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Rigor and Relevance of IJV Exit Research

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Abstract

  • International Joint Ventures (IJVs) are a well acknowledged and frequently implemented organizational mode, especially with regard to international market entry strategies, yet they are also prone to conflicts of interests, drawbacks, inefficiencies, and enduring losses. Past research has consequently been dominated by studies that have attempted to identify success factors for managing IJVs based mainly upon archive data. Success or failure is frequently defined on the basis that IJVs have ‘disappeared’ from the data-set. The term IJV-‘exit’ has become the byword for closing down ineffective, failing IJVs while neglecting the fact that such a disappearance may indicate success if, for instance, the initial objectives of partners have been achieved.

  • Beyond such misconceptions, there is no stock-take of what is known about the different types, measures, contexts, and determinants of IJV exit to take research to the next stage. This paper fills this research gap by comprehensively analyzing the IJV exit literature as an integral part of IJV research, while focusing on studies that either apply IJV termination or IJV longevity as a measure of IJV exit. A systematic overview of the contexts and determinants that influence IJV exit is provided. Furthermore, the rigor and relevance of the existing IJV exit literature is evaluated in terms of its methodological, conceptual and theoretical foundation, and major implications for directing future research are proposed.

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Notes

  1. For the full list (37th edition, 27 May 2010) see http://www.harzing.com/jql.htm.

  2. Some researchers subsume IJV exit under IJV instability (e.g., Yan and Zeng 1999), while defining IJV instability in terms of changes in ownership structure (Franko 1971), drastic shifts in the parent control structure (Yan 1998), or inter-partner renegotiations of prior contracts (Blodgett 1992). In fact, the IJV still exists as a cooperative organization (i.e., survival; Das and Teng 2000) and modifications of the interfirm partnership may simply reflect usual adaptations to changing business conditions (Beamish and Lupton 2009; Yan 1998). Hence, as long as studies do not explicitly analyze either termination or longevity as a dependent variable, we exclude such articles from our sample.

  3. We would like to thank all scholars who have reviewed our preliminary list of key words. Please contact the authors for a copy of the list.

  4. We appreciated and followed the recommendation by one reviewer to conduct such a citation analysis. Due to the variety of sources (e.g., web of science, scopus, google scholar), incomplete data (e.g., volumes before 1997), missing reference points, and a bias towards more general IJV success factor studies, the findings of our citation analysis appear not to be reliable or sufficiently valid to avoid misinterpretation, hence we abstain from presenting the details here. However, we would appreciate sharing and discussing these results with anyone interested in this research field, on request.

  5. Not all articles are equally relevant concerning the respective size of samples under study. For example, only 7 % of the foreign subsidiaries that have been analyzed by Li (1995) are IJVs (we thank one of the reviewers for this important clarification).

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the editors, Joachim Wolf and the two anonymous reviewers whose comments and suggestions have been extremely helpful in developing this manuscript. We also thank Andreas Klossek for his valuable suggestions and comments on a previous version of this article.

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  1. Department of Business Administration, Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg, Freiberg, Germany

    Alexander Nemeth &  Michael Nippa

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Nemeth, A., Nippa, M. Rigor and Relevance of IJV Exit Research. Manag Int Rev 53, 449–475 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11575-012-0158-8

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