A Multidisciplinary Cognitive Behavioural Framework of Impulse Buying: A Systematic Review of the Literature

Impulse buying (IB) is one of the most fragmented concepts in the marketing and consumer literature. This has resulted in some contradictory findings and a lack of an overarching theoretical framework for understanding the IB process and its outcomes. Based on a systematic review of the literature published over the past 60 years, the authors synthesize various research perspectives into a comprehensive multidisciplinary framework of IB – linking antecedents, triggers, the buying act and post‐purchase outcomes. The paper makes four specific contributions relevant to both academic researchers and practitioners. First, it provides a comprehensive understanding of IB as a process and outcome, by systematically reviewing the existing literature. Second, it specifically recognizes and discusses the triggers of IB, by drawing on literature related to the buying process, intentions and motivations. Third, this is the first meta‐analysis review in the area. Finally, it considers the potential consequences of IB that lead to subsequent IB, and provides a framework for future investigation. This paper also addresses a problem of relevance to both academics and practitioners, proposing further research and managerial implications.     

The Concept of International Opportunity in International Entrepreneurship: A Review and a Research Agenda

Recent research in the field of international entrepreneurship (IE) has emphasized the concept of international opportunity. The entrepreneurial behaviors focused on international opportunities have been found to be critical in IE. International opportunities, however, are often depicted in rather abstract and unspecified ways, and the research suffers from narrow theoretical discussion in relation to the concept of opportunity. To address these issues, the authors draw from entrepreneurship research and present alternative conceptualizations of opportunities as a basis for more in‐depth study of international opportunities in IE. To further articulate a future research agenda, the authors review the state of knowledge on opportunities in the IE field by content‐analyzing articles published between 1989 and 2012. All the analyzed articles incorporate the concept of opportunity into their studies. It is found that, although the IE research has investigated many relevant elements, it is rather limited in the articulation of the conceptual features of international opportunities and opportunity‐focused behaviors. Building on these observations, the authors propose a definition of international opportunity and research questions and strategies to advance IE research on international opportunities.     

SMEs and Marketing: A Systematic Literature Review

This paper presents a systematic review of recent academic literature analysing the role, organization and management of marketing activities in small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). To this end, 310 articles published between 2006 and 2015 in 69 main journals devoted to small firms/entrepreneurship and management/marketing fields were analysed. This review shows that SMEs’ marketing has received great attention in both management and marketing literature in recent years. Findings reveal, on the one hand, the emerging role of networks and information and communication technologies in marketing behaviour by SMEs, and on the other hand a research gap in terms of specific marketing practices. Entrepreneurial marketing has been used as the main conceptual framework in reviewed studies, even if findings overall still point out a distance between the theoretical bases of reviewed contributions and the study of SMEs’ marketing behaviour and practices. Therefore, future research on the role of resources, relationships and networks could benefit from the combination of theories developed within the field of entrepreneurship with other approaches such as the resource‐based view, the dynamic capabilities theory and the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) framework.     

The Internationalization of Chinese Firms: A Critical Review and Future Research*

The important phenomenon that the internationalization of Chinese firms (ICF) represents has attracted increasing interest from scholars from multiple fields over the past 20 years (1991–2010). Although this proliferation of research has the potential to significantly improve understanding of Chinese multinational enterprises (MNEs), the necessary step of consolidating and integrating extant knowledge is absent. This paper reviews the scholarship on the ICF and offers insights into the specific areas in critical need of further development. By focusing on articles published in major scholarly journals during the period 1991–2010, the authors develop a coherent framework to organize and review conceptual and empirical findings from disciplines as far ranging as management, international business, cross‐culture and area studies. Within the reviewed literature, three primary streams of enquiry are identified which focus on the antecedents, processes and outcomes of the ICF. Achievements within each of the three research streams are carefully reviewed using content analysis, whereby a number of important issues are identified which have remained consistently untouched, and recommendations are provided for future research, aimed at developing a more integrated research agenda on the ICF for management and international business scholars.     

