Choose Your Friends Carefully: Home-Country Ties and New Venture Internationalization

Shameen Prashantham () and Julian Birkinshaw
Additional contact information
Shameen Prashantham: Nottingham University Business School China
Julian Birkinshaw: London Business School

Management International Review, 2015, vol. 55, issue 2, No 4, 207-234

Abstract: Abstract While host-country relationships are known to help new ventures internationalize, we know little about how a firm’s home-country relationships affect its subsequent internationalization. We develop new theoretical arguments by combining social capital theory with reference group theory, to suggest that internationalization is in general adversely affected by home-country relationships, but facilitated by a specific networking strategy viz. of joining an aspirational local industry group in the home market. Based on a mixed-method study, with quantitative analysis of 102 Indian software firms and a longitudinal study of four firms, we find support for our arguments. Our process-based qualitative findings provide useful insights into the way new venture founders actually make sense of their relationship-building activities in the pursuit of international growth. A particularly novel facet here is the aspiration-building part of the process that is suggested by reference group theory, which has not been previously analyzed in the international business context.

Keywords: New venture internationalization; International new venture; Born global; Social capital; Networks; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11575-015-0244-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:manint:v:55:y:2015:i:2:d:10.1007_s11575-015-0244-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/11575

DOI: 10.1007/s11575-015-0244-9

Access Statistics for this article

Management International Review is currently edited by Michael-Jörg Oesterle and Joachim Wolf

More articles in Management International Review from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().