ABSTRACT
A longstanding criticism of export research is that a “mosaic of autonomous endeavors” (Aaby and Slater 1989) has contributed to confl icting fi ndings that have only served to obfuscate our understanding of the issues. Contradictory results have often been explained by differences in contexts, defi nitions and methodological approaches (Leonidou 1995) and the failure to build on existing research has not been helpful. Regrettably, a similar situation is occurring in the allied fi eld of SME internationalization (Coviello and Jones 2004) where the actors have been variously referred to as “committed internationalists” (Bonaccorsi 1992, Jolly et al. 1992) “born global” fi rms (Rennie 1993, Knight and Cavusgil 1996), “international new ventures” (McDougall et al. 1994, Oviatt and McDougall 1995, Shrader et al. 2000), or even “micromultinationals” (Dimitratos et al. 2003).
