Dr Arpit Raswant

In the context of intensifying nationalism and protectionism and a reconfiguration of the global value chains, the world's leading economies find themselves confronted with significant challenges. To address these issues, this book builds on conceptual and empirical analysis and makes a case for interdisciplinary research that connects International Business (IB) and International Security (IS) domains. Employing the concept of geostrategy and using multi-level approaches to explain the interaction among various players in IB and IS, the authors examine the implications that IB and IS disciplines provide to each other. This book is a valuable resource for students and researchers interested in international business, international relations, international security, and international political economy and answers the growing call for an interdisciplinary research approach to promoting critical thinking in the rapidly evolving international business and security environment.

Organic food consumption worldwide is growing. This chapter investigates this growth and outlines the major reasons behind the growth. Lack of consumer confidence in food produce from traditional channels is at the forefront of the increasing prominence of organic food consumption. A distribution channel, which has restored consumer confidence in food products, is organic cooperatives. This chapter provides a much needed definition of the organic cooperative and examines this concept through a social network lens. It further highlights the importance of close ties in the supply chain to build consumer confidence. It provides several examples of community cooperatives that use network ties and relationships to achieve success in this industry.

As a critical source of sustainable competitive advantage, organization capital combines human skills with physical assets and is of particular value in complex strategic endeavors such as international acquisitions. Our research examines the role of organization capital (OC) in firm internationalization through cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&A). We focus on the effect of OC on the initiation of cross-border M&A deals and value creation after deal closing. Further, we investigate the role of acquisition experience and whether acquisition experience allows firms with high OC to better allocate and direct resources along the cross-border M&A process. We draw on longitudinal data from listed US firms spanning 24 years of M&A activity between 1996 and 2019 and find that firms with higher organization capital are more likely to internationalize through cross-border M&A because of freed-up resources to recognize opportunities. We further find that firms with higher organization capital sustain performance and significantly create value for investors in the short and long run because of a better understanding of capturing value from rare strategic events. We also show that acquisition experience strengthens the relationship of organization capital with firm internationalization, but we do not find a significant effect on value creation after deal closing. Our results offer novel and robust insights into the importance of organization capital in firm internationalization and value creation in international markets.

The US has declared its intent to strategically compete with the rising power of China on all fronts. However, Washington's overt extension of US-China rivalry into the ideological realm presents unique challenges to its Indo-Pacific order-building process. The balance of threat theory provides a useful conceptual toolkit to unravel the case of the geostrategic positioning of South Korea, which is a close US ally and already engaged in a delicate balancing act between the US and China, to set the stage for a deeper examination of how the strategic community within South Korea views America's augmented policy of resisting authoritarianism and national debates on the prospect of an ideational threat from China. It then contemplates how policymakers in South Korea could respond to the new challenges this raises, concluding that the advent of an intensified values competition requires further finessing of their already delicate balancing act.