This paper provides a comprehensive review of the literature on integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into global value chains (GVCs) and its significant implications for international business operations. Using the Antecedents-Processes/Decisions-Outcomes (A-P/D-O) framework, this review explores AI's multifaceted impacts on GVCs across various disciplines. The literature review includes peer-reviewed articles from reputable academic databases, focusing on the intersection of AI and GVCs.

The findings indicate that AI adoption in GVCs is primarily driven by technological advancements, competitive pressures, and the strategic need for operational efficiency and innovation. Key insights highlight AI's role in improving supply chain management, optimizing production processes, and enhancing market analysis through predictive analytics, real-time data exchange, and automation. Additionally, AI supports innovation, promotes sustainability, and strengthens firms' competitive positions within GVCs. However, notable research gaps remain. Future studies should investigate AI's contributions to sustainability in GVCs, ethical considerations, sector-specific challenges, and the role of policy frameworks in facilitating AI integration. Addressing these gaps will provide a deeper understanding of AI's strategic implementation in GVCs, ensuring responsible and equitable outcomes.

Amid a backdrop of global and regional crises, resilience of multinational enterprises has become a focal point for practitioners and scholars of international management. However, opinions among academics about the definition and conceptualization of resilience continues to differ (Conz & Magnani, 2020). This paper addresses the lack of research on resilience of international management (Essuman et al., 2023) and the fragmented state of the literature in the field (Thalassinos et al., 2023). This study provides an overview of the body of research by providing a topological and temporal depiction of the study field’s cognitive and social structure, highlights, and clusters of thematic subfields. The objectivity of the study was achieved through the use of a performance analysis, using citation rates and publication venues (Cucari et al., 2023) as well as through a bibliographic mapping process based on co-citation and co-words (Donthu et al., 2021) using VOS Viewer and CRExplorer. Despite the methodological challenges inherent in this research, the resulting visualization uncovers distinct research streams and gaps, offering profound insights for future studies in the field. Besides others, the most important thematic clusters in resilience are built around “ambidexterity and business innovation”, “corporate strategies”, and “change management and innovation”.

Much of the existing literature on MNEs and the transition to a circular economy (CE) tends to adopt an economic perspective considering MNEs to be key protagonists pushing for a more CE. Those literatures tend to downplay how socio-economic relations amongst MNEs and a broad range of other national & transnational actors’, known as transnational-social-space (TSS), shape MNEs and supplier’s effort to move towards a CE. Drawing on the concepts of TSS and transnational communities (TC) we examine how the multi-tier organisational and global-stakeholders’ collective initiative complements MNEs effort to move their supply chains to a CE. Using two TSSs in Bangladesh’s apparel industry as embedded case studies, our study explores three drivers: (i) actors shared purposes, (ii) shared cognition and logics, and (iii)symbolic change and transformation, which shape TSS’s effort to move MNEs supply chain towards a CE, leading TSS to a TC. The TSS and TC concepts facilitate an embedded and contextualized view of MNEs, placing MNEs as one amongst a group of actors; instead, a central actor, who come together to work on a common, yet sometimes contested goal. We, thus, explore the ‘drivers’ of CE transition in GVCs, and present an alternative perspective to IB literature.

Focusing on the GVC of lithium batteries (LBs), this paper analyses the relationship between the major industrial policies adopted in the last decade and inward FDI in three major regions for the LB industry (the EU, the US and China).

First, we present a comprehensive recollection of the industrial policy instruments designed and implemented over the period 2012-2022, and we propose a tentative taxonomy for their classification. Second, we analyse the relationship between the emergence and the evolution of active policy instruments and the investments undertaken by MNEs in the different stages of the LB value chain, in the three regions considered.

Our results show that industrial policies have played a key role in shaping the LB GVC configuration, especially in the EU and the US, as they have fostered greenfield investments in midstream cells and packs manufacturing. Our evidence contributes to the debate regarding the potential tensions arising between the pursuit of resilience and sustainability objectives in industrial policy, arguing their coexistence is not discouraging inward investments flows. Moreover, we analyse similarities and differences in the strategic approaches towards the pursuit of technology sovereignty in the regions considered, and discuss their efficacy and repercussions.