Much of the international business literature on industrial location, internationalization and innovation is based on firm- or network-level research, but does not consider the role of professional communities that can be crucial in providing access to knowledge, resources and personal networks. This paper focuses on the role of local communities, the individuals that collectively form them, and on how they connect with international communities and become crucial facilitators of the internationalization processes of firms. In a co-evolutionary perspective, we investigate the role of local professional communities, international professional communities, and their local-global interfaces. In a conceptual survey, we propose that local-international community connections are crucial to the capacity to engage in foreign direct investments, international trade, production and innovation. We explore: who are the members of local professional communities and how do they create knowledge?; where do such communities emerge and how do they develop?; and how are local professional communities reproduced? We conclude by arguing that the interrelationship between local and international communities is a critical part of an environment that facilitates successful corporate internationalization, and this favorable interaction in the relevant industrial environment improves the development prospects of the city-regions in which local communities are located.

If great strategies can stem from personal values (Rindova & Martins, 2018), why are values so understudied in international business research? We use archival data from the 1930s and 1940s to examine how the personal values of a design company’s co-founders are linked to the firm’s initial decades of international activity. This reveals a set of six personal values in the founding team and a set of four complementary nonmarket strategies underpinning internationalization. Notably, the nonmarket strategies are values-based, and they differ from those typically addressed in international business research on MNEs.

Drawing on EIBA 2024 motto (‘It’s interesting!’) and paraphrasing Davis’ (1971), we argue that our endeavor is interesting, as it is “worth studying” and likely to engage the reader’s attention. This paper is a spin-off of the EIBA history book (Simões, Cantwell & Gugler, 2024, forthcoming), though with significant twists. It starts with the identification of the characteristics and evolution of the IB context over the 50 years of EIBA’s life. This provides the frame to analyse the evolution of IB research and EIB. Based on the previous analysis, we advance four potential courses of action regarding the IB context by 2050. Their implications for both IB research and EIBA are then discussed. The contribution of this paper is three-fold: to put IB research and EIBA history into perspective, by inscribing them in the periods identified in the wider IB context [from a fragmented world to the dawn of globalisation (1974-1988); heading towards globalisation (1989-2011); and globalisation in retreat (2012-2024)]; to advance, on the basis of the evolution of the IB context four potential courses of action up to 2050 (‘Slowbalisation’; Partial decoupling; Full decoupling; and Multipolarisation); and to assess their main implications for IB research and EIBA’s future.

The past few years have witnessed a plethora of scholars and practitioners embracing the concept of deglobalization. Our literature review reveals that authors have used different definitions of deglobalization, different metrics, and different levels of aggregation, looking at different institutional origins and different timeframes. To provide a more comprehensive assessment, we performed a series of analyses with metrics commensurable to the conceptualization of globalization on a multi-country dataset consisting of 3,303 unique firms from the top 16 home markets of the Fortune Global 500 firms over the 2001-2022 period (n=35,042). We introduce the difference between equally-weighted degree of internationalization which tracks the evolution of the average firm, and value-weighted degree of internationalization which better captures the evolution at the macroeconomic level. We find that using such distinct metrics leads to different judgements on the development of deglobalization. On the one hand, we identify an overall upswing of globalization for the average firm, a pattern that is robust across different economies. On the other, our analysis of value-weighted degree of internationalization highlights that different economies underwent distinct and even contradictory paths of (de)globalization. We identify the research implications.