De-globalization: Theories, predictions, and opportunities for international business research
By Michael A. Witt. Journal of International Business Studies, 2019
501 citations recorded by the source corpus.
De-globalization, now a distinct possibility, would induce a significant qualitative shift in strategies, structures, and behaviors observable in international business (IB). Coming to terms with this qualitative shift would require IB research to develop a much deeper integration of politics, the key driver of de-globalization. To support such integration, this paper introduces two relevant theories of (de-)globalization from political science, liberalism and realism. Both predict de-globalization under current conditions but lead to different expectations about the future world economy: liberalism suggests a patchwork of economic linkages, while realism predicts the emergence of economic blocs around major countries. This paper discusses the resulting opportunities in three areas of IB research: political strategies and roles of multinational enterprises (MNEs), global value chains, and the role of the national context. For political strategies and roles, there is a need to explore how regular business activities and deliberate political agency of MNEs affect the political sustainability of globalization. For value chains, questions include their future reach and specialization, changes in organizational forms, and the impact of political considerations on location decisions. Research opportunities on national contexts relate to their ability to sustain globalization and their connection with economic and military power.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2ef5380cb29ef5c60bd0eeefa365c538c71f377e
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In Economics and Econometrics
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In Strategy and Management
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Citations in the corpus
- The structural reshaping of globalization: Implications for strategic sectors, profiting from innovation, and the multinational enterprise (2019, background): “Few scholars have joined the call to study these developments more seriously as academic subject matter (e.g., Ozawa, 2019; Witt, 2019).”
- Innovation in and from emerging economies: New insights and lessons for international business research (2021, background): “Although this growing cross-border interdependence has spurred a degree of technological, institutional, and economic convergence, there remains significant variation across nations in terms of firm capabilities, institutional configurations, and levels of development (Witt, 2019).”
- Foreign direct investment along the Belt and Road: A political economy perspective (2021, methodology): “Geopolitical studies fill this gap and illustrate how geopolitics affects MNEs and FDI (Lubinski & Wadhwani, 2020; Witt, 2019a).”
- Rising regionalization: Will the post-COVID-19 world see a retreat from globalization (2020, background): “Empirical data support the view that de-globalization had begun prior to the pandemic (Witt 2019).”
- World Investment Report 2020: International production beyond the pandemic (2020, background): “Here, what is needed is a much deeper integration of political forces in IB research (e.g., see Witt, 2019).”