INTRODUCTION

International business (IB) scholars face a challenge – but also an opportunity – to revitalize our collective intellectual endeavors to be relevant to the contemporary needs of society, national and local economies, and businesses, big and small (Buckley, 2020; Contractor, 2021; Verbeke & Yuan, 2021). Given that global–local tensions are at the heart of much IB research, it is not surprising that much thoughtful work in IB studies has been grounded within a deep understanding of local context (Andersson, Forsgren, & Holm, 2002; Cantwell, Dunning, & Lundan, 2010; Meyer, Mudambi, & Narula, 2011). A present-day challenge for the IB field is to maintain a strong link between the global activity of firms and the local concerns of regions and communities, which remain even in an age of accelerating digitalization (Autio, Mudambi, & Yoo, 2021; Buckley & Hashai, 2020; Lorenzen, Mudambi, & Schotter, 2020) and increasingly relate to sustainability (Kolk, 2016; Montiel, Cuervo-Cazurra, Park, Antolín-López, & Husted, 2021).

However, guidance for researchers on how to connect the local with the global over time is relatively scarce. The late Stephen Young’s IB scholarship, embedded in (but not confined to) the regional context of Scotland, is particularly useful in offering valuable insight into how this might be done. A major theme in his work was the locally relevant entrepreneurial behavior of internationalized firms, both multinational enterprises (MNEs) and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), with the latter often including new ventures. Put differently, Young’s work can be thought of as being about the local roots of global entrepreneurship. For MNE subsidiaries operating in Scotland, this entailed being relevant to the local host environment and tapping it to build capabilities that could be deployed within its internal and external organizational contexts (Young, 1987). For internationalizing SMEs or new ventures operating out of Scotland, this involved ensuring that local networks and knowledge bases were tapped to make them competitive in international markets despite their liabilities of newness, smallness, and foreignness (Young, Dimitratos, & Dana, 2003), and an intriguing possibility, as a logical next step, is connecting these streams of work to explore the potential for MNE–SME cooperation. Indeed, Young was instrumental in inspiring some of our own work – in which Scotland was one of the empirical settings – on this precise theme (Prashantham & Birkinshaw, 2008, 2020)1.

This essay seeks to offer a glimpse of Stephen Young’s body of work which is remarkable in three respects: (1) the scholarly approach he took which was sustained, engaged, and broad-based, (2) the conceptual ideas he generated around the purpose, process, and people involved in MNEs and SMEs, and (3) the resonance of these ideas with contemporary IB research topics of rising interest. Stephen Young was a scholar’s scholar, respected and liked by those who knew him. A past chair of the UK Chapter of the Academy of International Business and winner of its inaugural John Dunning Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2015, he was a contemporary of, and familiar to, a generation of venerable IB scholars such as Jan Johanson, Steve Kobrin, and Alan Rugman – but is possibly less well known to a younger generation, especially in North America and Asia. Before expanding on the three aspects identified above – scholarly approach, conceptual ideas, and research directions – we offer an overview of the thrust of his work on MNEs and SMEs.

STEPHEN YOUNG’S MNE AND SME SCHOLARSHIP: A BRIEF OVERVIEW

Stephen Young’s scholarship in international business began not long after the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system finally ended in 1973, with a focus on US MNEs operating in the UK, specifically Scotland (Young & Hood, 1975, 1977). This work gained steam in the 1980s, when the term “globalization” began to be used more widely. Subsequently, in the two decades bookended by the end of the Cold War in 1989 (when the Berlin Wall came down) and the global financial crisis in 2008 (when Lehman Brothers capitulated), arguably the high tide of globalization, Young was especially active in two major research streams: (1) the multinational subsidiary and (2) the internationalizing small firm2.

