Governments as owners: State-owned multinational companies

Alvaro Cuervo-Cazurra (), Andrew Inkpen, Aldo Musacchio and Kannan Ramaswamy
Additional contact information
Andrew Inkpen: Thunderbird School of Global Management, Glendale, USA
Kannan Ramaswamy: Thunderbird School of Global Management, Glendale, USA

Journal of International Business Studies, 2014, vol. 45, issue 8, 919-942

Abstract: The globalization of state-owned multinational companies (SOMNCs) has become an important phenomenon in international business (IB), yet it has received scant attention in the literature. We explain how the analysis of SOMNCs can help advance the literature by extending our understanding of state-owned firms (SOEs) and multinational companies (MNCs) in at least two ways. First, we cross-fertilize the IB and SOEs literatures in their analysis of foreign investment behavior and introduce two arguments: the extraterritoriality argument, which helps explain how the MNC dimension of SOMNCs extends the SOE literature, and the non-business internationalization argument, which helps explain how the SOE dimension of SOMNCs extends the MNC literature. Second, we analyze how the study of SOMNCs can help develop new insights of theories of firm behavior. In this respect, we introduce five arguments: the triple agency conflict argument in agency theory; the owner risk argument in transaction costs economics; the advantage and disadvantage of ownership argument in the resource-based view (RBV); the power escape argument in resource dependence theory; and the illegitimate ownership argument in neo-institutional theory. After our analysis, we introduce the papers in the special issue that, collectively, reflect diverse and sophisticated research interest in the topic of SOMNCs.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (180)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/jibs/journal/v45/n8/pdf/jibs201443a.pdf Link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/jibs/journal/v45/n8/full/jibs201443a.html Link to full text HTML (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:pal:jintbs:v:45:y:2014:i:8:p:919-942

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... nt/journal/41267/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of International Business Studies is currently edited by John Cantwell

More articles in Journal of International Business Studies from Palgrave Macmillan, Academy of International Business
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().