ABSTRACT
The intersection between international business (IB) and economic geography (EG) is very recent and still represents an emerging debate, which is rather inconclusive. The turn towards outward-looking global value chains has provoked the necessity to get more insights about Multinationals (MNE) collocating or connecting local clusters. Despite the intensive focus on global value chains from EG (e.g. Amin and Thrift, 1992; Bathelt et al., 2004), MNEs are said to be much more studied within the IB strand. Assuming that IB needs to learn the subtleties of territories and the nuances of agglomerations from EG, while EG needs to borrow knowledge on MNEs from the IB perspective, as stated by scholars (e.g. McCann and Mudambi, 2004; Hervás-Oliver and Boix-Domènech, 2013), this study seeks to explore the common roots or fundamentals shared by the inception of that intersection between IB and EG/regional science literatures. Because IB refers to localization as the national level, dismissing local properties found in agglomerations and thus does not explicitly recognize the subtleties of the local space (e.g. Dunning, 2009; McCann and Mudambi, 2004; Narula, 2014), both constitute relevant theoretical exceptions; while EG tackles MNEs as a minor construct within agglomerations by emphasizing the meso-level connections through global value chains or global pipelines (e.g. Bathelt et al., 2004; Hervás-Oliver and Boix-Domènech, 2013 and Sedita et al., 2013 are interesting exceptions). As a result of this dual yet intertwined perspective, knowledge about that phenomenon remains fragmented and incomplete. Integration of literatures and exploration of their potential intersection, addressing a similar phenomenon from different perspectives, require a more in-depth and systematic analysis of their literatures and, specifically, of their fundamentals or foundations.
