Seminal contributions and future directions in international business political behavior and nonmarket strategy: a tribute to Jean Boddewyn

Professor Jean Boddewyn ^[1] (1929–2022) had a profound impact on international business (IB) scholarship. His work in international business political behavior launched a stream of research at the intersection of IB and strategic management that we now call international nonmarket strategy (INMS) (Boddewyn, 1988b; Boddewyn and Brewer, 1994; Boddewyn and Doh, 2011; Dieleman and Boddewyn, 2012; White et al., 2020). INMS refers to a multinational enterprise’s (MNE’s) action to improve its competitive position and performance by actively managing the institutional or societal contexts of business competition in which it operates, particularly its interactions with sociopolitical stakeholders (Baron, 2003; Mellahi et al., 2016). Therefore, it is comprised of two interrelated components: corporate political activity (CPA) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) ^[2]. Despite the fact that managing interactions with sociopolitical stakeholders across borders is complex in that it requires MNEs to consider a multiplicity of governments and other interest groups as well as supranational institutions (Boddewyn and Doh, 2011; Feinberg et al., 2015), recent research acknowledges that MNEs are deeply engaged in nonmarket strategies (Bruijn et al., 2024; Sun et al., 2021). Yet, Boddewyn’s work in 1988 was among the first to highlight that MNEs’ political behavior or nonmarket strategies had for long been ignored, downplayed or passively treated in mainstream IB research. In doing so, Boddewyn (1988b), and later, Boddewyn and Brewer (1994), laid the theoretical foundations of international business political behavior which spurred the development of a research stream in INMS.

More than three decades later, Boddewyn’s ideas continue to inspire IB and management scholars as they seek to explore and explain MNEs’ interactions with sociopolitical stakeholders across their home, host, and supranational nonmarket environments, and the impact of these interactions on MNEs’ legitimacy, performance, and survival (Doh et al., 2017; Meyer et al., 2020; Sun et al., 2024). As such, in this article, we pay tribute to Boddewyn’s scholarly legacy by providing an overview of his seminal contributions to international business political behavior and nonmarket strategy with the aim of stimulating future research. We begin by structuring our interpretation of Boddewyn’s pioneering work in this area into three chapters. These are: (1) the ideation chapter, in which Boddewyn focused on the ideation of MNEs’ political behavior by conceptualizing government as a factor of production or resource for MNEs, the nonmarket environment as distinct from the market environment and external relations as a necessary function for MNEs having the potential to provide competitive advantages; (2) the integration chapter, during which Boddewyn integrated political dimensions to our understanding of MNEs’ internationalization and introduced an integrated model of business political behavior to explain how MNEs interact with the nonmarket environment; and (3) the broadening chapter, in which Boddewyn, alone, alongside and in conjunction with others, further integrated nonstate and nonfirm actors, often referred to as civil society, activists and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); and incorporated the notion of legitimacy, which opened doors to discussing the ethics of political behavior, the legitimacy-conferring role of CSR, the provision of collective goods and reciprocity.

After reviewing these chapters, each of the authors of this article reflects on how they came to know Boddewyn’s work and how subsequent research has been inspired by and extended his ideas. Finally, we delineate future research directions that build on and extend Boddewyn’s visionary insights to further advance our understanding of INMS.

Because our scope of interest was on Boddewyn’s seminal contributions to international business political behavior and nonmarket strategy, our review does not do justice to the breadth of his substantive work. Boddewyn’s collective work (which has been cited more than 8,500 times in Google Scholar, with an h-index of 43) broadly focused on comparative marketing and management, foreign direct investment (FDI), international business management, and the political behavior and external affairs of MNEs (Harzing, 2022). Consistent with our scope of interest, we directed our attention to the latter two topics. By doing so, we identified more than 40 publications encapsulating his contributions to international business political behavior and nonmarket strategy ^[3]. As Table 1 shows, these publications include articles in IB, general management and more specialized journals, as well as books and book chapters. We analyzed all of these publications, and as Figure 1 reveals, the most common terms in their titles and abstracts were political, international, business, behavior, research, and nonmarket.

We structured our interpretation of Boddewyn’s work in this domain into three groundbreaking chapters summarized in Table 2. Note that these three chapters do not reflect a sequential, linear order as there is considerable overlap among them. We refer to the first chapter of Boddewyn’s work as “Ideation,” to point out that it focused on the ideation of MNEs’ political behavior by conceptualizing the role of government, the nonmarket environment, and the external relations function in MNEs. We define the second chapter as “Integration,” since it integrated political dimensions into explanations of MNEs’ internationalization and introduced an integrated model of business political behavior. Finally, we title the third chapter as “Broadening,” because it expanded the scope of MNEs’ political behavior by further involving nonstate and nonfirm actors, and incorporating the notion of legitimacy.

Boddewyn’s early work highlighted the importance of governments for MNEs’ operations and expansion (Boddewyn and Cracco, 1972). He pointed out that, somewhat counterintuitively, MNE executives often paid more attention to the political risk posed by governments than to political opportunities. Consequently, he suggested that to better address both political risk and opportunities, the role of MNE executives should involve understanding host governments, keeping abreast of politico-economic developments abroad, planning MNE political strategies, and developing skills in dealing with government officials (Boddewyn and Cracco, 1972). These notions nurtured one of Boddewyn’s seminal contributions: the ideation of MNEs’ political behavior by conceptualizing the government as another factor of production or resource that MNE executives need to consider in their management of the MNE’s chain of economic value-adding activities that cross borders (Boddewyn, 1993a, 1993b). He emphasized that governments have the power to set and change the laws, regulations, or “rules of the game” that shape the competitive environment in a given territory, and the authority to enforce their compliance. Thus, MNE executives should take into full account the political risk and opportunities posed by the governments of their home and host countries in their strategizing and decision-making (Boddewyn, 1977).

Boddewyn also emphasized that, beyond governments, other sociopolitical stakeholders (such as activists and the public at large) can assist or hamper MNEs’ operations and expansion (Boddewyn, 1993b). On this point, he introduced another of his seminal contributions, namely, the notion that MNEs should engage in external relations because society must be continuously convinced to give and maintain its support to business and to stop short of unduly restraining it (Boddewyn and Kapoor, 1972). Boddewyn explained that these stakeholders are the actors who constitute the MNE’s nonmarket environment, which is distinct from the market environment for the MNE’s inputs and outputs, and from its internal micromanagement (Boddewyn, 2003) ^[4]. Hence, he described external relations as that function within the MNE concerned with enlisting the support or negating the opposition of those nonmarket actors that actually or potentially affect its existence and prosperity (Boddewyn and Kapoor, 1972). This notion has since been often referred to as a “license to operate”.

