The Challenge of BRIC Multinationals

The extant body of scholarly work on multinational Enterprises (MNEs) has been hampered by an inevitable selection bias. With the majority of MNEs coming from developed countries, theories of international business have been informed mainly by the study of (large) corporations from countries or regions such as the United States, Europe and later Japan.
Subsequent empirical studies have also regularly suffered from a confirmation bias - the tendency to search inductively for particular information and to interpret such information in a way that confirms existing hypotheses, while giving comparatively less consideration to alternative research avenues. The growing importance in the world economy of ‘emerging economies’, accompanied by the large-scale appearance of MNEs from these countries, has not only widened the empirical basis of research but has also made it increasingly important to augment international business theory.
Over the last decade, this debate has increasingly focused on the question whether ‘emerging market multinationals’ (EMNEs) are fundamentally different from ‘developed country MNEs’ and thus require new theory. Whatever side one chooses in this debate (see the various contributions in this volume), the danger of another selection bias arises: if all emerging economy MNEs are simply lumped together in one set, and contrasted against developed economy MNEs in general, the absence of more fine-grained analysis will lead to research outcomes lacking much relevance.