With respect to his MNE subsidiary research, from the mid-1970s Stephen Young was one half of a Scotland-based duo with Neil Hood who studied the local units of foreign multinationals, mostly American ones (Young & Hood, 1975, 1977), which informed an important international business text of that era, The Economics of Multinational Enterprise (Hood & Young, 1979). In the 1980s, this work continued apace with a prominent focus on policy implications vis-à-vis attracting foreign investment (e.g., Hood & Young, 1981). Young, Hood and Dunlop (1988) found that MNE subsidiaries that demonstrated greater initiative were more likely to have a positive impact on economic development on Scotland. In the 1990s, these ideas were developed further in terms of implications for cluster formation (Young, Hood, & Peters, 1994). Subsequently, Young’s co-author Neil Hood forged a productive partnership with Julian Birkinshaw (Birkinshaw & Hood, 1998, 2001; Birkinshaw, Hood, & Jonsson, 1998) that explicitly adopted an entrepreneurship lens, culminating in a study of 24 MNE subsidiaries in Scotland that he was also involved in (Birkinshaw, Hood, & Young, 2005). This study highlights the interplay between subsidiary entrepreneurship and the competitive environment, both internal (involving other subsidiaries) and external (consisting of suppliers, customers and competitors).

While the importance of internationalizing small ventures began to register among IB scholars around the mid-1990s (e.g., Oviatt & McDougall, 1994; Wright & Ricks, 1994), Young (1987) had highlighted this emergent phenomenon, which he had begun to observe in Scotland, well before that. More work on this topic emanated from various doctoral students of his (Bell, 1995; Ibeh & Young, 2001; Johnson, 2004; Jones, 1999). One of his studies introduced the notion of the “micromultinational” that draws attention to the entry mode choices of internationalizing small firms (Dimitratos, Johnson, Slow, & Young, 2003), a departure from the ubiquitous emphasis on internationalization speed (Oviatt & McDougall, 2005) in much of the literature in this stream3. Other work highlighted another type of firm, the “born again global” which refers to small firms that had not internationalized rapidly to begin with but did so later in its life cycle through the utilization of knowledge and networks resulting from a critical incident (Bell, McNaughton, Young, & Crick, 2003).

The common thread in these two research streams is the significance of locally relevant entrepreneurial behavior in internationalized firms, which we refer to as “the local roots of global entrepreneurship”. While entrepreneurial behavior in either type of firm is not unique in and of itself, a remarkable feature of Young’s work is that it relates to both sets of organizations. With regard to the foreign MNEs operating in Scotland, Young (1987: 34) came to the view that in certain cases, “country subsidiaries can take on lives of their own and resist attempts by headquarters to control their activities”, while his observation of high-tech SMEs made him think that “evidence does seem to support the contention of more rapid and more direct forms of internationalization than in the past” (ibid.). Essentially, he was foreshadowing what Hitt, Ireland, Camp and Sexton (2001: 485) noted over a decade later: “international entrepreneurship can occur in large and small organizations as well as new or established companies”.

What can we learn today from Stephen Young’s IB scholarship? Rather than seek to offer an exhaustive review of his work in this essay, we highlight three sets of insights pertaining to (1) the scholarly approach that characterized his work, (2) some key conceptual ideas than emanated from it, and (3) contemporary research directions that it can inform. Figure 1 depicts the discussion that follows.

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The local roots of global entrepreneurship: scholarly approach, conceptual ideas, and research directions.

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SCHOLARLY APPROACH, CONCEPTUAL IDEAS AND RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

Scholarly Approach

Stephen Young’s research suggests that gaining a deep understanding of the interplay between locational contexts and internationalized firms calls for sustained, engaged, and broad-based scholarship.

Sustained scholarship

Young’s research was sustained in the sense that it demonstrates continuity over time whereby a longitudinal perspective of the co-evolution of the local milieu and globally-minded firms’ activities can be obtained. For over four decades, Young was based – one might say, embedded – in Scotland4, allowing for a rare long-term perspective on the region’s economic development and its interplay with the behaviors of international MNEs with a presence in that region and SMEs internationalizing from a Scottish home base. Since the 1950s, Scotland had become a notable destination for foreign investment resulting in the establishment of MNE subsidiaries (Dimitratos, Liouka, Ross, & Young, 2009). Scotland presented an intriguing context in the sense that it not only was a host market to foreign MNEs but also the location of origin for a large number of small firms in knowledge-intensive sectors such as biotech and software. This was fertile ground for the emergence of internationalizing small firms.

