Research has shown that, due to the various challenges associated with the compounded distance of expanding across regional areas, the world’s largest multinational enterprises (MNEs) place their economic activity mainly on their home regional area – the so called regionalization phenomenon. We move a step further to argue that a firm’s ability to grow outside its home region depends on a key structural strategic leadership form – the presence of executives with regional responsibility (regional heads) in the MNE’s corporate leadership. We argue that by having a regional head in the top management team (TMT) at the head office, strategic leaders economize on the bounded rationality (BRat) and bounded reliability (BRel) of growing in host-regions – an aspect that drives them to move away home-regional borders. We also postulate that this effect becomes more pronounced when: (a) the regional head in the TMT is not facing role multiplicity, (b) the MNE is led by a foreign CEO and (c) the region experiences high growth. Data from international automotive companies between 2003-2019 support most of our predictions.

Today’s tumultuous economic and political landscapes significantly impact multinational corporations (MNCs) and their approach to organizing innovation and technology in their globally distributed research and development (R&D) units. Drawing upon international business, strategy, and innovation literature, this paper employs a case study of a Danish MNC with a long-term presence in China. It presents an integrative framework for managing MNCs’ innovation activities in foreign locations increasingly exposed to growing global tensions and bifurcation. This framework encompasses governance mode, mandate, strategic goals, footprint, and innovation output, highlighting the importance of balancing conflicting centripetal forces pushing for more centralized and concentrated MNC operations and centrifugal forces supporting strong global dispersion and openness. From this, a new conceptualization of international organizing emerges—not as a single dominant mode but as an ever-evolving, complex constellation of modes. This finding emphasizes the dynamic nature of balancing these forces and its implications for refocusing MNC management capacity to deal adequately with this balance across business units and geographies.

Foreign survival literature emphasizes the critical role of organizational learning capabilities in survival, yet varied impacts of foreign subsidiary age on survival are reported. Elaborating on the organizational learning perspective, we delve into these diverse effects across different subsidiary life stages, examining resource endowments, learning capabilities, liabilities of newness and foreignness, and challenges of senescence and obsolescence. We further propose that subsidiary relatedness modifies the age-survival relationship, influencing resource development and learning capabilities. Our study examines Finnish MNEs and their foreign subsidiary survival from 1970 to 2018 to test these hypotheses. Our findings show survival rates change across life stages, with relatedness shaping these dynamics. This study extends organizational learning theory and informs MNE executives that foreign survival rates are dynamic and influenced by subsidiary relatedness.

In this paper, we consider how knowledge distance affects the MNEs' decision to

divest their foreign operations. We argue that, given the embedded nature of knowledge in a

given context, MNEs aiming to source knowledge in a foreign country characterised by a high

level of knowledge distance will be less likely to divest their operations in these countries. We

also consider how linguistic distance positively moderates the relationship between knowledge

distance and foreign survival. Results from a comprehensive panel of Finnish MNEs and their

worldwide subsidiaries reveal robust support for these arguments. This paper extends our

understanding of the link between foreign divestment and knowledge distance between the

home and host countries.