Boddewyn’s interest in the external relations function led him to study the external affairs activities of MNEs at the local, national, regional and world levels (Behrman et al., 1975; Boddewyn, 1974a, 1974b, 1976a; Griffin et al., 2006). He pointed out that MNEs’ external affairs functions vary depending on their overarching political philosophies and practices (Dunn et al., 1979). However, they tend to mainly deal with: (1) government in its multiple roles as legitimizer, regulator and promoter; (2) business and professional associations as well as other firms in their pressure-group, private-regulator and legitimizing roles; (3) the intellectual, moral and scientific communities as legitimizers and opinion makers; (4) public opinion at large as voters and general legitimizers; and (5) the firm’s stockholders and employees as legitimizers (Boddewyn, 1973a, 1973b, 1976b). He explained that because foreign MNEs exist in a given country at the will of the host government and other sociopolitical stakeholders, as these actors become more sophisticated in their understanding of multinational business, the demands on and expectations of MNEs would grow (Boddewyn, 1972, 1975b; Kapoor and Boddewyn, 1973). In particular, foreign MNEs’ high visibility makes them potential targets for discriminatory policies, expropriation, activism (such as that advocating for environmental protection), and antiforeign nationalism.

Overall, Boddewyn’s concern was in managing MNEs successfully across multiple environments where different national governments and other sociopolitical stakeholders play an important role in relation to their business (Boddewyn, 1988a, 2005). He viewed effective external relations as necessary for MNEs (Boddewyn, 1975a, 2007; Boddewyn and Kapoor, 1972; Griffin et al., 2001), to such an extent, that another of his seminal contributions was to suggest that managing external relations with nonmarket actors (the government and other sociopolitical stakeholders) relatively better than rivals, could provide MNEs with competitive advantages (Boddewyn, 1993b; Salorio et al., 2005). The prevailing notion at the time had been that MNEs should achieve their economic objectives only through effective internal management and performance in the marketplace rather than through public and government relations (Boddewyn, 1976b). Thus, we argue that Boddewyn’s ideas extended Porter’s (1979) five competitive market forces, as shown in Figure 2, by adding nonmarket forces, namely the “bargaining power of nonmarket actors.” These nonmarket actors include government at the local and foreign levels, and as part of supranational institutions, as well as other sociopolitical stakeholders such as civil society, activists, and NGOs, among others. The bargaining power of these nonmarket actors may influence the forces that shape competition in the marketplace (as indicated by the dotted arrows in Figure 2). Managing external relations therefore requires MNEs to assess the bargaining power of nonmarket actors to be able to engage in interactions that enlist their support or negate their opposition, and potentially provide competitive advantages. Moreover, Boddewyn’s ideas also extended Porter’s (1980) three “generic” competitive strategies that focused on cost, differentiation, or focus/niche, by acknowledging that MNEs’ development of competitive advantages in the nonmarket environment can play a critical role in their success. Boddewyn (1986, 1993b) suggested that if an MNE cannot be a cost, differentiation, or focus/niche leader in the marketplace, it may still beat the competition on another ground, namely, the nonmarket environment.

The second chapter of Boddewyn’s work is based on two of his most influential articles, Boddewyn (1988b) and Boddewyn and Brewer (1994). These articles proposed the integration of political dimensions into explanations of MNEs’ internationalization and introduced an integrated model of business political behavior to explain how MNEs interact with the nonmarket environment, leading us to refer to this chapter of Boddewyn’s work as that of “Integration.”

In the first article, Boddewyn (1988b) proposed that Dunning’s (1988) eclectic paradigm focused on the ownership, internalization, and location advantages that explain MNEs’ FDI, could be expanded to explicitly integrate political dimensions. Boddewyn (1988b) highlighted that the eclectic paradigm identified and explained these advantages from an economics rationale, but neglected to address MNEs’ political actions or behavior. He argued that an explicit integration of political elements could provide “a better understanding of why particular MNEs have succeeded where a purely economic analysis may fail to account for their success” (Boddewyn, 1988b, p. 342).

Boddewyn (1988b) explained that ownership advantages are viewed in Dunning’s (1988) eclectic paradigm as “knowledge or expertise” that are essentially of the traditional “economic” type since they involve superior technology, cheaper or better products, more efficient production, superior servicing, effective marketing, and lower-cost financing, among others. He proposed that ownership advantages should be extended to include “political knowledge or expertise” that can be advantageous in dealing with the nonmarket environment. Political knowledge or expertise underlie “political advantages that can take the forms of: (1) better intelligence about political actors and opportunities; (2) readier access to political opinion and decision-makers; and (3) superior influence skills at handling the latter through various means” (Boddewyn, 1988b, p. 348).

Second, on internalization advantages, Boddewyn (1988b) highlighted that from a political perspective, the question is whether MNEs could internalize better political intelligence, access, and influence skills. He argued that political activities should be internalized by MNEs because their top managers can obtain access to commensurate nonmarket decision-makers, can bargain for permissions and/or advantages, and can commit the MNE’s resources in related activities. Nevertheless, the internalization of political activities could lead MNEs to contracting services from particular agents in local markets such as political analysts, or even to the recruitment of former government officials. However, recruiting former government officials may be viewed as unethical, and therefore, have a negative impact on the MNE’s legitimacy and reputation (Boddewyn, 1988b).

Third, regarding location advantages, Dunning’s (1988) eclectic paradigm recognized that political factors were as important as economic ones in influencing the location of MNEs’ FDI. Yet, Dunning (1988) viewed political factors as exogenous, and as such, providing host countries with different political locational advantages. To extend this view, Boddewyn (1988b) suggested also acknowledging that MNEs could transfer abroad their home country’s political locational advantages or lack of thereof. For example, MNEs from the USA have been obliged to comply by their home country government with the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act across their foreign operations, whereas MNEs from outside the USA may not face these same requirements.

In the second article, Boddewyn together with his coauthor Thomas Brewer (1994), offered another influential contribution: an integrated model of business political behavior, as shown in Figure 3. In their integrated model, the authors explained that political behavior is not developed in a vacuum but is conditioned by firm, industry, and nonmarket environment factors. Political behavior aims for MNEs to achieve their strategic objectives related to efficiency, market power, or legitimacy through varying political behavior intensities and forms of the bargaining and nonbargaining types. The authors highlighted that conditioning factors, political behavior, and strategic objectives, all interact in an integrated manner. For example, an MNE’s political behavior to achieve its strategic objectives can impact other firms in the same industry, creating opportunities or challenges for them, and in turn, affecting the subsequent political behavior of all firms in the industry.