Engaged scholarship

Van de Ven (2007) uses the term “engaged scholarship” to refer to research that is participative and actively seeks the perspectives and inputs of key stakeholders, including practitioners, in order to understand complex phenomena. Young regularly advised Scottish Enterprise (formerly, the Scottish Development Authority), of which his co-author Neil Hood had previously been Deputy Chairman. In fact, Young explicitly viewed the nexus between academia and policy-making in Scotland as a form of engaged scholarship as explained in what was probably his last academic publication (Fletcher, Dimitratos, & Young, 2018). Apart from the local engagement with Scottish Enterprise, like other leading IB scholars in Western Europe, he also worked extensively with multilateral organizations like the World Bank and UNCTAD, traveling the world on projects which reflected a concern for developing countries. For instance, he traveled to Pakistan on several occasions, and in the process cultivated research collaborations with academics in that country which, no doubt, had a capacity-building effect.

Broad-based scholarship

Young’s body of work transcends a narrow focus on empirical phenomena to include diverse sets of organizations and issues, albeit within a relatively coherent set of issues or phenomena (such as internationalization). In general, much of the research on MNEs and smaller entrepreneurial firms involves very different sets of scholars  –  the former from the intersection of IB and strategy and the latter from the intersection of IB and entrepreneurship. Yet Young’s work spanned both of these research streams through his engagement with a range of scholars notably Hood and Birkinshaw (in terms of the large MNE focus) and a gamut of former doctoral students (in relation to SME internationalization). And, although not covered in this essay, multiple other topics were studied in his long career. For example, his research on the role of the World Trade Organization (WTO) as an investment regime (e.g., Brewer & Young, 1995, 1997, 1999) draws attention to, inter alia, tensions between efficiency and equity. This work notes that attracting and promoting foreign investment poses policy dilemmas and affects internationalizing firms’ practices. As such, his was a wide-angle view of IB phenomena that is relatively rare.

Conceptual Ideas

The above-described scholarly approach allowed Stephen Young’s work to yield three important ideas – purpose, process and people – with respect to the local roots of global entrepreneurship (cf. Bartlett & Ghoshal, 1994), and at the core of these ideas can be seen his deep interest in the role of international business in economic development5.

Purpose

In terms of purpose, his work in the 1980s and 1990s in particular drew attention to regional economic development – the notion that the local activities of MNEs and SMEs might have a positive impact on societal and economic wellbeing such as knowledge spillovers and cluster development, and in turn promote employment generation and innovation output (Porter, 1990). There was growing recognition of the prospect of Scottish firms internationalizing (Young, 1987). This was also a period when foreign-owned MNE subsidiaries in Scotland were showing ambition to go beyond their original manufacturing mandates. To illustrate, Young et al. (1988) report survey findings indicating that just over half of such entities claimed they had undertaken a nontrivial level of research and development work. Reflecting such developments, Young et al., (1994: 673) note “the significance of entrepreneurial managers in promoting MNE subsidiary development”, which, in turn, could have positive knowledge spillovers in the local economy.

The underlying logic here is that the local context in which internationalized firms, big and small, operate can lead to rising economic development and the development of knowledge-intensive agglomerations – especially when their activities are incentivized or harnessed by skillful policy measures (Young, 1987; Young et al., 1988, 1994). Thus firm outcomes have greater societal significance than international strategy research sometimes surfaces. Moreover, if a local context benefits from these firms, then potentially there will be a virtuous cycle whereby participating firms subsequently have new advantages, such as a more innovation-oriented business environment, in the local milieu that they can draw upon. In this vein, Young et al. (1994) highlight the scope for MNEs to contribute to the economic development of a local region – even one that is relatively peripheral or underdeveloped at the outset – via knowledge transfer and corporate spinoffs. As Young (1987: 39) described: “To give just one example from the author’s local area, Rodime, a manufacturer of Winchester Disk Drives, was formed in 1980 as a spin-off from Burroughs; by 1983 it had a custom-built manufacturing facility of 60,000 meters’ operational at Boca Raton in Florida and was raising funds on the New York OTC.”

