آیا شرکت های بومی زمانی که در بازار خانگی کار می کنند, متحمل مسئولیت می شوند؟مورد چین

Liability of foreignness has been one of the building blocks of theories of multinational enterprises. This paper looks at a parallel issue – the liability of localness that local firms may face as a result of foreign firms’ presence in their country. The results show that local Chinese firms enjoy location-based advantages over their foreign counterparts and these, together with their firm-specific advantages, have significant positive effects on their performance. The superior firm-specific advantages of foreign firms appear to erase the magnitude of such effects and create a significant negative impact on local Chinese firms’ performance, and this effect is heightened by foreign firms’ multinationality advantages. The research suggests that local Chinese firms incur a liability of localness, and the extent of the negative impact of such liability on local firm performance is largely dependent on the relative strength of various advantages that the local and foreign firms possess.

For at least fifty years, leading international business researchers (most notably Hymer, 1960/1976) have argued that firms operating abroad face considerable challenges and incur additional costs (i.e., a liability of foreignness, or LOF) relative to indigenous firms. These challenges and costs result from their lack of familiarity with local cultural norms and values, different economic, political, and legal systems, lack of experience in foreign markets and the geographic distance between the home and foreign host countries. As a result, an enterprise that operates outside of its national boundaries will incur additional costs relative to the local firms in the host country market (Miller and Parkhe, 2002 and Zaheer, 1995). A number of studies have re-examined this issue and in general confirmed that LOF-based competitive disadvantage still exists and affects firms’ performance adversely in foreign markets (e.g., Miller and Parkhe, 2002, Zaheer, 1995 and Zaheer and Mosakowski, 1997). Nachum (2003) and Kronborg and Thomsen (2009) challenged the conventional wisdom of the LOF. They argue that the LOF may not exist, and that foreignness may be either an asset or a liability depending on the circumstances (Nachum, 2010). While most studies of international competition are undertaken from the perspective of foreign firms, we argue that local firms are just as important to examine.

Prior LOF-based studies focused on the additional cost confronted by foreign firms, adjusting to the changes of geographical location – physical distance, or as Perez-Batres and Eden (2008) noted, adjusting to “here” being different from “there”. Perez-Batres and Eden's (2008) LOL study concerns the added cost to local firms, adjusting to changes in institutional settings over time – time horizon, or adjusting to “now” being different from “then”. In our study, we look at what happened to LOL after Perez-Batres and Eden's (2008) “now” and argue that, in the case of China, the LOL is still evident even after about three decades of changes in the ‘rules of the game’, the evolution and development of institutions and the adjustment of local firms’ strategies to address such changes. We further argue that, complementing Perez-Batres and Eden's study, the persistence of such LOL is due to the inability of local firms to adapt to those institutional developments, making LBAs less legitimate, and to the ineffectiveness of those firms in addressing their resource-based competitive disadvantages relative to their foreign counterparts.