Specifically, Boddewyn and Brewer (1994) suggested that, when managing governments, MNEs can assume various forms of bargaining and nonbargaining political behavior. Bargaining can involve conflictual or partnership political behavior, which entail either viewing the relationship between the MNE and the government as a zero-sum game, where if one wins the other loses, or as a positive-sum game, where there is cooperation and collaboration between both parties. Nonbargaining can entail political behavior in the form of compliance, avoidance, or circumvention. Compliance implies MNEs meeting regulatory requirements, avoidance involves MNEs exiting a market, and circumvention refers to MNEs engaging in illegal activities to go around regulations. Boddewyn and Brewer (1994) argued that MNEs tend to comply with regulations when these are favorable or they have no resources to challenge them, while they are likely to avoid or circumvent regulatory requirements when the benefits of such behaviors exceed their legitimacy costs. The authors predicted that the intensity of MNEs’ political behavior can be greater when the stakes for them are higher, and they have the competences required. Finally, the authors pointed out that political behavior aims to achieve MNEs’ strategic objectives related to efficiency, market power, and legitimacy. Efficiency implies MNEs acting politically to reduce production or transaction costs to provide cheaper, better, or unique products to customers; market power can allow MNEs to raise prices, eliminate competitors or collude with them, obtain favorable regulations, and deny such benefits to other firms by raising barriers of entry; and legitimacy facilitates MNEs’ acquisition of resources in their value added-chains, access to policy makers, influence in public policy making, and reduction in the opposition of other stakeholders.

Boddewyn and Brewer (1994, p. 126) argued that “political behavior is not merely an alternative or a complement to economic behavior, but it constitutes an intrinsic part of international business behavior because political processes interfere everywhere.” They highlighted that as governments at home and abroad create unnatural market imperfections that control MNEs’ access to foreign markets, international business behavior needs to be political, because without these governments’ permissions no economic transactions are possible. Political behavior is therefore attractive for MNEs since it allows them to access foreign markets, develop political knowledge and capabilities, engage in alliances and coalitions for political influence, create competitive advantages, and achieve their strategic objectives.

Thereafter, Boddewyn worked with other coauthors on extending different aspects of the integrated model of business political behavior. For instance, Marleen Dieleman and Boddewyn (2012) studied the relationship between firms’ organizational structure and their political behavior. The authors’ contribution was to explain that business groups depending on political ties can protect themselves against the negative effects of political ties by using organizational design to obtain such protection. Specifically, they suggested that a fragmented business group structure could allow to partially include government actors through bargaining in one part of the group, without having knowledge of or power over other group firms. This study expanded our understanding of the role of organizational structure in political behavior.

Relatedly, a set of four studies by Boddewyn and George White III, along with other coauthors, examined the relationship between the regulatory/legal environment and MNE subsidiaries’ political behavior. In the first study, White et al. (2015) analyzed how the interaction between managerial perceptions concerning specific dimensions of legal system uncertainty and organizational capabilities influence MNE subsidiaries’ political tie intensity. Their contribution was to explain that there is a positive association between managerial perceptions of ex ante commercial law inadequacy and the intensification of political ties that grows stronger when an MNE’s subsidiary is committed to organizational adaptation of capabilities to the local context. There is also a positive association between managerial perceptions of ex post judicial arbitrariness and the intensification of political ties that grows stronger when an MNE’s subsidiary is engaged in strategically positioning operations in an emerging market environment. The second study by White et al. (2018) examined how managerial perceptions of regulator vulnerabilities to political pressure, and institutional distance, influence the intensification of MNE subsidiaries’ political ties. The authors’ contribution was to uncover that managerial perceptions of regulator vulnerability to political pressures positively enhance the intensification of MNE subsidiaries’ political ties. Their results also revealed that regulatory distance and, more importantly, the simultaneous presence of political and regulatory distance diminish the positive relationship between managerial perceptions of regulator vulnerability to political pressures and MNE subsidiaries’ propensity to enhance the intensification of political ties.

A third study by White et al. (2020) analyzed how perceived deficiencies in the legal service sector where an MNE’s subsidiary operates, influence the intensity of its political ties with actors in both the regulatory and legal arenas. The authors’ contribution was to identify that in a flawed democracy, perceived deficient legal services enhance the intensity of an MNE’s subsidiary political ties with government actors in both the regulatory and legal arena. However, in a hybrid regime, perceived deficient legal services enhance only the intensity of an MNE’s subsidiary political ties with government actors in the regulatory arena. The authors’ results also indicate that the relationship between perceived deficiencies in the legal service sector and the intensity of political ties is stronger for MNEs’ subsidiaries that operate in heavily regulated industries across both a flawed democracy and hybrid regime. Finally, the fourth study by White et al. (Forthcoming), examined how the intensification of political ties affects MNE subsidiaries’ performance in a volatile emerging market environment. The authors’ contribution was to clarify that MNE subsidiaries’ political ties intensity has a curvilinear relationship with performance, which grows stronger when an MNE’s subsidiary operates in a heavily regulated industry or managers perceive regulatory excessiveness to be high rather than low. Together, these four studies improved our understanding of the effect of regulatory/legal factors, as conditioning nonmarket environment factors, on MNE subsidiaries’ political behavior.

The third chapter of Boddewyn’s work focused on broadening the scope of MNEs’ political behavior by further involving nonstate and nonfirm actors, often referred to as civil society, activists, or in their organizational form, NGOs and, relatedly, incorporating the notion of legitimacy as a central goal of MNEs (Boddewyn, 2016). One key contribution was to point out that MNEs’ legitimacy is granted by all types of nonmarket actors based on three dimensions (Boddewyn, 1995). First, legality, or adherence of the MNE to governmental rules; second, conformity of the MNE with mores and customs (as in definitions of “fair” and “loyal” competition); and third, contribution of the MNE to societal (including economic) goals. Parallel to mainstream nonmarket strategy research (Baron, 1995), literature in IB and management, Boddewyn’s interest in legitimacy, opened doors to discussing the ethics of political behavior, the legitimacy-conferring role of CSR, the provision of collective goods, and reciprocity. His ideas set a foundation for our understanding of the interactions that MNEs have with civil society as a way for MNEs to bolster their relationships with governments and competitive positions.

Boddewyn, alongside others (Teegen et al., 2004), began considering the role of nonstate actors as potential complementary partners in the provision of public, collective goods, especially in emerging markets. Later, Boddewyn and Doh (2011) coauthored an article in the inaugural volume of the Global Strategy Journal in which they introduced a model to explain and predict when public goods such as health care, education, transportation, and utilities, are supplied through collaborations among public as well as private for-profit and not-for-profit actors via contracting, alliance formation, internationalization, or charitable assistance. Boddewyn and Doh (2011) drew from transaction cost economics and institutional theory to predict which actors would be primarily responsible for the delivery of collective goods. They reviewed three institutional conditions: public ordering, in which formal rules guide transactions, prevalent in developed market systems; private ordering, in which informal norms determine how transactions are conducted, prevalent in emerging markets; and state ordering, where the state serves as the agent in determining how transactions are completed, prevalent in autocratic or authoritarian regimes. They used those conditions to predict that, where public ordering prevails, and assets are specific to a focal MNE, market transactions will determine how public, collective goods are provided. They use the example of British Petroleum hiring a private security company in Colombia to train local forces to protect its pipelines. Where public ordering prevails, and assets are more generally governed, alliances between MNEs and government or NGOs will be the primary means for the delivery of public, collective goods. They use the example of a German company working with development and government partners to train workers in Brazil. Where private and/or state ordering prevail, under conditions of high asset specificity, MNEs will provide public, collective services internally, as illustrated by De Beers and other mining companies in South Africa and Nigeria assuming many state functions in and around their mines and communities. Finally, where private and/or state ordering prevails, under conditions of low asset specificity, governments and state-led or directed organizations will provide these public, collective services broadly. They use the example of China Youth Development Foundation’s flagship Project Hope, which has raised hundreds of millions of dollars to build rural schools and provide scholarships for students from poor areas. Motorola, Coca-Cola, and overseas foundations contributed money to this project while lobbying for the expansion of the market system in China.

