Gender in international business journals: A review and conceptualization of MNCs as gendered social spaces

Abstract

The paper reviews 105 contributions published in journals pertinent to the field of International Business (IB) between 1991 and 2014 and details four main conceptualizations of gender: how women are compared against men, how gender is treated as a control variable and a cultural macro variable, and how gender is 'done' in international organizations. The review reveals that positivist epistemological assumptions dominate the IB field and that the current understanding of gender is limited. To advance the research, the paper develops the notion of MNCs as gendered social spaces and explains why the IB field would benefit from a more nuanced understanding and incorporation of gender relations into its analyses and discussions. The paper outlines theoretical and methodological advances associated with the reconceptualization of MNCs as gendered social spaces.

Beyond tokenism: How strategic leaders influence more meaningful gender diversity on boards of directors

“…Consequently, we acknowledge that this could limit the generalizability of our findings to firms located in other countries. Future research would benefit from exploring the implications of female strategic leaders in non-U.S. firms (Bazel-Shoham, Lee, Rivera, & Shoham, 2017;Koveshnikov, Tienari, & Piekkari, 2019). Second, although we paired insights from our interviews with quantitative data, we did not interview individuals within the firms in our quantitative sample.…”

Holding On While Letting Go: Neocolonialism as Organizational Identity Work in a Multinational Corporation

“…Finally, a characteristic feature of organizational identity work and neocolonialism in Dancom is that virtually all our research participants were men. Male domination in HQ management is typical of MNCs (Frenkel, 2017) and this is reflected in international business journals that for the most part remain gender blind (Koveshnikov, Tienari, & Piekkari, 2019). We found that tensions and struggles around the identity established at HQ did not undermine male dominance in the various units of the MNC.…”

Cultural Distance and Cross-Border Replication of China Multinational Corporations

“…'Power distance' (Hofstede, 1980(Hofstede, , 2001 at societal level concerns the extent to which the distribution of power is accepted by the society's members (Ghemawat, 2017) and their endorsement of perceived inequalities (Fowler et al, 2018). Power distance surfaces in the form of perceptions of inequality and perceived asymmetries in country relationships, influencing behaviours of groups (Koveshnikov et al, 2019). Groups such as the MNC that are exposed to multiple cultural contexts, where differences in the distribution of power may coexist, have implications for how key decisions are made (Fowler et al, 2018;Kaasa et al, 2013) and differences in working practices (Ghemawat, 2017;Sutton, 2012;Weber, 2005).…”

“…Variables were derived from recent empirical research (Kooij et al, 2010;Koveshnikov et al, 2019;Kunze et al, 2011) related to age, diversity, gender, and ethnicity. It argues that older employees can have a beneficial effect on firm productivity because of their experience, loyalty, morals, and work-ethic compared to younger workers.…”

“…To reduce data bias, we further control for managerial cross-country experience, which are set as the moderator, which is consistent with recent research on gender (e.g. Koveshnikov et al, 2019) and ageism of managers working across multicultural settings (Kooij et al, 2010;Kunze et al, 2011).…”