Search

The article discusses a study on the intellectual structure of global competitiveness (GC) research. Topics mentioned include the differences between the overall GC publications and marketing and international business GC articles, and the theoretical perspectives that have impacted the GC domain including the resource-based view of the firm, market orientation, industrial organization, and transaction cost economics. Also provided are the implications and limitations of the study.

Relationship marketing is a central and important tenet in marketing thought, and considerable research effort in the discipline has been devoted to examining various facets of relationship marketing, resulting in a large body of knowledge. In this study, the authors specifically focus on the international dimension of the relationship marketing literature and use citation and cocitation data to identify and unfold its intellectual foundations. The goal is to provide new and meaningful avenues for further research using the knowledge structure on which international relationship marketing stands. The examination of the literature spans more than 40 years, divided into three time periods that permit detection of longitudinal trends as well as meaningful visual representations of the cocitation data. Overall, the authors survey 29 key publications and identify 3,509 articles that include 230,684 citations, examining the data for 1972-1993, 1994-2003, and 2004-2013 to unfold research possibilities. Drawing on the analysis of emergent multidimensional scaling results, the authors discuss potential international relationship marketing research incorporating social relations and networking, new ventures, internationalization, trust and commitment, tacit knowledge, and cultural values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine articles published in the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS) and introduce a typology to support the relevance of intra-country variation in international business (IB). Based on social network theory, our analysis uses multidimensional scaling to study 53,203 citations from 1158 qualifying JIBS articles to determine the journal's social structure. The results indicate that three current research clusters (multinational enterprise knowledge development, foreign entry and cultural effects, and the internationalization process and national culture) are based on established IB theory. Then we respond to calls in the literature to improve research concerning intra-country variation, and propose a typology of three dimensions (social, demographic, and geographic) to study the diversity of individual, firm, and economic activity in a country. The social dimension evaluates the importance of modernist and traditionalist values, the demographic dimension proposes differences between urban and rural settings, and the geographic dimension discusses the relevance of border and interior locations. We suggest a nested typology that unifies these three dimensions for continued use in IB. Future research opportunities related to JIBS's social structure and the intra-country variation typology are recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the current intellectual clusters in the sourcing literature? How do these clusters relate to each other? How has sourcing-related research changed over the last 10 years? We respond to these questions by examining the intellectual structure of research in the sourcing literature across 21 journals during the last decade (1998–2007). Multidimensional scaling is used to analyze cocitation data involving 72,003 citations from 1,960 sourcing articles. The results indicate that 10 different sourcing clusters emerged in the 1998–2002 period and 6 sourcing clusters surfaced in the 2003–2007 period. Five of the intellectual clusters in 1998–2002 disappeared in 2003–2007, five clusters remained, and one new cluster materialized in 2003–2007 that did not exist in the earlier period (Managerial Behavior and Upstream Decision Making). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]