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The paper frames modern slavery as a global wicked problem and aims to provide a set of international business (IB) policy recommendations for taming it. The outlined approach can also guide IB policymaking to address other kinds of wicked problems.

This is a conceptual paper that reviews existing literature on wicked problems and integrates it with an IB policy double helix framework. The paper focuseses on the role multinational enterprises (MNEs) play in moderl slavery globally, either through global value chains or within global factory modes of operation.

As a global wicked problem, modern slavery will never be solved, but it can be re-solved time and time over. Understanding the social reproduction of modern slavery can help shift the focus from labor governance and a narrow supply chain focus toward the role of transnational governance and the need to address institutional, market and organizational failures.

The paper contributes to the gap in an overarching theory of modern slavery and systematically applies the concept of wicked problems and wickedness theory to modern slavery. Drawing on an IB policy double helix framework, the paper addresses the governance nexus between modern slavery, IB and policymaking which can in turn advance IB policy research and theory.

This paper aims to respond to the response pieces by Burmester (2024) and by Dindial and Voss (2024) to the original paper on “Taming wicked problems through international business policy: recommendations for addressing modern slavery”. Beyond engaging with the issues raised by Burmester (2024) and Dindial and Voss (2024), the follow-up helps further clarify the key difference between so-called “grand challenges” and “wicked problems” for both international business (IB) policymaking and multinational enterprise (MNE) research.

In response to Burmester (2024), the paper juxtaposes key literature on grand challenges and wicked problems to show the theoretical value of applying a wicked problem lens to modern slavery. In engaging with some of the issues raised by Dindial and Voss (2024), this paper further builds on the most current review papers on navigating control and coordination issues within MNEs and the literature on global value chains (GVCs).

The paper operationalises the field of IB policy of relevance to modern slavery research and proposes an augmented conceptual model of MNEs’ control and coordination mechanisms to address modern slavery under conditions of distributed responsibility in their GVCs.

This paper problematizes the grand challenges’ label imposed on modern slavery and leverages a wicked problem theoretical toolkit that can help better guide modern slavery’s global and multi-level governance nexus. The proposed augmented conceptual model also provides a significant attempt to address some of the key theoretical gaps in GVC and MNE control−coordination literature.

Firm internalization is a central concept within the business strategy literature, as part of the broader social sciences. The purpose of this paper is to show how and where MNE internalization theory can benefit from a social identity theory (SIT) perspective to better understand 21st-century multinational enterprises (MNEs).

This paper provides a review and future research agenda for the use of SIT related to MNE internalization theory. The authors complement an evolutionary review of SIT literature with a systematic bibliometric analysis identifying specific thematic gaps. Extending Buckley and Casson’s review of and future research agenda for MNE internalization theory, the authors propose three specific future research directions along with eight guiding research questions.

International business (IB) scholars are familiar with limited aspects of SIT and apply it only in certain research areas, mainly connected to human resource management and leadership, organizational identity and work-related outcomes or international marketing. Strategic management and strategy-oriented IB scholars are less familiar with SIT, despite growing interest in MNE micro-foundations and decision-making under uncertainty.

The authors position SIT as a natural meta-theoretical fit to MNE internalization theory. By providing a future research agenda along with eight supporting research questions, the authors help to advance the MNE internalization theory by linking individual, group and intergroup perspectives against a more socially nuanced, interactionist and dynamic view of MNEs and their decision-making.

Contrary to the widely held belief in the linear positive effects of business relationships (BRELs) on performance outcomes, the authors posit that the quality of a manager's BRELs with a foreign business partner has an inverted curvilinear effect on managing challenges arising out of institutional differences between two countries, which the authors define as institutional success. The authors further propose that managers' global role complexity (GRC) negatively impacts institutional success and dampens the inverted curvilinear effects of BRELs on institutional success.

The proposed model is tested using questionnaire survey data from 186 senior Indian managers doing business with New Zealand.

The authors find significant support for the inverted curvilinear effects of BRELs and the negative effects of GRC on institutional success. They did not find significant results for the moderating role of GRC on the inverted curvilinear relationship between BRELs and institutional success. However, significant linear interactive effects of GRC and BREL are evident.

The key managerial implication is that managers should focus on building BRELs of appropriate quality with their overseas counterparts to keep producing relational rents. They should, however, also be sensitive to when such relational rents start to be eroded by internal and external factors and treat them as a dynamic equilibrium rather than a static one.

