Framing international operations management: contributions from emerging country multinationals

Abstract

Despite the seminal works of authors like Bartlett, Ghoshal, Nohria, Doz, Williamson, among others, because they focused on mature multinationals, newcomers in international markets find scarce information about the design and implementation of international operations networks. In this paper we analyze the internationalization process of Brazilian and Chinese firms to understand the evolution of their networks, a process influenced by factors inexistent in studies about developed country multinationals, namely global production networks (GPNs) and country-of-origin effects. The key characteristics of their international operations networks seem to be well described by a stage-based approach where emerging country multinationals start as local optimizers and then evolve by taking different strategic positions within the GPN to which they are connected. That upgrading is possible when the implementation of the international operations network reaches a certain level of maturity.