Routines in International Business: A semi-systematic review of the concept

Routines are a crucial element in different streams of International Business (IB) research. This semi-systematic review examines articles published in top-ranked IB journals to analyze how the concept routines is used, in order to provide orientations for future research in the field. A systematic search process in three databases, followed by inductive text analysis and a cluster analysis, identifies three distinct research streams on routines in International Business: Global strategy, international organizational learning, and internationalization processes. A comprehensive analysis of the use of the concept in IB is presented by documenting qualities, types, dimensions, antecedents, and consequences of routines in the extant research. We integrate the fragmented and often implicit aspects ascribed to routines in IB research, so that future research can draw upon a defragmented, synthesized, and clarified concept. Opportunities for future contributions are highlighted in five broad areas: hierarchy and order in the MNE; agents, context, and time; distributing routines; distributed routines; and the non-routine.     

Does Outsourcing Really Improve Firm Performance? Empirical Evidence and Research Agenda

The phenomenon of outsourcing has spawned a rich body of scholarly work in the last two decades. Yet, the answer to one important question has remained elusive: Does outsourcing really improve firm performance? Addressing this question is important as firms across nations continue to embark on the practice of outsourcing to save operating costs and remain competitive. Scholars, practitioners and policy‐makers need to understand whether and how outsourcing benefits the firm. However, no comprehensive review of empirical evidence has been published so far that can address this question. This study reviews 57 empirical research articles that investigated the outsourcing–firm performance relationship in 47 peer‐reviewed scholarly journals over a 20‐year time‐span (1996–2015). The articles differ widely in research scope, context, level of analysis, data source, time‐span, industry sector, extent of outsourcing and measure of performance. The findings suggest that outsourcing can produce positive, negative, mixed, moderated or no significant impact on the firm. This study also provides useful directions for future research on outsourcing and firm performance.     

Family Business Performance from a Governance Perspective: A Review of Empirical Research

Given the complexity of the family business phenomenon, empirical research has still reached no consensus on whether family control is beneficial or detrimental to firm performance. To shed new light on this issue, this paper covers more than 350 articles published in 37 top finance and management journals. More specifically, it provides an in‐depth analysis of the family business governance system in three steps. First, after examining the various family business definitions and measures of performance used in empirical research, the authors discuss the findings on the direct effect of family control on performance in different geographical regions. Second, the authors pay special attention to the choice of ownership structures by business families and analyse how family owners influence strategic decisions faced by their corporations, including the succession process. Finally, the authors explore the interaction of family control with other governance devices to gain a better understanding of family firms' corporate decision‐making and performance. The holistic approach highlights the need to contemplate the multiple relations that exist among the various governance dimensions of family firms to explain their unique performance. In addition to enhancing understanding of family business conduct, the authors emphasize the need to go beyond the borders of the family firm to identify its external antecedents and consequences. By integrating the finance and management perspectives and analysing the theoretical frameworks and methodologies used in these disciplines, the review highlights the need for interdisciplinary collaboration to advance family business research and thus to consolidate it as a distinctive academic field.     

OFDI performance of EMNEs: A review and recommendations for future research

Outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) by emerging economy multinational enterprises (EMNEs) is an increasingly significant global economic phenomenon. A growing and extensive body of research has examined the OFDI performance outcomes of EMNEs. Our systematic review seeks to capture the diverse theoretical lenses adopted and advanced in this stream of research, synthesize empirical findings, identify methodological challenges, and recommend directions for future research. Following a comprehensive and rigorous literature review, we identified 175 relevant studies published from 2001 to 2020. Our review suggests that a wide range of theories across disciplinary boundaries have been applied, and in some cases extended, to understand the performance outcomes of the OFDI of EMNEs. Empirically, previous studies have focused on different performance dimensions when assessing the OFDI outcomes of EMNEs, and investigated antecedents and contingencies across micro, meso, and macro levels. Based on our review findings, we propose a number of future research directions to move this research stream forward.     

