Prelims

Half Title

The Multiple Dimensions of Institutional Complexity in International Business Research

Title Page

PROGRESS IN INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS RESEARCH VOLUME 15

THE MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS OF INSTITUTIONAL COMPLEXITY IN INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS RESEARCH

EDITED BY

ALAIN VERBEKE

University of Reading, United Kingdom; Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium;

University of Calgary, Canada

ROB VAN TULDER

Erasmus University, The Netherlands

ELIZABETH L. ROSE

University of Leeds, United Kingdom; Indian Institute of Management Udaipur, India

YINGQI WEI

University of Leeds, United Kingdom

United Kingdom – North America – Japan India – Malaysia – China

Copyright

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2021

Copyright © 2021 Emerald Publishing Limited

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80043-245-1 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80043-244-4 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80043-246-8 (Epub)

ISSN: 1745-8862 (Series)

Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

List of Contributors

D. Eleanor Westney: A Biography

Elizabeth L. Rose

This volume is in honor of Professor D. Eleanor Westney, who is Sloan Fellows Professor of Strategy and International Management Emerita at MIT Sloan School of Management (U.S.) and Professor Emerita at York University (Canada), where she was the Scotiabank Professor of International Business and Professor of Organization Studies at the Schulich School of Business at York University (Canada) from 2007 to 2014. It is my pleasure to provide a brief introduction to a scholar who is widely respected – and widely beloved – with in the International Business (IB) community.

Like so many of the key contributors to IB, Eleanor entered the field as something of an “academic immigrant”. An organizational sociologist who had combined Sociology with Japanese Studies throughout her undergraduate, masters, and doctoral programs, she found that her knowledge of Japan provided a natural segue into IB in the early 1980s, at a time when academic and managerial interest in the success of Japanese multinational enterprises (MNEs), especially relative to U.S.-based companies, was very strong. Her sociological research on how Japanese organizations emulated western models in the Meiji period provided a useful base for addressing how western companies might then learn from Japan. She has gone on to make deep and lasting contributions to her adopted field, bringing a sociological perspective to various aspects of cross-border organizational learning, including the internationalization of research and development activities, with an emphasis on the evolutionary and institutional theoretical lenses for studying the MNE.

Although she has spent most of her adult life in the U.S., Eleanor is proudly and resolutely Canadian. She was raised on a dairy farm near Toronto. (This is a fact that I learned during a dinner when she and another person at the table – also with farming experience – were discussing silage. Having grown up in suburban New York, I finally had to ask, sheepishly, what on earth silage was.) She studied at the University of Toronto, earning a BA and an MA in Sociology and Japanese studies. After a stint working at the Canadian pavilion at Expo’70, the World’s Fair in Osaka (she learned Japanese as an undergraduate) she headed to the U.S. – specifically, Princeton University, where she earned a PhD in Sociology. Her first academic position was in the Department of Sociology at Yale University. She then shifted to MIT, which served as her academic home for most of her career, before returning to Canada to join the Schulich School of Business at York University and be closer to her family. She has held visiting appointments at Hitotsubashi University, University of Tokyo, University of Michigan, and Aalto University.

Throughout her career, Eleanor has engaged deeply with the academic community, through a variety of organizations, with a strong focus on helping to develop the next generation of scholars. She served as Chair of the International Management Division of the Academy of Management, and was named the Division’s Eminent Scholar in 2013. She was elected a Fellow of the Academy of International Business (AIB) in 1997, and served as Dean of the AIB Fellows from 2008 to 2011. Among her other honors, Eleanor has been awarded an honorary doctorate from the Stockholm School of Economics.

Eleanor is renowned for her remarkable ability to synthesize apparently disparate lines of discussion; this is informed by the fact that she is a voracious reader with extremely eclectic tastes. She is unfailingly generous with ideas and comments, and has a well-deserved reputation for being able to frame questions in ways that provide stunning clarity to students who are struggling with their research, while simultaneously offering a wealth of ideas for future research that have the potential to drive a full postdoctoral research agenda. I have lost count of the number of times that students have referred to suggestions that Eleanor had made to them years earlier; her impact on young researchers around the world is both vast and deep.

Perhaps the best way in which I can convey the esteem in which I hold Eleanor Westney is to share what I consider to be the best compliment that I have ever received in a professional context – being told that I have done something that reminds a colleague of Eleanor.

On behalf of my co-editors of this volume – Rob van Tulder, Alain Verbeke, and Yingqi Wei – it is a real pleasure to honor Eleanor with Volume 15 of the Progress in International Business Research (PIBR) series. Like the scholars to whom previous PIBR volumes have been dedicated (Danny Van Den Bulcke, Alan Rugman, Lou Wells, Rosalie Tung, Lorraine Eden, and Peter Buckley), Eleanor Westney has made – and she continues to make – an indelible mark on the field of International Business.