Call for Papers :Dynamic Capabilities and International Entrepreneurship

Call for Papers

Dynamic Capabilities and International Entrepreneurship

Special Issue for International Business Review

Guest Editors

Chris Pitelis, Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds Catherine L. Wang, Brunel Business School, Brunel University London

Mathew Hughes, School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University Véronique Ambrosini, Monash Business School, Monash University

Deadline for submission: 31st January 2023

We would like to invite you to submit a paper to the Special Issue of the International Business Review (IBR). The Special Issue will focus on the relationship between Dynamic Capabilities (DCs) and International Entrepreneurship (IE), and the implications for research, practice, and policy.

Organizations, especially those operating across borders, have faced unprecedented challenges due to the global pandemic, political uncertainty (e.g., Brexit, trade wars), societal and migration movements, hardening global challenges such as climate change, the 4^th industrial revolution with the advancement of artificial intelligence and digitalization, and de- globalisation tendencies. In such rapidly and radically changing environments, firms must adapt swiftly to new ways of management, from coping with supply chain disruption, managing remote workforce, adjusting to new regulations, to embracing new technology and transforming business models. The overarching research problem is this: in a world replete with ongoing, disruptive, and unpredictable change, what are the consequences for long-held management theories and beliefs about change, readiness for change, and coping with change?

Organizations have been tested and stretched for their resilience and their ability to renew and reconfigure existing resources and create new resources, responding to changes in the external environment in ways that leverage their internal advantages, or, in other words, to develop and leverage their DCs. The changes are not restricted to businesses in the private sector (e.g., airlines, catering, and tourism), but also apply to organisations in the public sector (e.g., healthcare and education). In some cases, the combined health and economic global crisis has triggered innovative problem solving on an ad-hoc, firefighting basis. To address challenges in a sustained fashion, organisations must learn from their experiences, and maintain and develop their capabilities in the post-pandemic era. How can this be achieved is a timely and important question.

IBR has hosted a distinctive research conversation on IE (e.g., Dimitratos et al., 2016; Jafari Sadeghi et al., 2019; Muralidharan and Pathak, 2017; Zucchella, 2021), and dynamic capabilities (e.g., Gölgeci et al., 2019; Vahlne and Jonsson, 2017). However, with a few exceptions (Buccieri et al., 2020; Eriksson et al., 2014), the relationship between international entrepreneurship and dynamic capabilities, especially from a strategic perspective has been muted in IE research. This is somewhat surprising, since DCs are a core tenet of strategic management, perpetrating entrepreneurial and strategic actions, and entrepreneurial activities enable the formation and deployment of DCs Teece (2012). DCs enable a firm to reconfigure, renew and create resources (Teece et al., 1997), responding to changing environment that characterises the international market. DCs are arguably one of the most promising theoretical developments to address the origins of a firm’s competitive advantage (Nayak et al., 2020) within nations and internationally (Pitelis and Teece, 2018).

Given the global pandemic-induced uncertainty and shifting geopolitical dynamics, DCs are ever more important to international organizations in the private and public sectors. How DCs help organizations around the globe to build resilience and adjust business models during the pandemic and beyond is a critical and timely topic. This Special Issue aims to advance IE research from the vantage point of DCs in the global crisis management, and many other challenges brought about by political uncertainty, technological disruption, and social movements.

We are looking for papers that deal with the following non-exclusive list of topics:

1. Investigating roles of DCs in organizational transformation and resilience in the global crisis.
2. Exploring how international organizations in private and public sectors can turn ad-hoc creative problem solving into DCs in the post-pandemic era.
3. Advancing IE and DCs theory and practice in the age of the 4^th industrial revolution and the advent of digitalisation and artificial intelligence.
4. Embedding social responsibilities and sustainability in DCs in the IE process.
5. Developing interdisciplinary insights into IE and DCs, not least links with capabilities views in development economics
6. Conceptualising and re-conceptualising DCs based on strong theorisation alone or backed up with robust quantitative and/or qualitative evidence in the context of IE.
7. Examining antecedents of DCs in the IE process.
8. Assessing critically the link between IE and the three proposed key functions of DCs, namely sensing, seizing, reconfiguring/transforming in cross-border operations.
9. Examining the role of IE and DCs in international new venture forms and the evolution of established enterprises and their business models.
10. Exploring the relevance of IE and DCs for relatively recent entrepreneurial phenomena like the so-called ‘sharing economy’.
11. Exploring roles of DCs in market and business ecosystem co-creation and orchestration across borders.
12. Exploring the role of IE and DCs in globalisation and de-globalisation tendencies.
13. Examining how in practice entrepreneurs develop and deploy dynamic capabilities across borders.
14. Investigating how DCs help shape institutional and organizational contexts within which firms, markets, and business ecosystems are created, co-recreated and orchestrated nationally and internationally.

The deadline for submission is 31^st January 2023. IBR’s Guide for Authors and its online submission system can be accessed at https://www.editorialmanager.com/ibr/default1.aspx. Please make sure that the paper is submitted for this Special Issue by ticking the relevant box in the system. All papers will be double-blind reviewed, following the IBR review procedure. For informal discussion, please contact one of the special issue guest editors.

Chris Pitelis, [email protected]

Catherine Wang, [email protected] Mathew Hughes, [email protected] Véronique Ambrosini, [email protected]