework of ‘transnational CSR’, the authors provide a systematic mapping of CSR approaches in MNEs, highlight the tensions between globally integrated and locally adapted CSR strategies, and discuss the constraints that they impose on MNE activities at both headquarters and subsidiary levels. By focusing on integration/coordination advantages versus localization/responsiveness advantages when analysing CSR decisions at both headquarters and subsidiary level, the authors’ analysis shows the cost-benefit trade-offs associated with the interaction of these advantages at the local, regional and global levels. This suggests that issues raised in the two papers may have important implications in terms of considering not only economic but also ethical aspects of business strategy. More specifically, various challenges associated with the global-regional dilemma identified by Verbeke and Asmussen can have not only transactional dimensions but also significant implications in terms of organizational legitimacy vis-à-vis different types of stakeholders. For example, an unexplored issue is whether social and ethical norms converge on the regional level to the extent that MNEs can build legitimacy regionally, as opposed to either globally or locally. Further, Mudambi and Puck argue that externalized relationships within GVCs are frequently much less ‘loose’ than one may expect and need to be actively managed by the MNE. While in most cases the MNE is not connected to its partner via any kind of equity-based agreement, the two are intertwined at arm's length. This creates an important area of research that does not only acknowledge that MNEs reflect a network of one headquarters and a set of semi-independent subsidiaries, but also takes into account that MNEs themselves are embedded in a broader network of inter-firm relationships, which might substantially impact the MNE's ability to create and appropriate value. Within the strategic management literature, the relational view perspective (e.g., Dyer and Singh, 1998; Madhok and Tallman, 1998) has emerged as a solid theoretical foundation to better understand why some firms are more able to generate relational rents in external networks. Applying such theoretical framing can help international business scholars to assess the ability of MNEs to realize sustained competitive advantage when engaging in GVCs. At the same time, strategic research on the phenomenon of inter-firm collaboration might substantially benefit from the insights that have emerged out of international business research. Focusing on the external network of partners, research on inter-firm collaboration tends to pay limited attention to the internal structure of firms, even when MNEs are considered. Examining how the internal structure of MNEs (e.g., geographical and cultural distance between subsidiaries, nature of subsidiary-headquarters relationship, intensity of collaboration between subsidiaries) influences their external partnerships therefore is an important avenue for future research. Existing insights from international business are a viable starting point for such novel research endeavours. In conclusion, the two papers of this PCP identify theoretical commonalities but also highlight potential tensions between the ‘regional-global’ perspectives. By integrating complementary aspects of business strategy within the context of MNEs, these papers help to develop theoretical foundations for future research on the strategy and governance of MNEs. The two papers have a high degree of relevance and implications for management practice, since both the MNEs and national governments need to have a clear understanding of the costs, benefits and potential efficiency and regulatory trade-offs associated with different types of strategies. By publishing these two papers JMS not only acknowledges Alan Rugman's significant contribution to IB research, but it also recognizes that his legacy provides an important building block for essentially inter-disciplinary theory development that combines key elements of IB research with general management studies.