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Exploring Key Concepts in International Business

1. Introduction to International Business

The concept of international business carries multiple meanings of business management that extends across myriad boundaries, normally resulting in spectacular new questions and insights about economic conditions and international business theory. Hence, this global view commonly explores the functional areas of management international business but also navigates on its own eclectic journey around the world. Moreover, since globalization has become one of the top agendas in management and marketing, this courseroom concept is rich, varied, meaningful, and generally well understood by students who frequently possess extensive personal experiences of international travel.

The scholarly field of international business has consistently seen most research papers published in the Journal of International Business Studies. This position at the top stems from the wide range of scholarly questions that are addressed. While the topics are diverse, published papers address a variety of contexts about how businesses are functioning in multiple international environments, including companies in the US and their international business operations and activities, business studies in specific global regions, and the international rules, regulations, and policies of international business. The definition of international business and the resultant international business activities include both scholarly questions in macroeconomics such as foreign direct investment and trade, as well as business management-related issues, such as issues relating to human resource planning, operations management, and marketing of international business.

2. Globalization and Its Impact on Business

In most senses, there is no divide in international business at all. Large companies are really global leaders. It is the small and less developed national companies that find it hard to come to terms with the numerous challenges brought about by the widespread and practically irreversible process of globalization, whose realization has become a part of our daily life. There is a look upstream towards the larger company making the unimpeded journey towards openness and competition; in much the same way that smaller companies are left behind to fathom every last niche market and struggle to reach the key objectives. In the final analysis, all companies are called to make judicious and wise judgments. The strategy is the same for all, large or small, regardless of geography, on the condition that research into new markets is carried out and the correct competences acquired, thus avoiding the mistake of underestimating domestic and international cross-culturalisms.

According to Vladimir Kvint, global business should address the following questions: What does our company do? What is our business purpose? What is our duty to each market? What are our expectations from each market and for each market? How do we visualize our role within each market? Do socially responsible economic and geopolitical rules exist – specifically for global business? When is it reasonable to produce in a given market? When is stockpiling and inventory storage strategic or even dangerous, and how is that different, and to what extent, from increasingly necessary just-in-time operating techniques?

3. International Marketing Strategies

The choice of a market entry strategy in a certain foreign country for a company is described as an important decision. Although there are several options, a market of companies generally makes this choice among three forms of market entry: 1) export 2) cooperation and 3) direct operations abroad. In international marketing, export is the strategy that firms more quickly use to accomplish their objectives, at least if we think in relation to the other internationalization strategies such as cooperation and operations in foreign countries.

Internationalization is the synonym used to describe the strategy that firms use to enter international markets. It is said that a firm is international when it enters a distant country, not only in order to sell products, but also when it sells abroad approximately 20-25% of its products, or when it has consolidated the operation in many foreign countries. The international experience of a great number of firms who implemented the internationalization of operations and the Brazilian economic opening process since the fifteen years of the 1990s allowed and will still allow the better marking out of the followed route with the entry in foreign countries.

4. Cross-Cultural Communication in Business

Among the many things business people need to know to elaborate and maintain networks of international business operations are a few pointers about handling small publications that will be printed and/or distributed for business purposes. In all cultures, more communication goes on in key business relationships than can be handled face-to-face. Also, in all such other than the most informal relationships, major communications require something permanent and impersonal, like a note or document, to carry detailed information. Documents don’t forget things and don’t misinterpret ideas, at least not at the time of writing. It is not always easy to tell why a document about a subject of interest is written in the way it is. A chatty dialogue, as if in a television play on business, runs off in any number of casual-sounding ways.

All international business involves communicating across cultures. True, many domestic firms also communicate across substantial subcultural differences, such as those that lie between different functions in a well-organized company. However, the standard differences familiar to people who use umbrellas in Tokyo are even larger. Foreign businessmen often tell stories about communications that went badly wrong. These tales always sound like comic operas, in the first telling at least. But when people tell stories of things that caused them a lot of trouble, you may be sure the incident had uncomfortable aspects at the time.

5. Ethical Considerations in International Business

What are the ethical standards for international business? Typically, the transaction of goods and services economy, by its purchase of raw materials and manufacturing equipment, would be seen to be driving the foundation of a consumption society. While intent that is not the singular focus of business, this is its main contribution to society. The arrival of this philosophy in foreign countries, in the guise of multinational corporations and joint ventures, is criticized because it is felt that it erodes and perhaps eliminates the traditional values and relationships in these countries. Even a Western value such as consumerism is widely debated as exporting a short-term oriented economy that benefits the few. The firms that produce and distribute products under this system are critiqued for gaining an unreasonable advantage through exploitation and not fostering the minimum standards and practices necessary for business to succeed. In the 1990s, issues such as child labor abuses and pollution abatement became well-recognized ethical concerns that were international business responsibilities.

As businesses operate internationally, they take their local guiding principles and governing rules with them. However, firms must be cognizant that rules and ethical principles are often narrowly defined by national borders, cultural values, and economic systems. Firms understand that their practices are going to be seen by and measured using a wide range of definitions. A company is seen as unethical by the social worker in a South African town if shoes are destroyed that were paid for by an American company, while the same action may look like a responsible decision from a financial point of view in America. Differences in ethical viewpoints can create tensions not only in business but also in social and political relationships between countries.