The Historical Evolution of IB in a Comparative Perspective

This history of international business (IB) as an academic field sets IB in the context of the larger system of academic disciplines, then compares it explicitly with seven other fields in social and natural sciences and in professional studies. The chapter begins with a brief overview of the system of academic fields that coalesced from 1850 to 1900, as disciplinary associations, secular universities, and research institutes arose. It describes how through these institutions, core disciplines (physics, biology, and economics) gave rise to other disciplines and subfields, which developed numerous theoretical and empirical discoveries laying groundwork for post-1950 advances. The chapter then compares IB with the historical development of management, economic history, world history, African studies, climatology, primatology, and network science. These fields, while varied, all benefited from the era’s growing international and cross-disciplinary ties. Among them, IB’s focus was on the application of the internalization logic to move from FDI to the structure of MNEs, thus exploring a new, rapidly growing, and changing organizational form, rather than developing new knowledge about existing topics. This novelty might explain in part IB’s struggle to establish its legitimacy as an academic field of study. In scale of analysis, IB focused on the MNE and its internal operations set it apart from the other fields studied that have alternated between micro and macro levels.