Management International Review

Service Multinationals: Their Past, Present, and Future

Opening the 'Non-Manufacturing' Envelope: The Next Big Enterprise for International Business Research

This study surveys recent work, published in four International Business journals, that has focused on the non-manufacturing sector which includes the "services" sector. It documents the nature of scholarship in this area, identifies opportunities for future work, highlights some important challenges of undertaking such work, and suggest a few starting points for a more systematic study of this vital sector of the economy. The findings highlight a largely barren academic landscape vis-a-vis r...

A New Perspective On the Regional and Global Strategies of Multinational Services Firms

This article explores the differences in international strategy between multinational enterprises (MNE) in services and manufacturing, especially in terms of their international diversification, as measured by their sales and asset dispersion. The longitudinal data show that the largest MNEs in services have a much stronger home-region orientation than manufacturing MNEs. Large MNEs in the services sector average 83.9% of their sales in their home region, which is significantly higher than la...

Rethinking the Paradigm of Service Internationalisation: Less Resource-Intensive Market Entry Modes for Information-Intensive Soft Services

The service sector is becoming increasingly important in the global economy; this is especially true for "soft" services involved in providing information and knowledge-based solutions. It has been suggested that soft service firms are restricted to internationalizing through market entry modes requiring substantial resource commitment, such as wholly owned subsidiaries and equity based joint ventures. This article argues that this assessment is based on overly simplistic assumptions regardin...

The Influence of Human Capital Investment On the Exports of Services and Goods: An Analysis of the Top 25 Services Outsourcing Countries

With the rise of the global service economy, an understanding of the export competitiveness of nations is critical for managers seeking offshore export locations, and for government policy makers who wish to bolster the attractiveness of their nation as an exporting location. Services globalization calls into question the role of human capital investment, whose effect in past studies has been mixed. Drawing on human capital theory, this article developed three propositions and analyzed the ef...

Offshoring Propensity in Information Technology Services: A Firm and Country Level Analysis

This conceptual paper examines the dynamics of the offshoring of information technology (IT) service work. It considers this important emerging phenomenon from multiple lenses, especially those of international business theories. Research propositions are developed based on the perspectives of home country firms, host nation and the dynamic interactions between the two. Questions for future research are suggested. Already established nations in the field get more opportunities than the new en...

Internationalization of Retail Banks: A Micro-Level Study of the Multinationality-Performance Relationship

This study discusses the underlying reasons for the variant nature of the relationship between multinationality and firm performance in the context of service firms. To date, this line of research has mostly used evidence from manufacturing firms, despite the ever-increasing contribution of service firms to national and global economies. We conduct an exploratory study using case analyses of large European retail banks. We argue that the nature of the multinationality-performance relationship...