Trends in International Business Research: Twenty-Five Years Later
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JOURNALOF INTERNATIONALBUSINESS STUDIES,FOURTHQUARTER1994
progressedsince then? Have trendsobservablethen continued?What new directions or thrustsin internationalbusinessresearchhavearisenwhich were not even foreseenat thattime? The inauguralissue of JIBS, twenty-five years ago, includedan article, "Trends in InternationalBusiness Research" [Wright 1970]. That article surveyed the state of researchin the embryonicfield of internationalbusiness, and it laid out proposalsand prioritiesfor the futureof internationalbusinessresearch.It serves as a useful referencepoint for reflecting on the changes and developmentssince then. THE ORIGINAL STUDY The surveyand forecastsreportedin the initial issue of JIBSwere the resultsof a pioneeringstudy conductedat IndianaUniversity,and publishedmore fully in a book by Lee C. Nehrt, J. FrederickTruittand RichardW. Wright [Nehrt,Truitt and Wright 1970]. The Graduate School of Business at Indiana University received a major Ford Foundation grant in 1965 to create an International Business ResearchInstitute.Among its first mandateswas to "preparean inventory of recent and currentresearchin internationalbusiness and recommendations for the future."The results of the surveyand the recommendationswere to serve as a guide, not only for future projects of the Institute, but also for researcherseverywhere. The first task of the project team was to formulate a meaningful and useable definition of internationalbusiness research.After discussions with a numberof leading academics and business leaders, a working definition was established which probablyremainsvalid today.It is shownas Table1. Having established their working definition, the authorscompiled an annotated bibliographyof all known internationalbusiness researchprojectsthat hadeither been published or were currentlyunder way at that time. Over 300 completed projectswere reportedin the book, each annotatedwith a descriptionof the objectives of the research,the methodology,and the principalfindings or conclusions. One hundredeleven ongoing projects were also entered,similarly describedby objectives, methodology and anticipated significance. While the annotations themselves were an immediately useful outcome of the project,patternsin the incidence and distributionof the entries also told a great deal about how internationalbusiness researchhad evolved to that time, and served as a useful base for drawinginferences about where it was going. A summaryof the distribution of projects,by categoryandyear, is shown as Table2. EARLY TRENDS The authorsobserved,first,thatthe entriesreflectedan increasinglyrapidpace of researchin what was still the very new field of internationalbusiness. They were able to find only sixteen projects fitting their definition in all the years prior to 1960. Throughoutthe early 1960s, the numberof internationalbusiness research projects referredto in
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