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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how qualitative case research (QCR) has been conducted in the field of international entrepreneurship (IE) in terms of onto-epistemology and methodology. QCR can serve as an umbrella approach for contextualizing and capturing the complexity of IE opportunities, events, conditions and relationships, and to illuminate and enrich the understanding of related IE processes. Design/methodology/approach A thorough literature review was conducted of IE journal articles published between 1989 and mid-2017. This paper identified and analyzed 292 journal articles in terms of theoretical purpose and research design. Findings The findings suggest that the “positivistic” QCR is the customary convention of QCR in IE. “Exploratory” and “theory building” are the two most commonly pursued objectives. There have also been atypical practices and increased methodological rigor in recent years. Alternative paradigmatic QCRs that depart from positivistic assumptions are in an early stage of development in IE. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research examining QCR onto-epistemology and methodology approaches in IE, providing a useful state of the art that has been hitherto lacking in the literature. Based on this paper’s findings, the authors suggest that the IE field would benefit from greater methodological transparency in the reporting and writing of QCR. Also, the breadth of knowledge and legitimacy of the IE area would be enhanced through more studies involving unconventional (beyond positivistic) QCR.

Customer citizenship behavior (CCB) in virtual brand communities is a topic of increasing importance in marketing management research. This type of behavior plays a critical role in the improvement of enterprises' marketing capabilities. In this study, we draw on regulatory focus theory-along with the perspectives of selfpresentation and regulatory fit in relation to social identity-to construct and test a model that investigates both the main effects of regulatory foci (promotion and prevention) and the indirect effects of online self-presentation and community identification on CCB. The empirical results based on our online survey between 310 individual members of an well-known online-community in China demonstrate:(1) a promotion focus exerts a positive influence on CCB while a prevention focus exerts a negative impact; (2) the desire for online self-presentation mediates the association between regulatory foci and CCB; and (3) community identification moderates the relationship between regulatory foci and the desire for online self-presentation, as well as the mediation effect. These results have substantial implications for studying CCB within virtual brand communities.

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