IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-031-86133-8_2.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Emergence and Growth of International Business Thought as an Evolutionary Process

In: The Historical Evolution of International Business

Author

Listed:
  • Feng Zhang

    (Pennsylvania State University)

  • Yuanyuan Li

    (California State University)

Abstract

International Business (IB) scholars have made efforts to document IB scholarship history and deepened our understanding of the evolution of IB thought over time. Several evolutionary questions remain in debate, including the origin and independence of the field, as well as its current developmental phase. This study intends to explore these unresolved and sometimes ambiguous questions with qualitative and quantitative evidence from the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS), the field's most prestigious journal, and the interpretation of this evidence by its leading scholars. We seek to explore a metaphor of the emergence of IB disciplinary knowledge from relevant disciplines being the formation of a new scholarship species, and the growth of IB scholarship being the thriving of the new species. This chapter examines whether the emergence and growth of IB scholarship follow a trajectory that can be explained by variation, competition, inheritance, etc., i.e., an evolutionary process of conceptual lineages. Leveraging the evolutionary approach, we argue that the field of IB is in its adolescence phase, becoming increasingly multidisciplinary and evolving in parallel with developments in the global environment.

Suggested Citation

  • Feng Zhang & Yuanyuan Li, 2025. "The Emergence and Growth of International Business Thought as an Evolutionary Process," Springer Books, in: Lilac Nachum & Attila Yaprak (ed.), The Historical Evolution of International Business, chapter 0, pages 51-103, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-86133-8_2
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-86133-8_2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-86133-8_2. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.