Get Ready to Answer the Call for Papers for AIB 2027 Kuala Lumpur

AIB 2027 Kuala Lumpur Program Chair Grazia Santangelo begins our Annual Meeting’s CFP with a compelling description of today’s shifting geopolitical landscape and the complementary theoretical adaptations that may be required for IB scholarship to keep pace with these rapid changes:

The field of international business was built on a particular reading of the world. Its foundational theories, namely internalization theory, the eclectic paradigm, the Uppsala model, the integration–responsiveness framework, institutional theory, and the national-culture model, took shape in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Those decades were themselves turbulent with the oil shocks, stagflation, and the collapse of Bretton Woods, but their turbulence unfolded within a well-defined rule-based global order. That order is moving. The wars in Ukraine and Iran, the Venezuelan crisis, the tensions over Greenland, the U.S.–China technology and trade frictions, the reorganization of supply chains around blocs, the return of industrial policy in major economies, and the rise of domestic political movements whose reach extends well beyond their borders are not mere noise around a stable system. They are signs that the system itself is in transition.

The scholarly question this raises is not whether firms must adapt, but whether the assumptions encoded in our theories still describe the world those theories set out to explain. This matters for international business scholarship beyond the study of multinational enterprises. Domestic firms embedded in global value chains face the same reconfiguration of cross-border activity, and the institutional environment in which the field itself has developed is shifting alongside.

With submissions opening on 9 November 2026, our AIB 2027 Call for Papers invites current and prospective members of our association to start preparing contributions that interrogate the foundational assumptions of the field. Empirical and conceptual work drawing on international business, global strategy, or related traditions, including dynamic capabilities, microfoundations, ecosystems, and a behavioral international business perspective is likely to fit well into our 2027 conference theme. Contributions integrating theoretical perspectives from economics, political science and political economy, sociology, history, and geography are especially encouraged.