New Challenges to International Marketing: Volume 20

Labelling this volume "New challenges" proved to be a challenge in itself, as we have to visualize what we mean by "New". On the one hand, it is the very nature of our academic investigations that we are aiming tocontinuously push frontiers and explore phenomena which have been underexplored. On the other hand, there is nothing "new" in the fact thatthe economic, physical, cultural and political environment within whichinternational marketers operate is continuously changing. Given thispretext, we still chose to label this volume "New challenges". This is because in the recent years we have seen a number of phenomena whichhave been emerging that we had not seen before. The anxieties regarding increasing prices of commodities, spatial reorganization of production processes (Buckley & Ghauri, 2004), outsourcing and offshoring of vitalsupply chain activities are some of the factors that are creating new challenges and are transforming the landscape of international marketing. Globalization, the all-encompassing force which transforms the fabric of our socio-cultural and economic interactions (Giddens, 2000, 2002) continues as a topic on the rise (Miller, Hartwick, & Le Breton-Miller,2004) and is influencing marketing strategies of internationally active firms. Adding to this, developments such as the advancement in technology and modernity (Levitt, 1983) are heating up and revolutionizing the way companies do business in the international marketing arena (Jean, 2007).In fact, we see a faster pace of technological innovation and technologicalconnectivity is transforming the way people live and consume. Mega-trends such as the rise of firms from China and India (Doh, 2005; Lewin & Peeters, 2006) as mature and valid competitors to Western firms (Aulakh, 2007;Dunning, 2006) require international marketers to reframe their traditionalthinking. In the call for papers we encouraged submissions around these trends,e.g. the changing nature of technology-enabled international marketingresearch, the impact of environmental degradation, global warming andscarcity of resources on international marketing strategies, global accountmanagement, procurement and international supplier networks, internatio-nalization of small and entrepreneurial firms, implications of outsourcing and offshoring, reliability and validity issues for construct measurement and advanced methodologies. The submissions selected for this volume cover some of these areas, while some of the topics remain open for future research.The book is organized in four parts; Part I presents a selection of papersthat focus on the internationalization process of the firm. Part II combines studies with a small firm perspective and a focus on entrepreneurship. In Part III we offer three studies which examine value creation in strategic alliances, investigate reasons for international joint venture dissolution and finally a conceptual contribution on diversification and the controversywithin the literature which either suggests that diversification results in afirm’s value premium or a firm’s value discount. The final part in this edited book is devoted to methodological advancements. This part provides goodexamples of methodological challenges faced by today’s scholars andmanagers alike