ABSTRACT
In line with the book’s choice of paying as much attention to decision-makers as to their decisions – anchoring ostensibly objective commercial strategising in practitioners’ more subjective personal psychologies – the chapter offers a historical review of the way in which international business (IB) theorists have conceptualised this discipline over the years, with special attention paid to the contexts within which theoretical paradigms and prescriptions have been formulated. The first section starts with the country-level analysis of early mercantilists and classical economists (Smith, Ricardo, later Heckscher-Ohlin, etc.), largely speaking to topics such as protectionism and the international division of labour. It goes on to covermore recent theories focusing on company-level decision-making affecting the fundamental IB question of who does what where before concluding with a brief introduction to the welfare economists who have tried to bridge the gap between corporate and societal levels of analysis. The second section delves into the longstanding debate over the ideal size and role of the state – embodied in the ideas of leading lights such as Hayek and Keynes – before concluding with a historic overview of the cycles in economic thinking that have dominated the different national policy frameworks within which most IB is conducted.