Young’s philosophy vis-à-vis IB and economic development transcends a rich-get-richer perspective that would suggest only developed regions benefit from MNE activity. Indeed, as noted, Young’s concern for regional economic development extended well beyond Scotland to developing countries, notably in Africa and Asia. His collaborative work with Peter Buckley on Egypt (Buckley & Young, 1999), for instance, reveals a deep grasp of the opportunities and challenges that developing countries face in attracting foreign investment from MNEs while also having to balance this imperative with the needs and limitations of the (often state-owned) domestic business sector.

This research helps us to enrich the notion of purpose in international business. Traditionally, purpose was seen as a firm-level aspiration, a “statement of a company’s moral response to its broadly defined responsibilities” (Bartlett & Ghoshal, 1994: 88), and in more recent years it has become common to link company purpose to broader societal issues, for example as articulated in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Young’s research makes it clear that a specific economic region or city can be a meaningful level of analysis in its own right because it aggregates firm-level outcomes and, arguably, feeds into more global ones, notably those relating to SDGs like poverty reduction and climate change (Montiel et al., 2021). It is entirely reasonable, for example, for the central belt of Scotland to articulate a set of responsibilities to its citizens and to future generations living in that area, and to put in place policies to address those responsibilities. Of course there is no CEO of the central belt, nor is there a unifying legal construct, akin to a firm, through which that purpose can be enacted. This makes the practical challenges greater, but it does not deny the need, felt by many senior politicians and business leaders in such regions, to try to make a difference. The impressive growth (in terms of GDP, inward investment and employment) of the central belt of Scotland through the 1990s and 2000s, is testament to what purpose-driven leadership can achieve (Hood, Peat, Peters, & Young, 2002).

Process

In terms of process, notably in the 2000s, his work points to – among other factors – the importance of MNEs and SMEs leveraging knowledge and networks. Organizational processes emanating from the inherent interaction of firm activity (in both foreign MNEs like IBM and home-grown SMEs) with the local environment were observed to have strong entrepreneurial undertones. An important consequence of this interaction is capability development in MNEs and SMEs aligned with locational realities. The value of collaborating with organizational entities including other firms and non-market actors (e.g., public policy bodies such as Scottish Enterprise) is a theme that can be gleaned from a careful reading of his work. MNE subsidiaries that leverage firm-specific advantages and (host) locational advantages entrepreneurially, including through assumed autonomy, contribute to the parent’s competitive advantage in excess of what their mandate may require of them to do (e.g., Birkinshaw et al., 2005).

A key insight in the Birkinshaw et al. (2005) study is that not only the external but also the internal (intraorganizational) network of an MNE could be conceptualized as a competitive arena, meaning that proactive entrepreneurial initiatives may be targeted at either environment, or both. Importantly, this points to the coexistence of cooperation and competition in the relationship between subsidiaries and their internal and external networks. This was clearly seen in the case of IBM Scotland, which manufactured PCs and laptops for the European market for some thirty years, before being closed down in 2009 (after Lenovo acquired it). To understand the rise and fall of this operation, it is necessary to consider both the complex internal dynamics within IBM and Lenovo and also the shifting locational advantages of Scotland vis-à-vis Eastern Europe, Asia and other parts of the world. As such, Young’s work highlights that local entrepreneurial behavior in global firms involves temporal and spatial dynamics entailing the co-evolution of firms and regions (see also Cantwell et al., 2010).

