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The Roles of the Corporate Level in the Internationalization Process of the Firm

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Creating Value through International Strategy

Abstract

After many years of abundant research in corporate strategy, the issue of whether and how the corporate level contributes to competitive advantage still raises strong controversies. An important stream of work aims at identifying the sources of corporate performance by isolating company, industry and corporate effects on this variable (Schmalensee 1985; Rumelt 1991; McGahan and Porter 1997). These contributions concluded that corporate effects appeared to be negligible. However, this ’truth’ of strategic management has been challenged by recent findings (Brush and Bromiley 1997, Chang and Singh 2000; Bowman and Helfat 2001), leading to the conclusion that studies within this tradition appear to be strongly affected by apparent and difficult to fix sampling biases and methodological flaws (Brush and Bromiley 1997; Chang and Singh 2000; Bowman and Helfat 2001).

We gratefully acknowledge support for this research from IESE Business School’s Anselmo Rubiralta Center on Globalization and Strategy.

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© 2004 Ádrian Atilio Caldart and Joan E. Ricart

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Caldart, Á.A., Ricart, J.E. (2004). The Roles of the Corporate Level in the Internationalization Process of the Firm. In: Ariño, A., Ghemawat, P., Ricart, J.E. (eds) Creating Value through International Strategy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230005563_18

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