CfPs: Management and Internationalization of Latin America´s Firms

International Journal of Business and Emerging Markets (IJBEM)

ISSN print: 1753-6219 | ISSN online: 1753-6227

Call for Papers for the Special IJBEM Issue on

Management and Internationalization of Latin America's Firms

Submission deadline: October 31, 2015

Guest Editors: Dr. Ilan Avrichir (iavrichir@espm.br) and Dr. Felipe Borini
Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing – ESPM, São Paulo, Brazil


Latin America (LA) grows faster, attracts more foreign domestic investment (FDI), and is more populous than the European Union and North America. Though its stock of inward FDI matches that of China, top management journals have given little attention to the region, while conferences, journals, and specialists on China abound. Even when scholars have examined LA, they have focused more on addressing disciplinary issues than on providing insights about the region’s specific issues.

The purpose of this special issue is therefore to promote research that focuses on the economic, cultural, geographical, and/or social conditions specific to LA. We seek articles that test the validity of results obtained in other contexts or that develop or empirically verify new concepts and hypotheses concerning conditions particular to LA.


Suitable questions for these topics would include, but are not limited to, the following:

• · What challenges and opportunities do the relatively low levels of economic and institutional development, as well as high dependence on commodity exports, that predominate in the region confront and offer to companies operating in it? 
• · What managerial and leadership styles are compatible with the scarcity of resources that tend to be significantly greater in LA than in most economically advanced regions? What are characteristics of these styles, and how can they be developed and/or promoted? 
• · What managerial and leadership styles are compatible with features such as orality, informality, and flexibility that research indicates characterize LA’s cultural cluster? Does speaking about a Latin American way of management make sense? Or, is it reasonable to expect one to develop? 
• · Why are negative phenomena such as corruption and the low level of innovation so common, and what measures and experiences have been successful in confronting and mitigating these phenomena? 
• · In what ways and to what extent are the characteristics of the internationalization of LA firms similar or different to those of other regions? How and why is entrepreneurial orientation related to these characteristics? 
• · Do social, economic, and environmental sustainability assume different significance in the context of the region? If so, in what ways should firms seeking to be sustainable act differently in LA than in other locations? 
• · Why have some firms in LA been successful amid international competition despite the adverse circumstances that they must negotiate? How do these firms circumvent the liability of origin? Is their performance linked to comparative advantages? What lessons can be learned from their experiences? 

Important Dates

• · Submission of manuscripts: October 31, 2015 
• · Comments to authors: January 31, 2016 
• · Revised paper submission: April 30, 2016 
• · Publication in late 2016 or early 2017 

Paper submissions

All papers must be submitted online. For more details and the submission link, please see the web page http://www.inderscience.com/info/ingeneral/cfp.php?id=2913.

If you experience any problems submitting your paper online, please contact the publishers via e-mail at submissions@inderscience.com – describing the exact problems you are experiencing. Include in your message: the title of the Special Issue; the title of the Journal; the name of the Guest Editor; your name and your return e-mail address.

Notes for Authors

• · Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. (N.B. Conference papers may only be submitted if the paper was not originally copyrighted and if it has been completely re-written). 
• · All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors, sample copies and other relevant information for submitting papers are available on the Author Guidelines page. 
• · All authors must declare that they have read and agreed to the content of the submitted article. Here is a full statement of our Ethical Guidelines for Authors page. 

Call for chapters. Special issue: New Wine in Old Bottles? The Role of Emerging Markets Multinationals in advancing IB Theory and Research.

International Journal of Emerging Markets

Call for Papers for Special Issue on

New Wine in Old Bottles? The Role of Emerging Markets Multinationals in advancing IB Theory and Research.


Special Issue Editors:

• Bersant Hobdari (Copenhagen Business School)
• Lourdes Casanova (Cornell University)
• Peter Hertenstein (University of Cambridge)

In many respects, multinationals are a defining invention of Western economies. But like much else, they are no longer the preserve of the West. The emerging economies are producing business giants of their own at a staggering rate. While these businesses share the scale and ambition of their developed-world counterparts, their processes and patterns of growth are often dissimilar to those of their competitors in the developed world. They are success stories that are changing the narrative rules as they go along.

As emerging market countries gain in stature, their companies are taking center stage. Emerging market companies accounted for over 40 percent of world exports and around a quarter of outward foreign direct investment investments flows (UNCTAD, 2012; Contractor, 2013). These emerging market companies will continue to be critical competitors in their home markets while increasingly making outbound investments into other emerging and developed economies. Working to serve customers of limited means, the emerging market leaders often produce innovative designs that reduce manufacturing costs and sometimes disrupt entire industries. 

The state of the literature is divided in between those who claim that emerging market multinationals are similar to their Western counterparts and those who claim that these multinationals are a new phenomenon requiring new theories and frameworks. Arguments in support of new theoretical models in which EMNEs can contribute to IB theory can be divided into two streams. Ramamurti (2009), on the one side of the argument stresses the role of country of origin and other contextual factors in shaping emerging market multinationals internationalization strategies. In this respect, there is a need for empirically grounded research to discover ownership-specific advantages of emerging market multinationals, which either help or hinder internationalization process (Ramamurti, 2012). On the other side of the debate, others, like Dunning, Kim, and Park (2008) and Williamson and Zeng (2009), give reasons to believe that emerging market multinationals do not behave differently because of their origin, but because of fundamental changes in the world economy. As a consequence, emerging market multinationals would act similar to young multinationals from developed countries. In between these opposing views, Cuervo-Cazurra (2012) argues that the behavior of emerging market multinationals can be explained by extending and modifying the existing models rather than building new ones. Gammeltoft et. al. (2010) stress the role of macro and micro perspectives when analyzing the dynamics of emerging market multinationals. 

