International Activities of Emerging Market Firms A Critical Assessment of Research in Top International Management Journals

During the last decade emerging market firms (EMFs) have increasingly attracted scholarly attention. Yet, the conclusions concerning the nature and the theoretical foundations of EMFs' international expansion vary greatly thus calling for a critical assessment of the existing theorizing in this field. We examine publications on the internationalization of EMFs in fourteen top international management (IM) journals in the period of 2000-2010 and use the inductive approach and the qualitative content analysis methodology. Our analysis shows that the published research can be classified into two groups: macro- and micro-level studies. The former predominantly employ macro-level institutional factors to examine the overall patterns of EMFs' international expansion, while the latter build on a wider range of approaches, including the resource-based view, network and strategy perspectives to investigate various aspects of EMFs' internationalization. The paper identifies a number of theoretical inconsistencies in the existing research that arguably cause ambiguity in findings and suggests future research directions to address these inconsistencies. By doing so the analysis contributes to the central debate in literature concerning whether conventional theories suffice to explain the EMFs' internationalization or new theoretical approaches are needed. The analysis illustrates that the research on EMFs' internationalization can be improved through refined application of a broader range of methodologies such as longitudinal and mixed-method studies. The geographic focus of studies needs to be widened as well. Currently it is clearly biased towards China, while other emerging markets remain under-researched.