Publication Type
Book Chapter
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
9-2019
Abstract
The acronym and neologism “VUCA” is employed by management and some scholars to denote the unpredictability of the modern world and its impact on business. The VUCA approach suggests that a rational firm’s response should be to: protect against volatility by engineering-in redundancy and slack, gather information to reduce uncertainty, develop expertise to make complexity computable, and learn heuristically to reduce ambiguity. We combine a critical perspective on the VUCA approach with the global factory model, popularly used to describe the flexibility sought by advanced economy multinational enterprises (MNEs) within the global value chain. Both VUCA and the global factory would seem to account less well for the expansion of emerging multinational enterprise (EMNEs) abroad, particularly the preference for equity-based control and inflexibility when seeking strategic assets. Also, both approaches fail to incorporate behavioral principles toward risk. Using International Business theory, we propose a research agenda that may help to make VUCA more tractable, the global factory more useful, and the internationalization of EMNEs more comprehensible.
Keywords
VUCA, international business, global factory, emerging market MNEs, risk, uncertainty
Discipline
International Business | Strategic Management Policy
Research Areas
Strategy and Organisation
Publication
International business in a VUCA world: The changing role of states and firms
Editor
Tulder, R.V., Verbeke, A., & Jankowska, B.
First Page
55
Last Page
66
ISBN
9781838672560
Identifier
10.1108/S1745-886220190000014005
Publisher
Emerald
City or Country
Bingley
Citation
CLEGG, L. Jeremy; VOSS, Hinrich; and CHEN, Liang.
Can VUCA help us generate new theory within international business?. (2019). International business in a VUCA world: The changing role of states and firms. 55-66.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/7300
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1108/S1745-886220190000014005