Building on this work with coauthor Jonathan Doh, Boddewyn subsequently developed three articles with Peter Buckley in which they extended internalization theory by incorporating social issues and the concept of reciprocity to nonmarket actors. The main contribution of the first of these articles was to demonstrate that the market-internalization framework could be applied to noneconomic institutions (Buckley and Boddewyn, 2015). This was due to the fact that society’s nonmarket sub-systems (political, social, and cultural) are subject to failures analogous to those of economic markets. MNEs can therefore contribute to their repair or replacement by selectively, strategically, and responsibly internalizing the market and nonmarket arenas for these sub-systems’ functions. This helps explain the growing “political role” of MNEs, which entails substituting for failing nonmarket institutions in a wide spectrum of societal functions (health, education, security, public utilities, and roads) and geographic locations (Scherer and Palazzo, 2011). In a second article, Buckley and Boddewyn (2016) in response to Hillemann and Verbeke (2015), argued that the conventional definition of internalization theory had been too limited and that broadening its scope to include nonmarket transactions, institutions, and actors, as well as widening society’s welfare criteria, enhanced its contemporary relevance and potential utility. The authors suggested that society’s welfare criteria should “be widened to include equity, environmental impact, legitimacy, and the provision of ‘merit goods’ that are judged to be required by a society’s members on the basis of need rather than willingness to pay – an example is education” (Buckely and Boddewyn, 2016, p. 3). They go on to argue that there is no reason why the predictive power of internalization theory should be diminished when widening its application to the supply of public, collective goods by MNEs.

The last article in this series by Boddewyn and Buckley (2017) demonstrated that MNEs can use social and political activities to obtain goods from others without having to transact with them but rather via noncontractual reciprocity. Relatedly, another of Boddewyn’s (2017) contributions pointed out that in the remote areas of emerging markets, MNEs can use noncontractual reciprocity to develop the collective goods they require to operate. Later, Boddewyn, together with Mike Peng (2021), explained how informal institutions provide some of the conditions, motivations, and precipitating circumstances behind MNEs’ use of noncontractual reciprocity. Specifically, they clarified that noncontractual reciprocity may be useful when there is reliance on informality, perceived importance of contributions, and estimated probability of returning favors, which, respectively, correspond with the conditions, motivations, and precipitating circumstances related to using noncontractual reciprocity.

In this section, each of the authors of this article reflects on how they came to know Boddewyn’s work in international business political behavior and nonmarket strategy, and how subsequent research has been inspired by and extended his ideas.

I first met Jean Boddewyn in 1997 at the International Association for Business and Society Conference in Destin, FL. As a doctoral student, I had of course read his work. I approached him and he was kind and generous with his time and conversation. That was the beginning of a 25-year professional relationship and friendship.

Although Boddewyn did not always use the term “nonmarket” to describe his work, it clearly influenced much of INMS research as it unfolded in the 21st century. Despite the increasing incidence of MNEs both responding to and seeking to influence their nonmarket environment, as late as 2006, scholars were suggesting this research was still “embryonic” (Rodriguez et al., 2006). Shortly thereafter, the literature exploded with regard to international CPA as well as multinational CSR.

One research stream has directed attention to the role of global governance at the state level and how home country conditions affect MNEs’ nonmarket strategies (Doh et al., 2015). Another has built upon not only the work of Boddewyn, but especially that of Vernon (1971), in exploring the various contingencies related to MNE-host government bargaining, and especially the factors that exacerbate the “obsolescing bargaining model” (OBM, in which early investments are encouraged and supported by the host government, but as a given project nears completion, the investment becomes largely sunk, shifting the bargaining power to the host and setting up the potential for asset appropriation by the host government) (Ramamurti, 2001; Teegen et al., 2004). An additional line of research has explored how MNEs, alone or in partnership with governments or NGOs, address “institutional voids” – the absence or limited presence of market supporting mechanisms and systems in emerging markets (Doh et al., 2017). A related stream has examined the important role of political ties in influencing the fortunes of foreign MNEs entering the focal country as well as domestic firms seeking to pursue growth opportunities outside of it (White et al., 2018).

With regard to the role of MNEs in providing “social” or “public” goods, even prior to the article by Boddewyn and Doh (2011), a number of IB scholars had advocated for incorporating NGOs into investigations of MNE strategy generally, and INMS in particular. Teegen et al. (2004) offered one of the first arguments for the relevance of including NGOs in IB research. Among other observations, they documented how NGOs exert pressures on firms via various tactics to alter their behavior and activities, but also how collaboration between MNEs and NGOs can create value. Presaging Boddewyn and Doh (2011), they showed how NGOs can influence the transaction costs of MNEs. Teegen et al. (2004) also argued that NGOs themselves can be studied as multinational organizations, with challenges analogous to MNEs in terms of entry strategies, gaining host country legitimacy, managing headquarter-subsidiary relationships, and similar issues.

Continuing this line of inquiry, Dahan et al. (2010b) edited a special issue of the journal Business and Society on the role of NGOs in the business-government-society interface, and Dahan et al. (2010a) explored how NGOs can help MNEs create value in emerging markets through various forms of collaboration. As late as 2013, Doh and Lucea observed that global strategy and nonmarket research had proceeded independently, and called for the full integration of these areas, given global developments that demonstrated the importance of the nonmarket environment for global firms. In the decade since, IB research addressing “nonmarket” issues and actors has exploded, as documented in the comprehensive review article published in the Journal of International Business Studies by Sun et al. (2021), attesting to the lasting impact of the work of Jean Boddewyn and other early pioneers.

Jonathan Doh invited the authors of this article to be part of a panel paying tribute to Jean Boddewyn’s scholarly legacy in 2022 at the Academy of International Business (AIB) Conference in Miami, FL. This invitation gave me the opportunity to appreciate the power of academia as I retraced how Boddewyn’s trailblazing work influenced my research, although I never got the chance to meet him in person.

Boddewyn’s expansion of Dunning’s eclectic paradigm (Boddewyn, 1988b) provided a theoretical foundation for my doctoral research, in which I further extended the integration of political dimensions into MNEs’ choice of equity (e.g. FDI) and nonequity-based market entry modes (e.g. exports or contractual agreements for production and/or distribution). Building on CPA literature and institutional theory, my coauthors and I untangled how the macro and micro levels of analysis of the political environment can affect all types of market entry mode decisions (De Villa et al., 2015). This allowed us to enhance the incorporation of political considerations into the full range of entry modes available to MNEs.

