Reappraising liabilities of foreignness within an integrated perspective of the costs and benefits of doing business abroad

Several international business scholars have elaborated upon Hymer's [Hymer, S. H. (1960). The international operations of national firms: A study of direct investment. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, MA] costs of doing business abroad through the liability of foreignness notion. While this research has made important contributions, there is need for more conceptual refinement and synthesis due to the vastly increased scale and scope of MNE operations in recent years. Consequently, this study attempts to more precisely delineate the liabilities of foreignness component of costs of doing business abroad from other costs/liabilities that arise from the increasing complexity of global business. Further, we synthesize both the costs and benefits of cross-border operations that accrue to the foreign subsidiary into an integrated conceptual framework, and advance 11 theoretical propositions on how those impact its competitive dynamics. We illustrate these notions through a longitudinal case study on the operations of Ford Motor Company in India over the past 80 years. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.