Small Business Social Responsibility: A Critical Multilevel Review,Synthesis and Research Agenda

Small‐business social responsibility (SBSR) related research is rapidly increasing in quantity, but is found in divergent literatures and disciplines. It is time to offer a comprehensive review that identifies, synthesizes and integrates previous research, and highlights the knowledge gaps and the way forward. This methodical search of the literature helped to identify 115 multidisciplinary peer‐reviewed academic articles appearing in high‐quality journals over the 1970–2016 period. Using a systematic and in‐depth content analysis technique, the authors reviewed the articles and identified the theories used, the national contextual focus and the methodological orientations in these articles. They also identified the predictors, outcomes, mediators and moderators of SBSR at the institutional, organizational and individual levels of analysis. This review helps to identify significant knowledge gaps in terms of the theoretical orientation, the national contextual focus, the core content under study, and the methods used. The authors offer numerous suggestions across these topics to help address the knowledge gaps and raise important questions for future research. The primary contributions of this paper are: delineating and summarizing a multilevel analysis of an emerging literature on SBSR; integrating contributions from a wide range of management disciplines and geographical contexts; extracting the potential theoretical contributions in this field; and informing directions for future research. The authors propose a research agenda that is theoretically relevant and innovative, and call for context‐ and size‐aware research on SBSR, using small‐business‐specific methodologies and measurements.     

Top Management Team Diversity: A Review of Theories and Methodologies

This paper reviews empirical research on top management team (TMT) diversity. A number of scholars have concluded that upper echelons findings, in particular in terms of the consequences of TMT heterogeneity, have been inconclusive. This review conducts an in‐depth analysis of conceptual and methodological issues related to upper echelons diversity studies and offers some directions for future research. Sixty journal articles, published in ten top international journals over a 22‐year period (1984–2005), were analyzed. The results suggest that upper echelons research is increasingly multidisciplinary in nature; however, in‐depth inquiries into the antecedents of TMT composition and the multilevel contextual influences on the implications of TMT heterogeneity are still needed. This review finds that clarity about level of analysis, both theoretically and empirically, remains an important issue in the field and thus a multilevel approach is strongly encouraged. Moreover, the complexity of diversity as a theoretical construct needs to be acknowledged and operationalized accordingly in upper echelons studies.     

Multinational enterprises' Entry Mode Strategies and Uncertainty: A Review and Extension

The issue of uncertainty has been one of the most important topics in the research on multinational enterprises' foreign market entry modes. This paper provides a conceptual review of the literature on the role of uncertainty in entry‐mode strategies. It is found that transaction cost theory has focused primarily on entry modes as a way of minimizing behavioural uncertainty, while research using the more recent real options approach has distinguished between endogenous and exogenous types of uncertainty and provided evidence that managing uncertainty through appropriate entry modes may lead to competitive advantage. By synthesizing the relevant literature, this paper provides some new perspectives and avenues for future research on uncertainty and entry‐mode choices by considering the impact of firm learning, prior experience and host market attractiveness.     

Institutional agency by MNEs: A review and future research agenda

Although the study of institutional agency by MNEs is gaining traction in the IB literature, there are gaps in our understanding of how MNEs purposively engage with institutions in home and host markets. By systematically reviewing 73 articles in 26 journals over a 17-year period, I assess the embeddedness of institutional agency in the IB field; and present key findings along societal and organizational field triggers, individual and organizational enablers and types of institutional agency, as well as the consequences for institutional maintenance, creation and transformation. The review demonstrates that very few IB studies explicitly examine MNEs' intentional actions in relation to institutions. Consequently, I call for an advancement in MNE strategy and structure debates to account for the ways in which MNEs can address institutional contradictions. I develop propositions on these as well as micro-level activities that offer opportunities for MNEs to display institutional agency, setting a clear agenda for future research.     