Boddewyn and Brewer’s (1994) model of business political behavior that went beyond MNEs’ choice of bargaining political strategies (Hillman et al., 2004; Katic and Hillman, 2023; Lux et al., 2011) to include nonbargaining political strategies, also offered pivotal inspiration for my doctoral dissertation. The predominant notion, based on research in developed countries, was that MNEs typically use bargaining political strategies to influence public policies. Yet, my fieldwork across Latin America revealed that MNEs are likely to deliberately use nonbargaining political strategies in host markets (despite possessing political resources and capabilities and identifying opportunities to improve the favorability of public policies) when they perceive high host country political risk, arising from not only host country political institutions but also from high distance between their home-host governments’ relations (De Villa et al., 2019). Notably, these findings underscore Boddewyn’s (1998b) call for the consideration of home-country influences on MNEs’ political behavior by uncovering the effects of home-host governments’ relations (De Villa et al., 2019; Hartwell and Ursprung, 2024).

Relatedly, my fieldwork also extended Boddewyn’s forms of nonbargaining political behavior. We uncovered that in foreign markets where MNE executives perceive high political risk, in part arising from high distance between their home-host governments’ relations, MNE subsidiaries can deploy four different nonbargaining political strategies. These are: low visibility, ensuring a minimal degree of general attention from other actors; rapid compliance, entailing high-speed actions to obey the rules; reconfiguration, involving rearranging the MNE’s structure and processes for competitiveness; and anticipation, implying the prediction of public policy and analysis of interest groups to anticipate responses (De Villa et al., 2019). These findings, beyond amplifying MNEs’ repertoire of political strategies, highlight the need to examine political strategies from a subsidiary perspective because subsidiaries are the units within MNEs that are directly exposed to host governments, enabling the extension and contextualization of knowledge (De Villa, 2021).

One of Boddewyn’s distinctive interests was informing managerial practice (Boddewyn, 1975a, 1975b, 1977; Boddewyn and Cracco, 1972). This inspired my work offering insights to MNE executives on how they can assess and manage geopolitical risk (De Villa, 2023). Another of Boddewyn’s central concerns was achieving theoretical rigor. This motivated two articles in which my coauthors and I explored methodological approaches that achieve rigor and offer opportunities for advancing INMS research. One article explained how Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) can improve our understanding of the configurations of conditions that constitute MNEs’ sociopolitical risks across contexts or the effects of sociopolitical risks on diverse outcomes of interest for MNEs (Lawton et al., 2024). Another article explored how high-quality process research can be undertaken in an IB setting, for instance, to deepen our understanding of the temporal unfolding of MNEs’ interactions with sociopolitical stakeholders across markets (De Villa and Langley, 2024).

I first encountered Boddewyn’s work during the early days of my PhD. At the time, I was exploring how and why political strategies could be essential for firms, particularly in the context of MNEs’ global strategies. Boddewyn’s early papers were pivotal in shaping my thinking and persuading my mentors, who were initially skeptical about the relevance of this research area within a doctoral program in strategy. Boddewyn’s insights into the political nature of IB not only validated my curiosity by demonstrating the importance of the political and diplomatic dimensions of firm strategy, but they also laid the foundation for much of my academic journey.

Boddewyn’s perspective that MNEs can develop nonmarket capabilities, which often interact with and substitute for institutional mechanisms (Boddewyn and Brewer, 1994), resonated deeply with my research. In one of my dissertation papers, I explored how MNEs navigate risks associated with foreign investments by leveraging their political resources and capabilities, an idea directly inspired by Boddewyn’s notions of political strategy and government as a “factor of production” (Boddewyn and Brewer, 1994). We found that supranational institutions, such as Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs), and nonmarket capabilities, are strategically used by firms. Notably, firms with strong nonmarket capabilities can better navigate institutional uncertainties, even in the absence of BITs (Albino-Pimentel et al., 2018).

Boddewyn’s ideas also inspired my research on MNE investments in conflict-prone countries. This work revealed how the type of nonmarket capabilities – political, social or environmental – shapes firms’ strategies to enter challenging institutional environments (Albino-Pimentel et al., 2021). Similarly, Boddewyn’s work on political ties and their role in safeguarding firm interests motivated me to examine how MNEs deploy political ties to protect innovation. His insight that nonmarket considerations can mitigate weak institutional frameworks inspired our findings that home-country political ties can help firms operate in weak regulatory contexts, even when intellectual property protections are lacking, provided their home countries have some economic or social leverage over the foreign location (Albino-Pimentel et al., 2022).

Boddewyn’s influence also extends to my work on the role of industry-specific support policies for foreign investments. For instance, my coauthors and I found that adverse experiences with government policies, such as policy reversals, can make firms wary of certain institutional settings (Georgallis et al., 2021). This aligns closely with Boddewyn’s observations about the complex interplay between government policies and corporate strategies.

Perhaps more important than these specific inspirational insights, in my opinion, one of Boddewyn’s enduring legacies is the way his ideas continue to shape the growing literature at the intersection of nonmarket and global strategy (Albino-Pimentel et al., 2024). While much of his work focused on political strategies and firm-government interactions, his more recent insights into a broader view of nonmarket strategy, including firm relationships with other nonmarket actors besides the government, are nothing short of visionary (e.g. Boddewyn and Doh, 2011; Boddewyn and Buckley, 2017). This is indeed reflected in how the field is evolving (Bruijn et al., 2024; Sun et al., 2021).

Looking back, what stands out most about Boddewyn’s work is not only its theoretical rigor and insight but also its ability to integrate disciplines such as political science, economics, and IB. This interdisciplinary approach has provided generations of scholars, including myself, with inspiration and tools to question, explore, and better understand the complexities of INMS.

Boddewyn’s work proved pivotal during the nascent stages of my doctoral research when I encountered challenges in establishing a theoretical framework to elucidate the performance of MNEs operating in the Middle East and North Africa region during and after the Arab Spring. His research on international business political behavior provided a foundation for situating my research on legitimacy, compelling me toward a transdisciplinary approach encompassing sociology and political science, mirroring his own intellectual breadth. I recall meeting him and his wife at the 2013 Academy of International Business Conference in Istanbul. His presence and insightful contributions at a 9:00 a.m. paper session solidified his role as an inspiring figure in my academic development, particularly in demonstrating a sustained commitment to INMS.

Boddewyn’s influence is evident in a strand of IB research that builds on institutional theory to explain MNE behavior, particularly the attainment of legitimacy in foreign markets. This body of work suggests that MNE internationalization success hinges on perceived legitimacy – the generalized perception that an entity’s actions are desirable, proper, or appropriate within a system of norms, values, and beliefs (Henisz and Zelner, 2005; Kostova and Zaheer, 1999; Deephouse and Suchman, 2008). However, securing legitimacy can be particularly challenging in least-developed or developing nonmarket environments, where political dynamics, corruption, and limited democratic representation create complex entanglements between state and nonstate actor interests (Darendeli et al., 2021; Margolis and Walsh, 2003; Rodriguez et al., 2006). My research has argued that MNEs’ ability to maintain legitimacy and stakeholder support depends on their engagement strategies with both formal and informal actors within the political system (Darendeli and Hill, 2016; Feinberg et al., 2015).

