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This paper engages with the important work of Raškovic (2024). The authors agree with Raškovic’s (2024) argument that international business (IB) policy is well positioned to inform and address many of society’s wicked problems, including modern slavery. Beyond supporting this position, the purpose of this paper is to highlight IB’s internal and ongoing debate regarding multinational ownership and control, and how this unresolved theoretical issue can hinder the contribution of IB policy in addressing wicked problems.

By leveraging prior literature, this paper synthesises opposing views on the extent of control that multinational enterprises (MNEs) exert across global value chains (GVCs). The authors then demonstrate why these conflicting perspectives should be resolved to fully realise the task that Raškovic (2024) has laid out for IB policy.

This study argues that IB is steeped in a tradition where ownership has been a proxy for meaningful control. Rising GVCs have complicated this relationship, and while IB recognises this, the field remains short of explicating a set of robust conditions that can detect control in the absence of ownership. Given that responsibility is often based on an assumption of who has control, this ongoing and unresolved debate limits IB’s utility in advancing appropriate policy interventions to tame wicked problems.

This paper makes a contribution by bringing together diverse perspectives on the ongoing debate regarding MNE control in GVC. It demonstrates how this seemingly abstract debate can have significant implications for IB’s role in addressing society’s grand challenges. The authors further suggest that embracing interdisciplinarity and novel analytical tools can assist in demystifying the opaqueness of GVCs and resolving the control “fuzziness” that confuses responsibility boundaries across the GVC.

International business (IB) education typically focuses on the multinational enterprise (MNE) and how it navigates varying institutional setups for its own benefit. This reductionist and MNE-centric approach underplays the influence these firms have on the societal and environmental fabric of the geographies they are operating in. This paper aims to propose integrating systems thinking into IB education to address this shortcoming with the intention to setup IB education to engage with wicked grand challenges.

This conceptual paper offers an approach for integrating complexity, criticality and diversity into IB education through teaching systems thinking capabilities.

Integrating systems thinking into IB education allows for a more realistic appreciation of IB’s contribution to addressing grand challenges. The authors propose a systems thinking perspective to IB education and offer how systems thinking capabilities could be taught in IB.

Grand challenges are characterised by wicked problems. Addressing them requires a multilevel, cross-disciplinary approach that takes into consideration the inter- and intradependencies of all actors within a system.

Mainland Chinese firms have become important international investors. Many have gained their capabilities to internationalize in a domestic institutional environment characterised by significant market imperfections. In this study, we argue that the imperfections affect firm behavior depending on firm size, ownership form, and location. We find preliminary support for the notion that large, well connected Chinese firms benefit most from institutional advantages, but that smaller firms internationalize because of institutional constraints. This represents a more nuanced view of the determinants of Chinese firm internationalization than is evident in prior research, with consequences for future theorising and empirical research on Chinese MNEs.

The acronym and neologism “VUCA” is employed by management and some scholars to denote the unpredictability of the modern world and its impact on business. The VUCA approach suggests that a rational firm’s response should be to: protect against volatility by engineering-in redundancy and slack, gather information to reduce uncertainty, develop expertise to make complexity computable, and learn heuristically to reduce ambiguity. We combine a critical perspective on the VUCA approach with the global factory model, popularly used to describe the flexibility sought by advanced economy multinational enterprises (MNEs) within the global value chain. Both VUCA and the global factory would seem to account less well for the expansion of emerging multinational enterprise (EMNEs) abroad, particularly the preference for equity-based control and inflexibility when seeking strategic assets. Also, both approaches fail to incorporate behavioral principles toward risk. Using International Business theory, we propose a research agenda that may help to make VUCA more tractable, the global factory more useful, and the internationalization of EMNEs more comprehensible.

The upsurge of Chinese and Indian outward foreign direct investment (FDI) raises an unanswered question about locational determinants of direct investment from the two countries. Using an unbalanced bilateral FDI database, we find that Chinese and Indian FDI are attracted to countries with large market size, low GDP growth, high volumes of imports from China or India, and low corporate tax rates. We also find important differences between China and India. While Chinese FDI is drawn to countries with open economic regimes, depreciated host currencies, better institutional environments, and English speaking status, none of these factors are important for Indian FDI. Chinese FDI is also deterred by geographic distance and OCED membership. However, neither of these has any impact on Indian FDI.

The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the conceptual frameworks and concepts with which the research on internationalization patterns of small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) should be conducted.

A comprehensive overview of concepts and a conceptual framework to study internationalization patterns of SMEs is offered.

The complexities of existing definitions and methodologies for researching internationalization patterns are highlighted, and a synthesis of the issues is provided. An integrative model of internationalization pathways, and their antecedents and outcomes is presented.

It is recommended that future research focuses especially on the time dimension of internationalization patterns. Future research can contribute to the literature by adopting a longitudinal approach with larger samples and more detailed cases to capture the dynamics of internationalization.

Practitioners might map their positions, and look for challenges and opportunities with regard to their chosen internationalization pattern. They can also benchmark other firms’ pathways and fine‐tune their own approach to internationalization.

The paper integrates a large body of research in an important research area in international marketing. It also provides guidance on how to conduct future research in the area, and introduces the content of this special issue of the International Marketing Review.

Over the past two decades, China’s outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) has risen remarkably. Whether such an increase affects the Chinese export diversification (ED) is a significant issue that has surprisingly remained unaddressed. This study aims to explain this issue that how OFDI plays a vital role in symmetric and asymmetric effects on its ED.

The authors introduce a robust nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model. Ironically, the purpose of this study is to analyze the symmetric and asymmetric effect of OFDI on ED.

The authors propose that growing OFDI would be more advantageous to China, rather than the policies of contraction. Therefore, the study provides valuable policy insights to consider the long-run asymmetric momentum given to ED by China’s OFDI.

The results of this study may seem to be an important newsletter for further policy discussion on how China can catch up on the benefits of ED through OFDI.

China's Confucius Institutes (CIs) have been under increasing scrutiny in the West while their development in Africa has been steady and strong. This article aims to examine the establishment, operation and effects of this institute in Africa, and discuss its role in a wider context of education, development and China's foreign policy towards Africa.

This empirical research is a case study of China's Confucius Institutes in Africa. Fieldwork data was collected in China and seven CIs in four African countries.

This research found that the CIs were not just Chinese language and culture promotion organisations in Africa. Rather, they played a deeper and more profound role in training local individuals, involving them in different forms of Chinese presence in Africa and linking their own personal development with the rise of China. In that sense, this article argues that the CI plays a positive role in promoting China's soft power and national interest in Africa. This article also highlights the problems of the institute's operational mode, and casts doubt on some aspects of its future development.

This research systematically examines the establishment, operation and effects of the CIs in Africa, in an attempt to understand the real role of this institute in China's foreign policy towards Africa and demonstrate the uniqueness of the situation of the CIs in Africa.