Perception and Communication of Flood Risks: A Systematic Review of Empirical Research

Flood hazards are the most common and destructive of all natural disasters. For decades, experts have been examining how flood losses can be mitigated. Just as in other risk domains, the study of risk perception and risk communication has gained increasing interest in flood risk management. Because of this research growth, a review of the state of the art in this domain is believed necessary. The review comprises 57 empirically based peer‐reviewed articles on flood risk perception and communication from the Web of Science and Scopus databases. The characteristics of these articles are listed in a comprehensive table, presenting research design, research variables, and key findings. From this review, it follows that the majority of studies are of exploratory nature and have not applied any of the theoretical frameworks that are available in social science research. Consequently, a methodological standardization in measuring and analyzing people's flood risk perceptions and their adaptive behaviors is hardly present. This heterogeneity leads to difficulties in comparing results among studies. It is also shown that theoretical and empirical studies on flood risk communication are nearly nonexistent. The article concludes with a summary on methodological issues in the fields of flood‐risk perception and flood‐risk communication and proposes an agenda for future research.     

Politics and Power within Multinational Corporations: Mainstream Studies,Emerging Critical Approaches and Suggestions for Future Research

Given the increased public interest in the use and misuse of power in multinationals in the aftermath of the financial crisis, it is notable that power relations in multinational corporations (MNCs) have not gained enhanced attention in the academic community. What is missing so far in the study of MNCs is a systematic examination of how power and politics within MNCs have been addressed in mainstream international business (IB) and sociological research studying the MNC. This paper starts by critically reviewing these two mainstream approaches in the study of MNCs as organizations and seeking to understand the shortcomings of former research. Next, it reviews new emergent critical perspectives, which the authors call socio‐political studies of MNCs, where power and politics are addressed not just more prominently, but also differently, from a more bottom‐up and actor‐centred perspective. After reviewing this emergent stream of research, the authors propose that future studies should take a more micro‐political perspective and focus in more detail on the micro‐foundations of power relations. In the concluding section, the authors show how future studies of MNCs can learn from both critical interactionist and discursive theories when analysing organizational politics and power relations. A framework is proposed for the study of micro‐level political game‐playing in MNCs, based on a three‐dimensional framework for organizational power (episodic, rules of the game and domination), and some key research questions for future studies are suggested.     

Leading day-to-day: A review of the daily causes and consequences of leadership behaviors

A recent trend in leadership research is to explore the daily causes and consequences of leadership behaviors. As this type of research has grown dramatically in the past several years, we seek to provide a systematic review of existing empirical research that has used a daily ESM study design to examine the leadership process. In this review, we reflect on the unique and important benefits a daily perspective on leadership provides for leadership research. We also provide a systematic review of the existing research on daily leadership, discuss the methodological and theoretical aspects of the studies identified in the review, and highlight the important findings of this research. Finally, we conclude by drawing upon the reviewed articles to provide recommendations for future scholarly work. Specifically, we give recommendations that will both broaden scholars' understanding of the daily leadership process as well as deepen understanding.     

The COVID‐19 Pandemic: What can we learn from past research in organizations and management?

The ongoing COVID‐19 pandemic is having a profound impact on organizations across the world, as businesses and societies face their greatest challenges for many decades. Over the past 20 years, the International Journal of Management Reviews (IJMR) has published many reviews of research that bring together the key findings across important bodies of research relevant to understanding how organizations might confront grand challenges such as these. Reflecting on this work, we have chosen a number of recent reviews published in the journal which have relevance both for practitioners and scholars in the current crisis. We invited the authors of these papers to offer some comments, which we have drawn from in the discussion below.     

What makes articles highly cited?

We examined drivers of article citations using 776 articles that were published from 1990 to 2012 in a broad-based and high-impact social sciences journal, The Leadership Quarterly. These articles had 1191 unique authors having published and received in total (at the time of their most recent article published in our dataset) 16,817 articles and 284,777 citations, respectively. Our models explained 66.6% of the variance in citations and showed that quantitative, review, method, and theory articles were significantly more cited than were qualitative articles or agent-based simulations. As concerns quantitative articles, which constituted the majority of the sample, our model explained 80.3% of the variance in citations; some methods (e.g., use of SEM) and designs (e.g., meta-analysis), as well as theoretical approaches (e.g., use of transformational, charismatic, or visionary type-leadership theories) predicted higher article citations. Regarding statistical conclusion validity of quantitative articles, articles having endogeneity threats received significantly fewer citations than did those using a more robust design or an estimation procedure that ensured correct causal estimation. We make several general recommendations on how to improve research practice and article citations.