In addition, consistent with Oviatt and McDougall (1994), Young’s work shows that entrepreneurial smaller firms that can skillfully leverage their home-grown knowledge-intensive expertise to collaborate with external actors can establish a presence in international host markets without necessarily owning international assets (e.g., Bell et al., 2003; Dimitratos et al., 2003). Dimitratos et al. (2003) outline various types of micromultinationals including what they termed as network-seekers, learning-seekers and global market chasers, while acknowledging that these categories often overlap. Apart from global vision and strategy execution, the two key success factors they identify are knowledge (human capital) and competent networking capability. Bell et al. (2003) note that established small firms – not only startups – were also capable, if their intent was suitably transformed, to demonstrate entrepreneurial behavior in driving internationalization, often by leveraging networks resourcefully. The overall sense is that of firms punching above their weight (which arguably was also consistent with Scotland’s self-image as a distinct region of the United Kingdom).

Linking to the previous point, this research provides insight into the processes through which purpose can be enacted in the absence of central hierarchical control. Young and his coauthors documented a number of lateral coordination mechanisms, such as knowledge-exchange forums, funding systems etc., put in place by key actors within the central belt of Scotland, through which broad statements of purpose could be translated into investments and tangible actions by a variety of actors in the public and private sectors. One such mechanism, highlighted by Young and Tavares (2004), is the importance of fostering links between MNE subsidiaries and local universities and research institutions – both of which Scotland had in abundance – as “an inexpensive way of building the capabilities of the subsidiary and improving its credibility with head office, and in the process providing a modicum of autonomy”. And for smaller firms, links forged with local academia could yield knowhow about market expansion through training programs for cohorts of high-potential Scottish SMEs (Dimitratos et al., 2003; see also Fletcher & Prashantham, 2011). It goes without saying that these types of coordination processes require greater effort than those undertaken within a corporate structure, because individual actors are free to disengage or disagree with what is proposed. To the extent that they are successful – and Young’s research provides several examples – they provide important lessons in the art of collective action, in the spirit of Nobel prizewinner Elinor Ostrom (2000) who notes that actors often engage and collaborate under conditions of complex regional institutional diversity.

People

In terms of people, his later work in the 2010s alludes to the fact that individual actors – managers, entrepreneurs, policy-makers, multilateral agency officials – matter in enacting entrepreneurial strategies that lead to bigger mandates (in MNE subsidiaries) and internationalization outcomes (for smaller startups and SMEs). Individuals spanning organizational and locational boundaries in MNEs and SMEs are especially relevant. That is, the theme of entrepreneurial behavior developed in the 2000s began to get more concrete expression through the examination of entrepreneurial competences in both MNEs and SMEs. By implication, these proactive, innovative and risk-taking behaviors and competences were manifested in and through people operating in companies (both foreign MNEs and local SMEs) that sought to leverage the Scottish base of expertise in knowledge-intensive sectors to enhance their competitiveness. And a noticeable emphasis lay on entrepreneurially building and leveraging networks and knowledge (including via networks), consistent with the earlier made observations about process.

The development of entrepreneurial cultures and competences – driven, by implication, through individual intrapreneurs – in MNE subsidiaries (and HQs) enable behaviors such as intra- and extra-MNE networking (Dimitratos, Liouka, & Young, 2014). In addition to well-established dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation such as proactiveness, innovativeness and risk-taking, Dimitratos et al. (2014) in effect draw attention to the importance of individual actors in managing the perceptions of network partners such as customers, suppliers and partners towards the focal subsidiary. Similar themes can be seen in Young’s work on SMEs. Based on 18 case studies of high-performing internationalized SMEs in knowledge-intensive sectors, Dimitratos, Johnson, Plakoyiannaki and Young (2016) highlight networking propensity as a key feature of such firms alongside other competences such as customer and market orientation. In smaller new ventures, individual entrepreneurs’ social capital is argued to be especially salient for accelerated international growth (Prashantham & Young, 2011).

