Journal of Economic Geography
Call for Papers
“International Business and Economic Geography;
The Multinational in Geographical Space”
Guest editors: Ram Mudambi, Temple University, USA
Sjoerd Beugelsdijk, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Philip McCann, University of Waikato, New Zealand
A firm’s location choice and its spatial antecedents and
consequences are key issues in economic geography.
International business (IB) scholars have also been long
interested in the issue of location. It is a pillar of the
well-known Ownership-Location-Internalization (OLI) paradigm,
recently re-emphasized by the current highest cited paper in
the Journal of International Business Studies (Dunning, 1998).
However, while the regional science and economic geography
literatures (notably the Uppsala school) have studied the
sub-national geographical behavior of multinational
enterprises (MNEs), they do not focus on the firm’s
organizational characteristics. These literatures tend to
highlight the crucial importance of space and proximity
(Gertler, 2003). The role of the firm in space is rarely the
main object of study (Beugelsdijk, 2007). For example, many
economic geographers would argue that spatial proximity is
important to generate knowledge spillovers, and are often
willing to make the empirical assumption that co-location
implies interaction. Conversely, IB scholars have a thorough
knowledge of the firm, but a relatively underdeveloped view of
geographic space (McCann and Mudambi, 2005). The IB literature
rarely recognizes the fundamental distinction between
geographic location and geographic ‘space’. For example, IB
studies of multinationality routinely use measures like
‘number of countries’, in effect treating the US and Andorra
as the same.
Despite the large literature on clusters, an MNE’s strategy
and structure within the context of its spatial embeddedness
has not received much attention. This is a crucial omission
since studies that link regional characteristics to firm
strategy based on macro data suffer from various forms of
aggregation bias. For instance, regional scores of R&D
expenditure do not tell us the whole story about firm level
innovation. Thus, “the economics of territories reflect the
ways in which they are ‘inserted’ into the organizational
spaces of firms – either directly, as the geographic locus of
particular functions, or indirectly, through customer-supplier
relationships with other (local) firms (emphasis added)”
(Dicken and Malmberg: 359). Hence, integrating a discussion
of organizational issues with the characteristics of the
sub-national region is important to better understand the
interplay between the MNE and its spatial environment. The
impact of the changing strategy of MNEs on global economic
geography is now considered to be one of the ‘big questions’
in IB (Buckley and Ghauri, 2004; Mudambi, 2008).
This special issue of the Journal of Economic Geography
constitutes an attempt to strike a balance between the
emphasis on space in economic geography, and the focus on firm
organization in IB. Our goal is to create a forum wherein we
can increase the mutual awareness of IB and economic geography
scholars. This should lead to a fruitful exchange of ideas,
increasing the audience for both literatures. A significant
call for just such an exchange of ideas has recently been made
by John Dunning (Dunning, 2009). Indeed, this piece suggests
several important research avenues of mutual interest to
economic geography and international business scholars.
Moreover, in terms of impact and visibility the Journal of
Economic Geography provides is the ideal setting for such a
forum, with an ISI citation impact factor which is typically
of the order of three and a ranking in the top five of all
economics journals and the top three of all geography journals.
We hope that this Special Issue of the Journal of Economic
Geography will contribute to an integration of the literatures
in economic geography and international business and catalyze
research on the relation between multinational enterprises and
geographical space. More specifically, by including
geographic space in the analysis of MNE behavior we aim to
advance our understanding of the role of the MNE in a
globalizing world. We welcome both theoretical and empirical
contributions, and papers adopting either a single or Multi
Level Analysis. Illustrative topics are mentioned below:
• The 'death of distance' and ‘spiky’ global innovation
• The disaggregation of the value chain and the location of
value creation
• The role of the MNE in (regional) cluster formation
• Local partners and geographic space; spatially proximate vs.
spatially distant local partners in large economies
• Extra-organizational knowledge spillovers in industrial
districts/clusters
• Economic geography and the 'global factory'
• Spatial antecedents and consequences of offshoring
• The dynamics of the spatial distribution of economic activity
Timeline & submission guidelines
All paper submissions should conform to the Journal of
Economic Geography’s standard guidelines for authors, details
of which can be found at the JEG website:
http://joeg.oxfordjournals.org/
The deadline for paper submission is June 30, 2009 and the
issue is scheduled to appear in Spring 2010. Papers should be
saved in Microsoft Word format and submitted to:
ram.mudambi@temple.edu.