Over the past five decades, international market entry has been a focal point of research across business, marketing, entrepreneurship and management. With rising de-globalization and geopolitical shifts, scholarly attention has expanded to encompass firms' international trajectories and de-internationalization. Yet, there remains a limited understanding of how these behaviors inform and are shaped by adjacent domains and how key themes interact across these areas. Therefore, this study seeks to review the literature on market entry, exit and re-entry and examine knowledge diffusion patterns across adjacent intellectual domains. In so doing, we derive five theoretical implications that we suggest should underpin future research endeavors.
This paper reports two interrelated studies. The first one employs bibliometric methods with a hierarchical clustering approach to map the intellectual landscape of the core literature and evaluate its influence and permeability across adjacent fields. The second adopts advanced polynomial forecasting to identify emerging research trajectories signaling promising directions for future inquiry.
We report our findings derived from bibliometric analyses of 822 publications encompassing 21,613 citations in 43 leading academic journals on international market entry, exit and re-entry, over the past five decades. The literature mapping revealed six core themes: ownership and governance in internationalization, market exit and re-entry dynamics, early and rapid internationalization, foreign market entry modes, internationalization challenges and responses and internationalization in the digital era. Additional analysis identified that the impact of the core themes has dissipated into fifteen diffused themes, reflecting the field's permeability and broader influence beyond myopic disciplinary boundaries. Findings based on forecasting research trends for the next five years highlight untapped and emerging research opportunities pertaining to an integrated approach to studying international market dynamics; with particular emphasis on family firm-focused internationalization, the role of ownership, control and governance in internationalization decisions, performance and operating risk management.
This study distinguishes itself from prior reviews by employing novel bibliometric techniques to comprehensively map the international market entry and exit (and re-entry) (IMEE) domain, explaining both core and diffused knowledge structures. This is the first attempt to interdependently review and map IMEE research using empirical methods. Combining data-driven analyses with forecasting methods, we reveal novel thematic connections and provide predictive validity to emerging research trajectories that provide valuable priorities within this domain.