Once again, Young’s research in Scotland provides some useful examples of the role of key people in enacting the sense of purpose alluded to earlier. With very few exceptions, the general managers of the US-owned subsidiaries in Scotland were born-and-bred Scots who were passionate about building up their operations in a way that helped both their parent companies and the local economy. Consider this example, drawn from our research, of a conversation we had with ‘John Bryant’, the general manager of a large manufacturing subsidiary:

When we asked him about initiative  –  Did he actively seek new investments for his plant?  –  he did not hesitate. "It is my obligation to seek out new investment." he responded. "No one else is going to stand up for these workers in the head office. They are doing a great job, and I owe it to them to build up this operation. I get angry with some of my counterparts in other parts of Scotland, who just tow the party line. They follow their orders to the letter, but when I visit their plants, I see unfulfilled potential everywhere" (Birkinshaw & Fry, 1998: 59).

Taken together, these conceptual ideas have influenced, to a greater degree than is perhaps apparent, the work on MNE–SME cooperation that we have been involved in (Prashantham & Birkinshaw, 2008, 2020). Stephen Young was inspirational and instrumental, by providing access to relevant field sites in Scotland, where we observed the intersection of the entrepreneurial behavior of MNE subsidiaries and innovative SMEs that led to mutually beneficial collaboration. And consistent with Hood and Young’s distinctive policy-informed perspective, we found actors like Scottish Enterprise to be important facilitators of some of these partnerships. Thus it seems worth acknowledging that, in essence, this work on collaboration between large multinationals and small startups can be viewed as an extension and integration of the above-mentioned conceptual ideas.

Research Directions

Based on the above, what might contemporary IB scholarship in an unsettled era of slowing globalization take on board? We suggest that three inter-related facets, corresponding to purpose, process and people, respectively, continue to warrant attention: (1) societal impact, (2) ecosystem strategy, and (3) the application of a micro-foundations lens.

Societal impact

As many IB scholars note today, social impact is an important focus that internationalized firms ought to be cognizant of. MNEs must be careful about the potentially negative consequences of their actions in host markets. A good example of this line of thinking is Narula’s (2019) insightful observation that MNEs seeking to act in transparently ethical ways could unwittingly contribute to the worsening of the conditions of the most vulnerable in developing countries who predominantly participate in the informal economy. Furthermore, Buckley, Doh and Benischke (2017) and Kolk (2016) have called for IB research to pay heed to the societal challenges we face, such as those encapsulated in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The regional economic development outcomes that Young (and Hood) demonstrated keen interest in was arguably a precursor to what in present day parlance would relate to the societal impact of business. And in this regard, Young’s work draws attention to the importance of harnessing globalization (to the extent that it exists) for good through local actions that generate employment and foster innovation, both of which remain relevant and desired outcomes in developing countries. Arguably, Young’s work reminds us of the potential value in public policy interventions enhancing MNEs’ collaboration with local firms and thereby innovation and other socially valuable outcomes (Prashantham & Bhattacharyya, 2020). More policy-oriented IB research along these lines seems warranted.

Ecosystem strategy

An increasingly important aspect for internationalized firms is their approach to orchestrating interfirm networks of complementors and other partners. Nambisan, Zahra and Luo’s (2019) exhortation for IB research to pay attention to platform-based ecosystems is consistent, at a broad level, with the growing interest in the network multinational and governance of global value chains in IB research (Kano, 2018) evidenced by concepts such as the global factory (Buckley et al., 2017) and flagship network (Rugman & D'Cruz, 1997). Enderwick and Buckley (2019) have noted that MNEs orchestrate innovation networks, not merely manufacturing, within the scope of their interfirm global factories (see also Dhanaraj & Parkhe, 2006). Young’s work which spanned both large and small international firms alludes to the prospect that, if boundaries are spanned (including, potentially, through public policy initiatives), the entrepreneurial behaviors of MNEs and SMEs could be complementary (Buckley & Prashantham, 2016; Prashantham & Birkinshaw, 2020).