Boddewyn’s research, and subsequent work, has also highlighted how political behavior can create conflicts of interest or liabilities through dependencies on specific political actors or institutions, thereby increasing firms’ vulnerability to political environment shifts. This insight inspired my examination of the Arab Spring (Darendeli and Hill, 2016) in which we extended Boddewyn’s perspective by distinguishing between the government and state in host countries, revealing the multifaceted nature of MNE legitimacy. In a follow-up study (Darendeli et al., 2021), we investigated how, in Arab Spring-affected countries, popular perceptions differentiated between governments and state institutions in assessing MNE legitimacy. Our findings indicated that MNEs with trust-based relationships with surviving state institutions fared better than those solely reliant on relationships with deposed governments. These studies, informed by Boddewyn’s (1988b) model of business political behavior, suggest that informal and sociocultural elements of the nonmarket environment, including but not limited to home and host country cultures, local communities, religious groups, families, tribes, and nonrepresented actors, play a crucial role in international market entry and success (Darendeli and Hill, 2016; Darendeli et al., 2021; Dahan et al., 2010b).

Boddewyn’s work extends to studies examining the interplay between a country’s institutional development and MNE institutional entrepreneurship. In collaboration with Brandl et al. (2019), we expanded this perspective by examining changes in intellectual property regimes across 80 emerging economies. We extended Boddewyn’s (1988b) framework of political actors and behavior by incorporating formal supranational institutions, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), demonstrating their significant influence on MNE nonmarket strategies and outcomes in contexts characterized by institutional voids. Furthermore, I have sought to refine Boddewyn’s political behavior perspective by exploring variations in formal institutions and their sphere of influence at the regional level within host countries. Our study (Onuklu et al., 2021) investigated how firms navigated export-related institutional voids at both federal and regional levels. This research revealed the existence of meso-level formal institutions, encompassing distinct regions within a country, which warrant explicit consideration in analyses of MNE behavior.

Boddewyn’s research on MNE-governmental bargaining had focused mostly on bargaining strategies to obtain benefits from governments such as information, concessions, or favorable tax treatment. What was less clear was how MNEs could shield themselves against subsequent adverse government policies or expropriation (e.g. Henisz and Zelner, 2003). Could firms strengthen their defense mechanisms when bargaining with political actors? It was this topic that I discussed with Boddewyn when I met him during an AIB conference over a decade ago. As I was working on emerging market business groups, I had discovered through my interviews that the owners of such groups used their organizational structure with multiple, informally connected legal entities as a way to bring in political ties where government actors could be partially included through bargaining in one part of the group, without having knowledge of or power over other group firms. Recognizing that emerging market firms often had no choice but to maintain political ties, the pertinent puzzle was not whether to engage in bargaining with political actors, but how to handle these relationships so as to obtain the benefits while mitigating their costs.

Our collaboration eventually led to the publication of a case study from Indonesia that showed how a fragmented business group structure allowed for sophisticated boundary management (Dieleman and Boddewyn, 2012). As there was little prior research on the use of organizational structure for managing relationships with government actors, I recall long conversations on how we could ground our insights and connect them to other scholarly conversations. The process included me receiving many fax messages with notes scribbled in the margin, which left me impressed with his thorough attitude to research.

Boddewyn’s influence on me and my work was reflected in a new conversation emerging in the IB literature. As others also acknowledged the role of organizational design in the management and buffering of political ties, the idea was picked up on and extended (e.g. Sun et al., 2012; Zhang et al., 2016). More recently, Witt (2019) suggested that such buffering strategies could aid firms when faced with de-globalization pressures, allowing them to continue their internationalization while also dealing with geopolitical shifts and tensions.

Later work built further on the importance of organizational boundary management, in particular boundary protection for firms with political ties. Using resource dependence theory, the inspiration I drew from Boddewyn led me to pursue a deeper understanding of how organizational designs can affect boundary management. Combining the work on organizational boundaries (see: Oliver, 1993) with insights on buffering political ties, Widjaja and I theorized that boundary permeability in politically connected firms can lead to appropriation of the firm’s resources by political ties (Dieleman and Widjaja, 2019). Drawing on a unique ethnography from Indonesia in the agribusiness field, we showed that being embedded in overlapping political and business networks can cause resources such as information, people, and funds to flow across organizational boundaries, ultimately leaving the firm vulnerable to their political partners. To mitigate this, we drew attention to the importance of utilizing formal controls (such as organizational structure and leadership roles) and informal controls (symbolic separation of the firm and political activities) in the pursuit of boundary management. As politics is increasingly intruding into global business, drawing attention to novel defense mechanisms firms use to handle their political relationships is a promising research stream where Boddewyn’s insights can be further extended. My experience in internalizing insights contained in Boddewyn’s work and in collaborating as coauthors has been inspiring due to his combination of insight, wisdom, and interest in practical implications of academic theories, as well as his work ethic and his attention to academic rigor.

Jean Boddewyn and I were interested in government-business relations, and indeed we each contributed to books and journal articles with the other (e.g. Boddewyn in Grosse, 2005; Grosse, 2010 in a collection dedicated to Boddewyn, 2010; Boddewyn and Grosse, 1995). Boddewyn was always focused on the company point of view, whether it be in making investment decisions or in dealing with governments and other nonmarket entities. Indeed, he even called the subject “managing external affairs” (Boddewyn, 1974a), and he viewed government relations as a potential source of competitive advantage for MNEs (Boddewyn, 1986), as we noted in the ideation chapter describing his work in this article.

Boddewyn’s thinking about how companies make decisions, whether to invest or disinvest, to respond to government policies, and also to try to shape government policies, was among his most influential. He was able to dissect company FDI decisions into three factors: underlying conditions, motivating factors, and precipitating factors (Boddewyn, 1985). All three factors are needed to produce a company decision, for example, to undertake FDI or not. And all three factors include the influence of governments and other nonmarket entities.

Boddewyn was quick to point out that companies not only make decisions in response to government policies, but they also attempt to influence government policymaking. This corporate political strategy (e.g. Boddewyn, 1993b) was not something that I had previously considered, and I fully agreed with Boddewyn that it is a key element of the government-business relationship. That perspective is one that has affected my thinking and my writing since that time.

One of Boddewyn’s most defining features as an author was his unfailing effort to give others credit for his ideas. In his advances in thinking about MNE decision-making, about relations with governments and pressure groups, and about the legitimacy of MNEs, he routinely gave other authors, from IB, political science, economics, international relations, and other relevant literatures, credit for originating the themes that he pursued. Indeed, he may have gone too far in failing to recognize his own contributions to our knowledge.