Consequently, we are soliciting empirical and theoretical work addressing these complex relationships between various forms of contextual heterogeneities and emerging market multinationals. This special issue provides an opportunity to bring together the research of scholars from a diverse range of disciplinary traditions such as economics, sociology and political science. As such, the following list of potential research questions is merely illustrative of the broad range of studies that could fit in the special issue:

• · Are emerging market multinationals different from similar-aged developing market multinationals?
• · Does the change in global economic conditions call for a radical change in the behavior of multinationals?
• · What opportunities do fine sliced global value chains open for entry and upgrading of emerging market multinationals in the global economy?
• · Can emerging market multinationals help broaden the concept of ownership advantages beyond the traditional definition including technology and brand value?
• · Does availability of finance and existence of internal capital markets shape the response of emerging market multinationals to the financial crisis?
• · Do emerging market multinationals use CRS and sustainability initiatives as sources competitive advantage? 
• · Are there contextual elements that make emerging market multinationals truly unique?
• · How does corporate governance affect internationalization strategies of emerging market multinationals?
• · What are the dynamics of the interrelationship between institutional change and corporate strategy?
• · Do emerging market multinationals possess institutional capabilities that can be transferred across borders?

Deadlines, Submission Guidelines and Co-Editor Information

Submissions to the Special Issue must be submitted through the IJoEM website. The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2016. For general submission guidelines, see http://www.emeraldinsight.com/products/journals/author_guidelines.htm?id=ijoem. No late submissions will be accepted. We have a marked preference for submissions which debate with, extend, and/or refute the indicative literature cited below. Please indicate that your submission is to be reviewed for the Special Issue on Emerging Economy Multinationals.

Papers will be blind peer-reviewed. We will make initial editorial decisions by June, 2016. Authors invited to revise and resubmit their work will be invited to present the papers at the IJoEM special issue workshop to be held at the 5th conference on “Emerging Economy Multinationals” at Copenhagen Business School in Copenhagen, Denmark during September/October 2016.

The papers accepted and presented at the workshop will be considered for publication in a special issue of the IJoEM. Presentation at the workshop does not necessarily guarantee publication in the special issue. The combination of a workshop and a special issue nevertheless follows a highly successful template to bring out the full potential of authors and papers. For questions about the special issue, please contact Bersant Hobdari, Guest Editor, at bh.int@cbs.dk.

Indicative Contemporary Literature

• Aharoni, Y. 2014. "To understand EMNEs a dynamic IB contingency theory is called for." International Journal of Emerging Markets 9(3): 377 – 385.
• Buckley, P. J. 2014. “Forty years of internationalisation theory and the multinational enterprise.” Multinational Business Review 22 (3): 227-245.
• Contractor, F. J. 2013. “Punching above their weight.” International Journal of Emerging Market 8(4): 304-328.
• Cuervo-Cazurra A. and Genc M. 2008. “Transforming disadvantages into advantages: developing country MNEs in the least developed countries.” Journal of International Business Studies 39: 957–979.
• Cuervo-Cazurra A. 2012. “Extending theory by analyzing developing country multinational companies: Solving the Goldilocks debate.” Global Strategy Journal 2: 153-147.
• Cuervo-Cazurra A. and Ramamurti, R. (eds). 2014. Understanding multinaitonals from emerging markets. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K.
• Dunning J. H., Kim C., and Park D. 2008 , “Old wine in new bottles: a comparison of emerging-market TNCs today and developed-country TNCs thirty years ago”, in The Rise of Transnational Corporations from Emerging Markets: Threat or Opportunity?, Sauvant K. (ed), Edward Elgar: Northampton, MA.
• Gammeltoft, P., J.P. Pradhan and A. Goldstein (2010), ‘Emerging multinationals: home and host country determinants and outcomes’, International Journal of Emerging Markets, 5(3/4): 254-265.
• Gammeltoft, P., H. Barnard and A. Madhok (2010), ‘Emerging Multinationals, Emerging Theory: Macro- and Micro-Level Perspectives’, Journal of International Management, 16(2): 95-101.
• Gammeltoft, Peter, Filatotchev, Igor and Hobdari, Bersant. 2012. “Emerging Multinational Companies and Strategic Fit: A Contingency Framework and Future Research Agenda.” European Management Journal, 30(3): 175-188.
• Narula, Rajneesh, (2012). Do we need different frameworks to explain infant MNEs from developing countries? Global Strategy Journal 2(3), 188-204. 
• Ramamurti, R. 2012. “What is really different about emerging market multinationals?” Global Strategy Journal 2: 41-47.
• Ramamurti, R. 2009. “What have we learned about emerging-market MNEs?” In Emerging Multinationals in Emerging Markets, Ramamurti R, Singh JV (eds). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K.: 399–426.
• UNCTAD. 2012. World Investment Report 2012: Towards a New Generation of Investment Policies. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development; Geneva, Switzerland.
• Williamson P and Zeng M. 2009, “Chinese multinationals: emerging through new global gateways”, in Emerging Multinationals in Emerging Markets, Ramamurti R. and Singh J. (eds), Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, U.K.