Microfoundations lens

A microfoundations orientation is increasingly being advocated in strategy and IB research, in relation to developing a deeper understanding of people in internationalized firms. Foss and Pedersen (2019) call for a greater emphasis on microfoundations (individuals’ actions) in IB research since, as Contractor, Foss, Kundu and Lahiri (2019: 3) put it pithily, “it is managers [not firms] who think”. Young’s work implies that managers in large MNEs and entrepreneurs in SMEs matter in terms of their cognition and behavior – as well as enterprising policy-makers who, in a context like Scotland, have contributed to the efficacy of international firms’ strategies. The co-evolution of firm behavior and local milieu characteristics observed by Young and his coauthors ultimately played out through individual actors. And of course the study of microfoundations can shed valuable light on the “dark side of networks” including the bounded reliability that leads to unmet expectations when actors transact (Kano & Verbeke, 2015, 2019).

Synthesis: MNE–SME cooperation

Expanding IB scholarship along these three inter-related dimensions, with consideration to the interaction between MNEs’ and SMEs’ activity and local context dynamics, could yield a more nuanced understanding of the local roots of global entrepreneurship. For instance, further work on purpose, process and people can shed more light on how these actors can create effective partnerships that leverage their complementary capabilities, and in so doing resolve each other’s problems through a division of entrepreneurial labor (Buckley & Prashantham, 2016; Prashantham, 2008, 2021). To illustrate, MNEs and SMEs – in particular, young ventures – face different tensions that need addressing. Established MNEs face the integration-responsiveness tension that requires them to achieve global integration in order to attain necessary levels of scale and scope (Prahalad & Doz, 1987). Smaller ventures face the growth-survival tension: internationalization from or near inception provides greater growth opportunities but also increases their odds of demise owing to the shock of expanding with meager resources (Sapienza, Autio, George, & Zahra, 2006). The MNE can potentially access novel – and locally embedded – expertise from the smaller venture resulting in offerings that are more localized. The smaller venture, in turn, can mitigate its constraints by drawing upon the resources of the MNE, thus reducing the shock from expanding6. This illustration indicates that useful insight can be obtained as scholars build upon and integrate the work of Stephen Young and others on the MNE and SME.

In terms of enriching future research, this observation suggests that the field of international business as a whole will benefit from MNE and SME/new venture scholars engaging in greater cross-fertilization of ideas, which typically starts with a deeper understanding of each other’s theoretical traditions. For MNE scholars, a deeper appreciation for the conceptual underpinnings of entrepreneurship research could lead to novel insights, for instance around individual agency, in their own domain. For SME/new venture scholars, there are equally fruitful opportunities to apply insights from MNE research, which views a firm’s international strategy as a consequence of its firm-specific advantages and its ability to access specific locations with their own country-specific advantages. Stephen Young’s work shows how it is possible to embrace both of these perspectives, and going forward we encourage IB scholars to respond to our call for studying MNE–SME cooperation more closely, including its potential societal impacts on helping to achieve the SDGs (Prashantham & Birkinshaw, 2020).

More generally, our thesis is that Stephen Young’s work continues to be relevant to the IB field in research streams where local roots and global entrepreneurial activity intersect, including transnational entrepreneurship, the global evolution of regulations, locally embedded cultural and creative industries, and corporate social responsibility7.

CONCLUSION

The sustained, engaged and broad-based scholarship of Stephen Young highlights how a deep understanding of a local context – in this case, Scotland – can yield valuable insights for IB research. Young arguably had the longest and most productive research career of any IB academic in that region and, over four decades, witnessed a great deal of institutional changes that affected, and resulted from, shifts in international business activity. The era following the oil crisis of 1973 gave way to a period of privatization in the US and UK in the 1980s, and then the heyday of globalization for nearly two decades which included prominent developments at the turn of the 21st century including the dot-com boom (and bust), global terrorism as a business environmental threat (especially after the 9/11 terror attacks) and the entry of China into the WTO in 2001. During this period Scotland made considerable strides in industries like bioscience8. Politically, the region entered a period of devolution with the restoration of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. In all that time, Scotland continued to enjoy its unique position as a regional context that was distinct yet subsumed within larger entities such as the UK and EU, providing a rich setting in which to observe phenomena pertaining to MNE subsidiaries (for who Scotland was a host market setting) and internationalizing SMEs (that had Scotland as its home base).

