Introduction to Yair Aharoni’s Intellectual Contributions

In this volume, we collect some of Yair Aharoni’s most original and impactful journal articles and book chapters. Considering that he wrote more than 72 articles and book chapters and published at least 30 books and monographs, it was challenging to select the articles to highlight in this section; we pooled our collective assessments to choose among them. Of course, this means that the final selection is subjective, and others might have selected a different subset of Yair’s work. Our goal was to represent all the major topics on which he wrote. The broad focus of Aharoni’s work was management and strategy, but he explored these topics at all levels, from macro (e.g., global and national) to micro (e.g., the role of managers in shaping organizational strategies). Looking back on his lifetime of scholarship, we were struck by how often he was ahead of other scholars in writing about important new trends in management and international business. He was among the first to explore the role of multinational enterprises (MNEs) from small countries, among the pioneers to study state-owned enterprises and their internationalization, among the earliest to explore the globalization of services, and at the forefront of exploring the complex relationship between MNEs and home/host governments…