Equally important as his writings, have been Boddewyn’s discussions with me and others at AIB meetings and elsewhere, which provided very valuable insights into MNE decision-making. When I was writing about the impact of foreign investment codes on MNE behavior, he was quick to point out that the codes were generally voluntary or had no teeth, so that MNEs did not pay that much attention to them – whereas dealing with national governments was/is much more important. When I was writing about strategies of financial firms in international markets, he pointed out that national regulation (and historical background) were key elements contributing to those strategies, rather than just competition with rival firms. It is a shame that many scholars did not have the opportunity to exchange ideas with Jean Boddewyn.

We suggest that future research will be undertaken in a world of rising political tensions and societal demands, often intertwined, creating higher complexity between heterogenous nonmarket stakeholders. This will lead MNEs to engage much more in nonmarket strategies, some oriented at the global level and others tailored to regional or local contextual conditions. Looking ahead, our purpose in this section is to offer future directions that build on and extend Boddewyn’s visionary insights to advance INMS research.

We point out five promising areas for future research, drawing on Sun et al. (2021). These are: (1) placing greater attention on the dynamic interactions between MNEs’ CPA and CSR, particularly the combinative effects of both and the complementarity and substitutability between them; (2) expanding the scope of INMS to incorporate a microfoundations perspective, focusing on the role of top managers in MNEs’ political behavior and the micro-level processes and practices through which individuals deploy capabilities and strategies oriented to nonmarket stakeholders; (3) integrating macro-level scholarship on geopolitical tensions, global institutions, governance and NGOs and their interactions with MNEs, as well as engaging in comparative studies of nonmarket strategies; (4) tackling social movements and multiactor global issues, to improve our understanding of MNEs’ responses, partnering initiatives, and innovations to address them; and (5) exploring the transformative role of artificial intelligence (AI), to understand the impact of this disruptive technological advancement on MNEs’ international nonmarket strategizing.

The first area regarding the dynamic interactions between MNEs’ CPA and CSR, builds on Boddewyn’s interest in the ethics of political behavior, the legitimacy-conferring role of CSR as an enabler for MNEs to bolster their relations with governments, and the provision of collective goods (Boddewyn, 1995, 2016; Boddewyn and Doh, 2011). Advancing our understanding of the combinatory effects of CPA and CSR is pivotal to uncovering the synergies and challenges for MNEs engaging in both (den Hond et al., 2014). We suggest that future research could extend Boddewyn’s interest in their combinatory effects by exploring one of his central concerns, that is, how MNEs’ CPA and CSR efforts jointly affect their reputation and legitimacy, and whether CPA and CSR efforts have complementary or substitutable effects. This research could broaden our understanding of how different combinations of CPA and CSR, and their internal consistency or inconsistency, contribute to making an MNE be perceived as legitimate or illegitimate, and therefore, successful or not in its business. Another research avenue could explore how governments may treat MNEs in a way that encourages them to engage in the provision of collective goods to help achieve social goals, and what political strategies might be most successful in guiding governments to enact policies that serve social goals. In contrast, future research could also further expand our knowledge about how the dark side of CPA may be used to pursue government officials to promote policies that help toward achieving corporate goals despite these being detrimental to society, and what are the economic, social, and environmental implications and costs derived from these actions.

Note that building on Boddewyn’s notion of increasing interdependence between CPA and CSR, Sun et al. (2024), called for a new construct to describe the integration of CPA and CSR, that is corporate sociopolitical engagement, which they defined as the simultaneous, concurrent and integrated management of social, political, and sociopolitical issues. We call here for future research at the intersection of CPA and CSR to use this construct as it: (1) captures a more holistic/integrative perspective on the interactions between MNEs, their institutional environments and the sociopolitical actors that populate them; (2) suggests that MNEs’ nonmarket activity often involves concurrent or sequential interactions with both social and political stakeholders; and (3) allows for the possibility that the MNE can be the subject or agent of that engagement (often in a strategic sense), the object or respondent to that engagement (when MNEs face regulation or other forms of stakeholder pressures) or both.

The second area related to incorporating a microfoundations perspective, draws on Boddewyn’s concern for the role of MNE executives in the deployment of MNEs’ political behavior (Boddewyn, 1977, 1988b; Boddewyn and Kapoor, 1972), and the view of microfoundations as a toolkit that can help scholars advance IB research (Santangelo et al., 2024). By adopting a microfoundations perspective, future research could explore how MNEs’ top managers and other individuals take part in developing capabilities that allow MNEs to interact with nonmarket stakeholders, as well as how these individuals shape MNEs’ choices of political behavior. Boddewyn’s insights on “political knowledge or expertise” as underlying political capabilities, his work on the conditioning factors of MNEs’ choices of political behavior, and his studies about the philosophies and practices of MNEs’ external affairs departments (Boddewyn, 1988b; Boddewyn and Brewer, 1994; Dunn et al., 1979; Griffin et al., 2006), could all be extended by asking “who” leads and is part of MNEs’ political capabilities, choices, and external affairs departments and “what” do they bring into these capabilities, choices, and departments, according to four categories: (1) the demographic characteristics of these individuals; (2) their cognitive characteristics; (3) their social capital; and (4) their team dynamics.

It is widely acknowledged since the path-breaking work by Kahneman and Tversky (1979) that leaders are susceptible to cognitive biases. However, the cognitive foundations of nonmarket-oriented capabilities, have hardly received attention. Zooming into individuals’ demographic characteristics, cognitive biases, social capital, and team dynamics could help us to better understand why some MNEs may be better at assessing or mitigating political risks and at capturing political opportunities (Boddewyn and Cracco, 1972). In particular, top management teams research related to hubris (e.g. Hayward and Hambrick, 1997) has found that some managers are more inclined to excessive risk-taking. Future research could therefore examine the impact of micro-level factors on risk-taking propensity to shed further light on Boddewyn and Brewer’s (1994) explanations of the choices among bargaining or nonbargaining forms of political behavior.

A microfoundations perspective could also elucidate what are the micro-level processes and practices involved in the work that underlies MNEs’ development of capabilities and strategies oriented to nonmarket stakeholders. This research could help us understand how these processes and practices unfold over time and across an MNE’s organizational structure and foreign markets. Moreover, future research could connect the macro-level environment with the micro-level processes and practices involved in the development of nonmarket-oriented capabilities and strategies, by exploring how these are changing in response to global societal demands for more openness and transparency. This could enrich our understanding of the contemporary ways of conducting nonmarket strategizing that seek to enhance MNEs’ legitimacy (De Villa, 2025), which was one of Boddewyn’s (1995) concerns for MNEs’ success.

