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

Zusammenfassung

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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 recent academic work pertaining to the non-manufacturing sector in general and services sector per se in particular. Therein lies a monumental opportunity for the discipline as a whole.

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Auszug

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

For men are prone to go it blind,

Along the calf-paths of the mind,

And work away from sun to sun,

To do what other men have done.

They follow in the beaten track,

And out and in, and forth and back,

And still their devious course pursue,

To keep the path that others do.

Sam Walter Foss

Academic work is generally known to lag empirical trends. So it is not surprising that, as a community of aspiring scholars, we have trailed a key economic phenomenon: The rising significance of now-manufacturing sector to the world economy. This sector comprises of primary as well as tertiary (or service) sectors, the latter being the center of this focused issue. Between 2000 and 2006, the most recent year for which data were available, the stock of worldwide outward FDI doubled from about USD 6,210 billion to about USD 12,474 billion (in current prices) - much of it fueled by M&As (World Investment Report 2007). In 2000, M&As in the service sector alone accounted for nearly 75 percent of total value of these transactions as measured in current prices in US dollars, roughly USD 1,144 billion. In 2006, although the corresponding statistic fell to 60 percent, the dollar value of M&As in the service sector still was a staggering amount, USD 880 billion. Moreover, the service sector dominated M&A activity in terms of the number of deals: In 2000, almost 63 percent of total M&A deals (approximately 7,900 deals) occurred in the service sector; this statistic remained largely u...

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