IB Research Opportunities in Central Asia

Central Asia has largely been ignored by international business (IB) research. Using Kazakhstan, a stable, relatively prosperous country, as a lens into the region, we argue that the Central Asian context, comprising Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, holds promise for advancing international business (IB) scholarship. We present three cases of Kazakh firms that have attempted to internationalize their operations. We find that classical motives for internationalization, such as market-seeking, apply to the internationalization patterns of these firms. Furthermore, we argue that Central Asia presents four broad opportunities for advancing IB research. First, Central Asia is fertile ground for supranational studies of how MNEs evaluate, anticipate, and respond to exogenous geopolitical risk affecting their business operations, a key gap in the IB literature. Second, due to Central Asia’s importance to the security, economic, and geopolitical interests of China, Russia, and the United States, MNEs’ nonmarket strategies (NMS), specifically bargaining with their home country governments, are likely to be salient in overall strategy. Studying MNEs investing in Central Asia will enable refinement of scholarly understanding of MNE bargaining models. Third, the Central Asian context challenges the dominant assumption that state-owned enterprises (SOEs) respond to interests of unitary domestic political actors as they internationalize since informal ethnic alliances, which pre-date and co-exist with modern state apparatus, may be a potent influence on the direction, level, and location of foreign direct investment (FDI). Finally, Central Asia could allow scholars to fruitfully examine whether developed country MNEs (DMNEs) outperform emerging market MNEs (EMNEs) when competing in a third (smaller) emerging market.