Welcome

RM-SIG LogoWelcome to the AIB RM-SIG.

 

Mission:

“To advance the quality, diversity and understanding of research methodologies in international business, and to promote innovation in research methodologies.”

 

WHAT’S NEW – UPCOMING EVENTS

 

AIB SIG Webinar: Archival Research as a Tool for Advancing International Business Scholarship

Date & Time: 11 February 2026, 13:30 UTC (View Local Time)

Event Recording Access: Current AIB members will be able to access a recording of this event in the “AIB Video Archive” section of our login portal. New webinar recordings are typically posted within five business days of the original event date.

Event Overview: Archival research provides a powerful avenue for advancing international business (IB) scholarship by revealing hidden or overlooked aspects of global operations, including marginalized voices, covert strategies, historical motivations for foreign direct investment, and organizational responses to past global crises -thereby enabling contextualization.

Archives offer rich temporal, cultural, institutional, and geographic insights that support an emic understanding of IB phenomena, trace their evolution, and reveal underlying path dependencies. At a time when methodological diversity in IB is declining, archival research broadens the methodological toolkit and enables scholars to address complex or sensitive questions that are difficult to investigate using other approaches. Yet archives remain poorly understood, frequently misconceived as secondary data or conflated with general documentary collections. The purpose of this seminar is therefore to clarify what constitutes an archive, address common misconceptions surrounding archival research, and illustrate how theorizing can be developed from archival materials.

By acknowledging both the agency of archivists and the constructed nature of archives, IB researchers can pursue two complementary pathways: engaging directly with primary archival sources or synthesizing existing historical accounts while remaining attentive to narrative construction and interpretive limitations. Together, these insights demonstrate how archival research can substantially enrich IB scholarship by illuminating context, complexity, and phenomena that would otherwise remain inaccessible.

PRESENTERS

Stephanie Decker is Professor of Strategy at Birmingham Business School and holds prestigious fellowships of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS) and the British Academy of Management (BAM). She is known for her work at the intersection of history and management studies and has published widely on African business history. She is the Vice Dean of BAM Fellows, has held multiple editorial appointments and is currently the business editor for BAM’s Business Research Unpacked Substack. Her work has been published in journals such as Academy of Management Review, Human Relations, Journal of Management Studies, Organization, Business History Review, and Business History.

Bareerah Hafeez Hoorani is an Assistant Professor at the Nijmegen School of Management, Radboud University. Her work focuses on qualitative methods, by addressing important research considerations such as selection strategies, theorizing and the role of time. She also conducts research on inter-organizational collaborations, organizational identities and organizational crisis. Her work has been published in Journal of World Business, PLOS One, Journal of Informetrics and Scientometrics. She has been recipient of best paper awards  at British Academy of Management conference and at the Academy of Management Meeting.

Eriikka Paavilainen-Mäntymäki is a Professor of International Business at the Turku School of Economics at the University of Turku, Finland. She is a member of the Journal of International Business Studies Reviewer Board and the Academy of International Business (AIB) Research Methodology SIG board. She has published, for example, in the Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of World Business, Organizational Research Methods and International Journal of Management Reviews. Her research interests include qualitative research methods, philosophy of science, the role of time in research, and contextuality.

MODERATOR

Emmanuella Plakoyiannaki is Chaired Professor of International Business at the University of Vienna, Austria, and Visiting Professor at the University of Turku, Finland. She is an Associate Editor at the British Journal of Management, a Fellow of the European International Business Academy (EIBA) and the British Academy of Management (BAM), and serves on the editorial review board of the Journal of International Business Studies. She has published in several top-tier journals, including the Academy of Management Review, the Journal of International Business Studies, and the Journal of World Business. Her research interests include qualitative research as well as the role of time and space in the study of international business phenomena. She is also VP (Internal Relations) for the Academy of International Business (AIB) Research Methodology SIG.

AIB SIG Webinar: Process Research Methods for International Business

Date & Time: 17 February 2026, 14:30 UTC (View Local Time)

Event Recording Access: Current AIB members will be able to access a recording of this event in the “AIB Video Archive” section of our login portal. New webinar recordings are typically posted within five business days of the original event date.

Event Overview: Process research deepens our understanding of how phenomena emerge, unfold, and evolve over time through ongoing activities and events. In this webinar, Professor Langley and Professor De Villa will discuss process research and the challenges of conducting process studies in international business.

PANELISTS

Ann Langley is Emerita Professor of Management at HEC Montréal, and Distinguished Research Environment Professor at University of Warwick. Her research deals with strategic processes and practices in complex organizations with an emphasis on qualitative and processual research methods. She has published on these methods notably in Academy of Management Review, International Business Review, Strategic Management Journal, and Strategic Organization. She is also co-editor of the Sage Handbook of Process Organization Studies, and co-editor with Haridimos Tsoukas of the book series Perspectives on Process Organization Studies published by Oxford University Press. From 2022-2025, she was Deputy Editor for qualitative research at Academy of Management Journal. 

Maria Andrea De Villa is Professor of Strategy at EAFIT University and Visiting Professor at University of Michigan-Flint. She received her Ph.D. from Cranfield University (UK). Her research focuses on how firms manage sociopolitical interactions and risks through nonmarket strategies, and how they strategize to address grand challenges such as climate change. She has a special interest in qualitative research methods, particularly in the use of case studies from process, practice, and variance perspectives, as well as in configurational thinking and qualitative comparative analysis. She serves as the Global Rep-at-Large for the Global Strategy Interest Group of the Strategic Management Society, Co-Editor of a Special Issue in Journal of International Business Studies, Communications Editor of Long Range Planning, and Editorial Review Board Member of Global Strategy Journal, Long Range Planning, Strategic Organization, and Multinational Business Review. Her work has been published in Global Strategy Journal, International Business Review, Journal of International Management, among others.