Relational Networks, Resource Acquisition And Internationalization Of The Firm

Toward the incremental dynamism and complexity of the global ecomomic and business environment, there are many new characteristics of firm's internationalization.The stable and broad international relational network is the key factors driving firm's internationalization.Achieving internationalization by building and operating relational networks has been the actual demand and strategic choice of firm's international growth.Facing the theroretical and practical challenges of Chinese firm's international growth, by broadly reference to foreign and domestic literatures, the research imported the embeddedness idea of economic sociology into the field of firm's internationalization research, and based on RBV which has been extended, involving network theory of firm, social capital theory and entrepreneurship theory, the article has carried comparatively comprehensive and thorough research on the dynamism and path choice of firm's internationalization under the relational network view. Then we built the theoretical framework of firm's internationalization which not only had stable theoretical foundation but also according with the pratice of firm's internationalization. About the research path, according to the normative technique of "theoretical research-model building-empirical proving ",the article researched six core problems:the theoretical root of embeddedness of firm's internationalization, the mechanism that relational network effects firm's internationalization, the path of firm's internationalization and the countermeasures the firm should take, the coevolution mechanism between the development of relational network and firm's internationalization, the design of the empirical method that relational network effects firm's internationalization and the empirical research of the theoretical model. The main creative work of the research includes four aspects behind.(1) Analyzing the internal mechanism that how relational network influences firm's internationalization.The article analyses the theoretical root of network embeddedness of firm's internationalization by importing some ideas of economic sociology, and thinks that firms not only have economic interation with the main bodies of international market, and what is more important is that it is also social interation and institutional interaction, this is the theoretical foundation of embeddedness of firm's internationalization. The research extends the RBV and brings network resources into the RBV, then build the theoretical framework of "relationship network→network resource→firm's internationalization", this is the foundation of researching firm's internationalization form the relational network view. finally we validated the rationality of the theoretical framework by linking to WenZhou's international private enterprises.(2) Analyzing the routes of firm's international growth from the relational network view. The choice of firm's international maily includes three phases which are "attention", "exploring" and "choosing",in the different phases the firm's will use different behavior mode. The customer types, the degree of uncertainty of the environment, entry mode and asset specility will determine the process of the choosing of international parters. The research also explored the relationship between different network mode including commissary relation, ranking relation, self-associate relation and leaning relation with the international entry mode. Also the paper dicussed the behaviors and strategies in different network situation and internationalization situation(3) Analyzing the development and international expansion of firm's relational networks and its interaction with firm's internationalization. The entrepreneurship, firm's network capabilities and the environment together determine the dynamic of the international expansion of firm's relational networks. From the network view internationalization of the firm can be seen as four phases including relation building, relation expansion, relation penetration and relation cooperation, the mechanism between development of relational network and firm's internationalization is "resources acquisition" and "relation operation".(4) The empirical research and theoretical model building of "relationship network→network resource→firm's internationalization". The paper empirically tests the relationship between firm's external relational network and firm's international performance by questionnaires from Guangzhou. The outcomes demonstrate that the external relational network not only has direct effects on firm's international performance but also has indirect effects on firm's international performance by the mediating role of resources acquisition. Since the network theory of firm's internationalization has been proved. At last the research carried on a case study on the internationalization of ZhuZhou Cemented Carbide Group to prove the theories.