The study findings challenge the assumption of linear positive effects of BRELs within the relational view. They highlight the significance of BRELs, even for emerging economy managers doing business in advanced economies.

Relationships are a critical success factor for business operations across markets with dominant Chinese culture, like Taiwan. The intersection of a high-quality institutional environment and a traditional Chinese cultural background in Taiwan provides a unique setting for exploring different types of relational mechanisms and ensuing renqing practices (i.e. reciprocal exchange of favors with empathy). The purpose of this paper is to examine when, where and how Taiwanese high-performance organizations manage and deploy interorganizational renqing across their business relationship portfolios. Answering these questions can help build a theory of interorganizational renqing and advance interorganizational reciprocity theorization more generally.

This research is motivated by two key research questions. First is related to how renqing givers understand renqing in the context of their organizations and their interorganizational business relationship portfolios. Second, whether organizations prefer a neutral renqing balance, a renqing debt or a renqing surplus is another point of interest. The study is based on interviews with upper echelon elite informants at six high-performing Taiwanese organizations with business relationship portfolios worldwide.

It is found that interorganizational renqing is deployed as a hybrid resource, taking on the functions of both an investment and a type of insurance against risk. Two notable differences between interorganizational and interpersonal renqing are also noted. First, the social exchange norm aspect of renqing points to salient social exchange norms also in interorganizational exchanges. This confirms the importance of understanding not only the regulative and normative dimensions of business relationships, as a type of institution, but also the cognitive dimensions and underlying institutional logics. Second, this study shows that unlike at the interpersonal level, the notion of renqing debt is not common at the interorganizational level – at least not within high-performance organizations with market leader positions.

This study explores interorganizational renqing practices and their strategic deployment through the use of “accessing” and “embedding” relational mechanisms. The study also adds to the poorly understood nature of interorganizational reciprocity and provides support for developing a theory of interorganizational renqing, as a form of interorganizational reciprocity within a Chinese cultural context.

The purpose of this paper is to address the misapplication of the embeddedness concept in Ferraris’s (2014) paper and show how it needs to be used as a cornerstone economic sociology concept within his proposed framework. This paper is a response to his paper in the Multinational Business Review “Rethinking the literature on ‘multiple embeddedness’ and subsidiary-specific advantages”.

The paper outlines the origin of the embeddedness concept and its evolution within the economic sociology literature. It addresses different types of embeddedness and continues with a critical analysis of Ferraris’s (2014) proposed framework of four main types of multinational enterprise (MNE) relationships. It provides suggestions for its improvement and application, as well as discusses the appropriate applications of embeddedness concept by international business (IB) scholars in MNE research.

The paper shows how the embeddedness concept is mostly used as a metaphor and as a simple umbrella label for different types of connections between MNEs, their subsidiaries and different types of environments. The analysis of Ferraris’s (2014) proposed framework shows how MNE embeddedness is incorrectly understood as emanating from the balancing of local responsiveness and global integration within MNEs, where subsidiaries develop subsidiary-specific advantages (SSAs) by recombining home – host country-specific advantages and parent – subsidiary firm-specific advantages (FSAs).

The paper adds to the existing IB understanding of MNEs’ multiple embeddedness and subsidiaries’ dual embeddedness through a wider and more structured economic sociology perspective. It provides an appropriate economic sociology-grounded typology of different types of embeddedness. A discussion of possible future research directions stresses how the embeddedness – dissembeddedness capability is a key source of MNE competitive advantage, which moderates the actual recombination process of producing FSAs and SSAs.

This is a response to “Taming wicked problems”, a paper recently published in CPOIB in which modern slavery is framed as a wicked problem. The purpose of this study is to convey the author’s appraisal of its contribution to policymaking regarding modern slavery in global supply chains.

The author engages in a discursive review of “Taming wicked problems”, taking inspiration from its perceived strengths and weaknesses to expand on the problem of modern slavery as a challenge to international business (IB) researchers.

“Taming wicked problems” is welcomed as a provocative contribution to modern slavery research in IB, although it is perceived to give too little critical attention to the problem of modern slavery itself.

This is, by design, a subjective assessment of the treatment of modern slavery and policy from the perspective of an IB researcher who has previously studied the phenomenon without a wicked problem framing.