The third area builds on Boddewyn’s interest in understanding how conditioning factors, particularly at the nonmarket environment level, affect MNEs’ political behavior (Boddewyn and Brewer, 1994). From a macro-level perspective, we suggest that future research could examine how the dynamics between countries’ relations, and their power and influence in global institutions such as the WTO or the United Nations, influence MNEs’ political behavior. This could extend our understanding of how geopolitical tensions between countries, global institutions at the supranational level and their governance mechanisms, interact in shaping MNEs’ nonmarket strategies. Another macro-level research stream building on Boddewyn’s attentiveness to the relations between NGOs and MNEs (Boddewyn, 2016; Boddewyn and Doh, 2011), could explore how NGOs are exerting pressures over MNEs and interacting with them to address common interests such as climate change or education, as well as what are the configurations of such relations and their effectiveness. This line of research could deepen our knowledge of the paradoxical relations between NGOs and MNEs, the different types of interorganizational arrangements between them involving cooperation and interdependence to achieve shared goals, and their legitimacy-building effects on MNEs.

Drawing on Boddewyn’s concern for managing MNEs successfully across multiple contexts (Boddewyn, 1988a, 2005), macro-level scholarship could also offer comparative studies of MNEs’ nonmarket strategies across institutional settings. Current insights suggest that nonmarket strategies are often embedded in a specific context with limited ability to “travel.” Comparative studies could allow us to further explore the boundary conditions of nonmarket strategies, including the extent to which they can be similar or differ across contexts and types of firms. For example, future research could further investigate what types of nonmarket strategies are more often used across a variety of contexts, such as developed vs emerging markets, democratic vs nondemocratic, or across captured states. Regarding types of firms, some studies suggest that family business groups from emerging markets are able to leverage their unique abilities to cultivate political and elite ties across borders, resulting in a unique internationalization strategy (Carney et al., 2016; Carney and Dieleman, 2024). Future research could more systematically investigate what types of firms can most effectively leverage their ability to foster political connections, and what counter-strategies these firms employ to mitigate the risks associated with them. Future studies could also examine the similarities and differences between domestic and foreign firms in their nonmarket strategies across different contexts, allowing us to gain a more nuanced understanding of nonmarket strategies around the globe.

Somewhat related to a macro-level perspective, the fourth area regarding social movements and multi-actor global issues, builds on the work by Boddewyn and colleagues related to how MNEs develop strategies to manage challenges derived from diverse nonmarket stakeholders and their implications for MNEs’ legitimacy (Boddewyn, 1993b, 1995, 2017; Boddewyn and Doh, 2011; Salorio et al., 2005). We suggest that future research incorporating social movements could help us to better understand how MNEs’ nonmarket strategies evolve as they interact with social actors questioning their legitimacy and contributions beyond economic performance. Social movements have developed mobilization strategies and “repertoires” that use sophisticated and coordinated tactics to concurrently target MNEs through protests, boycotts, and shareholder actions (Doh and Lucea, 2013). They may deploy resources at multiple levels of analysis and leverage social media and digital media to enhance their pressures on MNEs. This suggests that MNEs, too, must develop increasingly sophisticated nonmarket strategies to address the pressures of social movements at both the global and local levels, requiring the collaboration of their subsidiaries to adapt and adjust responses across varying institutional settings.

Another research avenue could improve our understanding of how MNEs develop strategies that take into consideration the multiactor global issues manifested in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and incorporate the pursuit of such goals to gain legitimacy and differentiate from their rivals (Boddewyn, 1995, 1993b). This research stream could explore how MNEs engage in partnerships with NGOs and other actors to participate in collective actions that contribute to the grand challenges manifested in the SDGs. Future research could also study how MNEs innovate to tackle these grand challenges, and how they scale up their innovative solutions to achieve greater impact.

By focusing on social movements and multi-actor global issues, this research avenue could extend Boddewyn and colleagues’ work on the provision of collective goods (Boddewyn, 2017; Boddewyn and Doh, 2011), amplifying our understanding of the interactions and practices underlying their offering by MNEs alone or jointly with governments and NGOs, and their effectiveness in conferring legitimacy to MNEs. This research avenue could also expand Boddewyn and colleagues’ work on reciprocity (Buckley and Boddewyn, 2015, 2016; Boddewyn and Buckley, 2017; Boddewyn and Peng, 2021), by shedding light on how MNEs can engage in noncontractual reciprocity with social movements and other actors in the provision of collective goods.

The fifth area, related to exploring the transformative role of AI, draws on Boddewyn’s visionary spirit to predict that he would have been interested in encouraging research about the impact of this disruptive technological advancement on international nonmarket strategizing. This research avenue could extend Boddewyn’s (1988b) insights on “political knowledge or expertise”, by investigating the role of AI in taking part in MNEs’ intelligence about political actors, risks, and opportunities. We suggest that future research could explore the use of AI tools by MNEs within nonmarket strategizing and their role in anticipating to and navigating increasingly complex nonmarket environments. For instance, we see AI tools as helping MNEs in the use of predictive algorithms to improve their scenario planning by accounting for potential regulatory changes, geopolitical tensions, social protests, and other disruptions, while also enabling MNEs to conduct sentiment analysis by monitoring public opinion across multiple countries and social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter) in real-time. Future research could thus explore how AI technologies can be utilized to better adapt to institutional differences in nonmarket environments. This implies studying differences in regulations governing AI use, variations in stakeholder expectations regarding AI adoption, and differences in the levels of public resistance or acceptance of AI across different regions. Furthermore, considering the competitive landscape of the AI industry itself, future research could investigate the nonmarket strategies of leading AI developers. For example, research could examine what kind of nonmarket strategies are pursued by OpenAI or DeepSeek to increase their chances of becoming the dominant platform for generative AI globally, and what types of engagements they incur in with governments, standard-setting bodies, and other key stakeholders.

We suggest that future research could also delve into the ethical dimensions of the use of AI in INMS. Boddewyn’s (1995) work underscores legitimacy as a critical aspect of nonmarket activities, deeply influenced by stakeholder perceptions. AI adoption in international nonmarket strategizing presents several ethical tradeoffs that can impact MNEs’ legitimacy. For instance, the use of AI algorithms to achieve better intelligence and decision-making raises significant ethical concerns, including issues of data privacy, bias, and accountability. The probability of AI delivering standardized analyses that lack the incorporation of particular factors or conditions, undermines the credibility of its input to INMS and can affect MNEs’ legitimacy. Future studies could therefore investigate how MNEs navigate these tradeoffs to maintain legitimacy across diverse regulatory and cultural contexts, considering the potential for reputational damage and stakeholder backlash.

Jean Boddewyn was a scholar ahead of his time, able to foresee and illuminate international business challenges intersecting governments and society. In this article we pay tribute to his scholarly legacy by providing an overview of his workin international business political behavior which launched a stream of research that is now referred to as international nonmarket strategy. We outline future directions that build on and extend his visionary insights to stimulate research in this domain. In honor of his trailblazing work, we call for scholars to embrace Boddewyn’s wise foresight, critical spirit, theoretical rigor, and sensibility toward managerial practice, as sources of inspiration to continue advancing scholarship in INMS.