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The rapidly changing international business landscape, driven by dynamic factors such as technology, emerging markets, and unpredictable crises, demands that organizations innovate to survive while gaining and sustaining competitive advantages. Culture, an intricate multilevel construct, presents challenges for transnational enterprises and international business as a key “soft” element of organizational strategy.

This paper employs a triangulated method combining a systematic literature search, machine learning, and qualitative thematic content analysis to explore the relationship between culture and innovation within the context of international business. The analysis involved scrutinizing 697 journal articles indexed in the Web of Science database.

Using k-means, which is an unsupervised machine-learning tool in Python, and hypertext preprocessor language scripting, we identified seven topic clusters and 94 keywords. Qualitative thematic content analysis facilitated the recognition of prevailing patterns in researchers' conceptualizations of the interplay between innovation and culture. We identified influential relationships between cultural configurations and innovation.

Our analysis contributes to developing a comprehensive research field map encompassing international business, innovation, and culture.

This study significantly enhances our knowledge of culture and international innovation. Future research that recognizes culture as a dynamic configuration at multiple levels (e.g. national, organizational, professional, and individual) and employs more comprehensive measures of innovation and culture could substantially advance our understanding of the intersection of culture and innovation in international business.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between culture and regional innovation performance in China where innovation is deemed as a key for sustainable economic development. The diversity of China’s regional culture and its rising economic and innovative capability enhancement provides an opportunity for such an exploration.

This paper adopts the GLOBE’s nine cultural dimensions to empirically examine the relationship between culture and Chinese regional innovation performance through multiple regression analysis.

The study results find that performance orientation and gender egalitarianism have positive and significant influences on regional innovation performance, while institutional collectivism has a negative and significant influence. The remaining six GLOBE cultural dimensions show no significant effect on regional innovation performance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research exploring the relationship between culture and regional innovation performance in a Chinese context by using GLOBE’s cultural dimensions that are deemed as a valuable empirical alternative to Hofstede’s cultural measures. The results of this study help further the understanding of the cultural influence in China’s regional innovation performance.

The purpose of this paper was to explore the role of empowering leadership, organizational climate for initiative and job autonomy in spurring innovative work behavior (IWB).

This study resorted to the structural equation modeling technique along the Bayesian estimation approach to analyze the mediating role of the organizational climate for initiative and job autonomy in the empowering leadership-IWB link in data gathered from CEOs, middle managers and non-managerial employees of 444 small and medium enterprises in Morocco.

The findings revealed that empowering leadership is a prerequisite of IWB as subordinates, who are empowered by their leaders, demonstrate IWB. Further, organizational climate for initiative and job autonomy mediate the empowering leadership-IWB link.

This research has demonstrated that firms and organizational leaders who seek to make their middle managers innovative in their job should adopt empowering leadership practices, build an organizational climate that is favorable for initiative-taking and grant middle managers with autonomy in the way they carry out their tasks.

This paper extends our understanding on the mechanisms linking empowering leadership and IWB by testing the mediating effects of organizational climate for initiative and job autonomy.

Sustainable development is a central issue for the world economy today. The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are associated with both responsible business practices and strategic orientation for competitive advantages. While most multinational enterprises (MNEs) want to ensure that their businesses will maintain or even enhance sustainability across borders, they face enormous challenges, often due to a lack of capabilities and inefficient institutions in host countries. In the nexus between the SDGs and international business (IB) research, the contexts of emerging markets and developing countries have particular significance, because they impose complex constraints on the achievement of the SDGs. At the same time, there is a high potential for MNEs to have positive effects internationally through their sustainable practices. This chapter discusses the recent trend in IB research on sustainability by showcasing current issues addressing several interrelated SDGs. The exemplary topics touch upon child labor, innovation for social sustainability, challenges in the green transition, MNE activities associated with the pollution haven, and health and safety concerns in global supply chains. The discussion cuts across various contextual settings and calls for actions by all stakeholders, including business entities, governments, and scholars.

This paper analyses what is understood by the “key players” involved in the promotion of benchmarking, within a comparative context looking at Germany and the UK. A content analysis of the key components of benchmarking in the leading texts is undertaken which is then used to examine the position and role of employer organizations, professional consultancies, trade unions and government bodies in the dissemination and implementation of benchmarking at the company level. The paper concludes with a critique of benchmarking. It is argued that the different contexts in which the key players are embedded define their ability to voice scepticism about the conventional presentation of benchmarking as a benign and objective technique.

This paper aims to unfold the path of how the complexity of culture issues leads to a rising pressure for paradigm changes in the research on culture in international management. In terms of academic debate about culture, the crucial paradigm shift has not yet happened. Research and writing are still dominated by a mechanistic-rational approach which does not quite know to handle cultural phenomena which by nature are mutuable, often transient and invariably context-specific. Rising pressure is observed for paradigm changes through three main trends: integration of West-East dichotomy, coexistence of convergence and divergence; and dynamic vs static perspectives. It is argued that the unresolved debate on the culture construct and its measurement, the epistemological stance by researchers and associated methodological choices in culture studies reinforce these trends pressuring for a paradigm shift.

This paper reviews the knowledge based on culture studies to establish the contributions of culture studies in international business and the foundation of its knowledge base. The conceptual foundation of culture, its multi-level and multi-dimensionality and critical issues in research epistemology and methodology are analyzed to discuss emerging trends in the process of an imminent paradigm change.

By unfolding the nature of abstract and high-order definition of culture, the focus is on deciphering the complex construct and multi-level and multi-dimensionality in measurement, which, in turn, interact with the epistemology of culture researchers and the choice of methodology used to carry out culture studies. Eventually the interaction of the three studied elements drives the proposed three paradigmatic changes in the evolving business environment.

The identified trends in existing culture research keep the importance of culture studies in international business management thriving as we point to their relevance for the envisaged paradigm shift.

The three paradoxes discussed challenge researchers who aim to contribute to the knowledge base of culture in international business. In addition, the debate cannot be ignored by international business managers as culture is a key informal institutional driver that influences international business performance.

The review of the knowledge base on culture studies in management contributes to a better understanding of the envisaged paradigmatic shift of the discipline. The debate on the complexity of culture studies is extended to three tendencies for potential paradigmatic change, with implications discussed to suggest future research.

A cascade of crises that materialized in particular over the 2019–2022 period, increases the relevance for international business (IB) scholarship to address the following question: whether, to what extent and under what circumstances can multinational enterprises (MNEs) rescue the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and make sure that nobody is left behind in a globalized world where the opposite seems to be the case? For many MNEs, slow progress in implementing the SDGs in a more strategic and transformational manner does not necessarily hint at a lack of interest with management, but also at a lack of solid knowledge and/or experience in how to implement general development ambitions like the SDGs. This introductory chapter defines the intellectual and managerial challenges ahead. It refers to relevant efforts already done in the IB community – with reference to IB journals that issued special editions on the topic – and explains why five angles have been chosen to cluster the contributions in this volume which are also aimed to enhance further progress in the study of MNEs and the SDGs: (1) general, (2) strategic, (3) operational, (4) contextual and (5) misbehavior.