That said, much has changed in Scotland in the period since Young formally retired in 2014 at the age of 70. That year, the people of Scotland voted for the status quo in a referendum on independence from the UK. The following year saw major global developments as the United Nations adopted the SDGs and the Paris Climate Accord was signed, but this was followed by Brexit in 2016 – an outcome the Scots did not vote for. The arrival of Donald Trump in the White House and the ensuing US-China Trade War added to the disruption with Covid delivering an unprecedented blow. Many of the US MNEs that had made huge investments in Scotland through the 1980s and 1990s, including Texas Instruments, Motorola and HP, scaled back their activities. Even IBM vacated the Greenock site that had been the basis of a business history analysis of MNEs in Scotland (Dimitratos et al., 2009). In short, for the world in general, and Scotland in particular, these have been turbulent times.

What Young’s body of work suggests, however, is that what ought to remain unchanged is an interest to harness globalization – in whatever form and to whatever extent it exists – as a force for good, with local context at the heart of IB scholarship. While it is not realistic for most individuals to observe one locale for four decades, we can imbibe from Young the virtues of engaging in sustained research (for a shorter period, perhaps) that engages with market and non-market actors, in addition to fellow-academics, and is broad-based enough to be sensitive to new emergent phenomena and societal concerns that events such as COP26, the UN Climate Change conference in Scotland, draw attention to. IB research can revitalize its relevance to local contexts – the disconnectedness of which is underlined by slowing globalization – by going back to its local roots. Perhaps, counterintuitively, the future interests of IB research in these turbulent times may be served well by paying closer attention to one’s own backyard as the locus of opportunity identification for scholars’ own (entrepreneurial) academic pursuits.

Notes

  1. 1

    Note that although the term “MNE–SME” is frequently used in our work written for an IB audience, the smaller firms involved are generally new ventures, which is consistent with the focus on younger firms in international entrepreneurship, a thriving branch of IB research that Young and his coauthors were major contributors to.

  2. 2

    While there were other research interests as well, including the internationalization of Chinese MNEs (e.g., Young, Huang, & McDermott, 1996), and multilateral agencies such as the WTO (e.g., Brewer & Young, 1995, 1997, 1999), the MNE subsidiary and SME internationalization streams identified above were particularly salient in terms of the volume of output and impact in terms of citations.

  3. 3

    See Ji, Li, Liouka, Fletcher, Tang & Slow (2021) for an excellent update on micromultinational research, in a tribute to the late Pavlos Dimitratos who, like Neil Hood, was a frequent co-author of Stephen Young’s.

  4. 4

    To be clear, Young’s scholarship was not confined to Scotland. He spent two professional stints in the US on sabbatical, the latter as a Fulbright Scholar visiting Georgetown University which spurred his research on WTO with Tom Brewer, a former JIBS editor. He consulted with the World Bank in several developing countries and published papers using empirical contexts as diverse as China (Young & Lan, 1997), Greece (Manolopoulos, Dimitratos, Young, & Lioukas, 2009), Nigeria (Ibeh & Young, 2001) and Pakistan (Zafarullah, Ali, & Young, 1997). As a matter of fact, Young had begun his (pre-academic) career as a young economist in Tanzania.

  5. 5

    We thank an anonymous reviewer for reiterating the importance that Stephen Young paid to economic development in his IB scholarship.

  6. 6

    Prashantham (2022) provides anecdotal evidence of this division of entrepreneurial labor: Walmart partnered with a startup in China to develop a solution based on image recognition technology to help it localize and improve the customer experience in its Chinese stores, and later deployed that same technology, with a different application, in its US stores thereby facilitating the efficient internationalization of that Chinese new venture.

  7. 7

    We thank an anonymous reviewer for helping us articulate this point.

  8. 8

    Dolly, a sheep that was the world’s first cloned animal, resulted from expertise developed in Edinburgh University.