Research Scotomata in Firm and Brand Internationalization A Meta-Analytic Review of Empirical Settings in Internationalization Research
(R2020-84122)

AUTHORS

Willem Smit, Asia School of Business in collaboration with MIT Sloan

KEYWORDS

Internationalization; empirical settings; logistic regression

ABSTRACT

This study is to assess the past and current empirical foci of internationalization research. Both International Marketing (IM) and International Business (IB) literatures have used a large variety of empirical settings to test theories related to internationalization. The two- folded research question we ask ourselves is: Has there been a concentration of research onto specific geographical areas? And if so, what are the interesting (geographical) areas still left to be researched? By using existing and hand-collected databases of 14,280 country pairs and 384 articles published in top academic journals, we identify out-of-vision blind spots, and in- vision scotomata. Our results show that 83% of the 300 economically most intense economic ties have been a context for a study. By performing a logistic regression on these economically prominent ties, we explore the influence of country pair characteristics on the risk of being ignored or under-researched by IM and IB studies.