Modern slavery is a serious problem for IB scholars, as they have failed to extrapolate it from their analysis of international business strategy. This paper is intended to advance the disciplinary defence of vulnerable workers exploited to the ultimate benefit of MNEs.

IB must engage critically with international business strategies that heighten the risk of human rights violations. The persistence of modern slavery disadvantages all persons in employment.

This paper seeks to better define the offense implicit in modern slavery so to inform critical IB research into its causes and deterrence.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the link between selected market orientation dimensions, HRM, and innovation, and their impact on organizational performance before and during the current economic crisis in Slovenia.

The data for the analysis are drawn from a longitudinal cross‐sectional study of the 101 best Slovenian employers between 2008 and 2009. Altogether, over 15,000 respondents and more than 170 companies took part in the study, making it the largest of its kind in Slovenia and southeast Europe. The research method applied in the paper is exploratory and consists of simple paired comparisons of univariate and bivariate statistics, as well as factor analysis, regression analysis, and correlation analysis.

The results show that customer expectations regarding trust and long‐term performance have a positive impact on HRM practices within a firm, that HRM positively impacts organizational performance, and that innovation unexpectedly impacts it negatively (at least in the short‐term). No significant relationships between customer expectations of services, quality, and price, and their impact on HRM and innovation, respectively, were found. However, the research partially confirms that the crisis is affecting organizational performance because companies are deploying more HRM practices and, unexpectedly, fewer innovation activities.

This paper explores market orientation, HRM, innovation, and performance‐related dimensions in a B2B relationship marketing context based on the results of an extensive longitudinal cross‐sectional company‐employee study conducted in Slovenia before and during the current economic downturn. The findings offer a unique glimpse into the impact of the current economic crisis on the observed links and relational dimensions, and also have important managerial implications.

The purpose of this paper is to apply an economic sociology perspective to the activity–resource–actor (ARA) interaction model for business relationships. Interaction has been chosen as a conceptual domain where economic sociology has a particularly high potential to advance business-to-business (B2B) marketing in terms of its future research directions.

The paper provides a structured account of economic sociology through the description of eight key economic sociology concepts and discussion of the structuration theory. This is followed by an overview of the usage of the eight key economic sociology concepts in current B2B marketing research, and concludes with outlining eight specific future research directions which guide future research on interaction in business relationships.

Eight economic sociology concepts are identified: embeddedness, networks, institutions, power, social capital, identity, social structures and cognition. An overview of the application of these constructs within the B2B marketing literature shows how most of them are used as metaphors with a gap in understanding their economic sociology background.

Future research directions are described individually, do not include potential interaction effects and are developed within the ARA interaction model framework. Given the conceptual nature of the paper, it does not provide any empirical data and illustrations related to any of the eight key economic sociology concepts.

The paper answers a call for a wider integration of economic sociology into the B2B marketing literature. It provides a systematic eight-concept economic sociology framework to be used by B2B marketing theorists and researchers. The paper finishes with eight concrete future research directions through which an economic sociology perspective can help advance B2B marketing theory and business relationship management practice. A brief discussion of managerial implications is also provided at the end.

The purpose of this paper is to systematically describe the evolution of Bartlett and Ghoshal's transnational typology within an appropriate historical context, and to additionally review key antecedent works of other authors who contributed to its evolutionary nature.

The paper presents a comprehensive review of the literature by combining an evolutionary perspective with a Chandlerian business history approach.

The paper shows how Bartlett and Ghoshal's transnational solution concept was developed in light of the global economic changes of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the managerial and strategic challenges faced by US MNCs. It shows how the transnational solution concept should not be seen as a single work, but rather the outcome of an academic discourse which lasted over a decade. The review of Bartlett and Ghoshal's stream of work since the mid 1980s also shows how the transnational solution concept developed gradually into its present form and through the integration of several antecedent concepts.

This paper describes not just the actual evolution of Bartlett and Ghoshal's transnational typology, but also systematically identifies and analyzes key antecedent works by other authors. This analysis has been overlooked and is at the same time key to the understanding of their typology. The employed evolutionary and business history perspectives within this paper are new to the international management literature. They should be especially valuable for graduate students and scholars who employ Bartlett and Ghoshal's typology, or anyone who wishes to understand the Zeitgeist of the time articulated by this seminal work, which will soon celebrate its 25th anniversary.