Internationalization and organizations – Challenges and prospects

The recent international crises, whether financial in 2007–2008, sanitary in 2020–2021 or geopolitical in 2022–2023, have shown some of the limits of the globalization of markets and the internationalization of supply chains (Cerrato et al., 2016; Engwall and Hadjikhani, 2014; Juergensen et al., 2020). The interdependence of companies on a global scale can quickly become a weakness that is expressed in terms of resources, opportunities and strategic autonomy, and therefore impact the survival of organizations. Indeed, Dinner et al. (2019) have shown that in international crises, not only the cultural distance but also the psychic distance between the home and host country represents distinct challenges. Moreover, the threats caused by sharp fluctuations in the prices of energy, raw materials or the cost of transport are a striking illustration of this. Exogeneous shock, such as the global pandemic of COVID-19, has accelerated the reconfiguration of the relationship between national states and markets, increasing the divide between economic actors with political connections and those without, posing new legitimacy challenges for the different economic actors (Amankwah-Amoah et al., 2021). The global pandemic of COVID-19 has also brought new challenges for global mobility practices and expatriate policies, confirming trends (flexible mobilities, virtual team work) that could have been observable before the pandemic (Bader et al., 2022). International crises have also opened up new opportunities, accelerating private-sector development and regional integration in emerging countries, providing private firms with the ability to overcome institutional voids and resulting in the emergence of regional challenger firms that are going to aggressively compete with foreign multinationals (Boso et al., 2019). The increase in migration flows and movements of skilled workforce across borders before, during and after the pandemic also bring new challenges for companies at national and global levels (Hajro et al., 2023). Moreover, Sharma et al. (2022) identify three steps in the post-crisis recovery: the business resumption after the crisis, the understanding of the consequences of the crisis on the firm and the future changes to implement in the business. This is why these economic actors, and more particularly companies, must take up the challenges (Oh and Oetzel, 2022), which, if they are not all new, mark the third decade of this century with a stronger imprint. Multinational enterprises also have to integrate the crises more deeply, either as exogenous shocks impacting their strategies or as a more central issue in the development of firms (Nielsen et al., 2023). This book offers an overview of these challenges along three axes: those related to the adaptation of processes to the international environment, those that affect the actors of internationalization and, finally, those that are generated by the international context. Thinking about internationalization means thinking about a process of transformation, adaptation and learning through successive stages, still preserving some degree of flexibility, so critical during an international crisis (Lee and Makhija, 2009). This process can be designed through the company's perspective. For example, for an internationalization strategy, by developing or strengthening specific strategic capacities or skills or by learning to adapt them to a foreign environment different from the national environment. Internationalization can also be conceived as a process of transformation of the environment (the context), through the internationalization of markets or the internationalization of norms and standards. However, as argued by Chidlow et al. (2019), it is of the utmost importance to take into account the interaction between companies, society and policy makers. Several contributions in this book highlight this phenomenon, which affects not only small, medium and large firms but also other organizations such as service firms (e.g., business schools). Finally, the process of internationalization concerns individuals and groups (actors), confronted by small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as by multinational matrix groups with different national norms and identities. As noticed by Epede and Wang (2022), SMEs are drivers of economic growth and they should be better integrated in the global value chain. Meanwhile, Durugbo and Al-Balushi (2023) identify priorities in operations strategy during a crisis, such as critical supplies, timely response, safety and traceability. These processes of intercultural interactions lead to learning processes, adaptations and negotiated reconfigurations of cultural representations and practices.