Past, present, and future of international joint ventures

Abstract

International Joint Ventures (IJVs) are a popular mode for a company to enter a foreign market. Research on IJVs has significantly grown in the past two decades. In this study, we applied several bibliometric analyses (i.e., performance analysis, co-citation analysis, and co-word analysis) to systematically examine 379 IJV studies from 1982 to 2021. Our performance analysis identifies influential articles, authors, and theories in the domain. In the co-citation analysis, after dividing the IJV literature into three periods (i.e., 1982–2001, 2002–2011, 2012–2021), we unveil the thematic evolution in the IJV literature. Our co-word analysis outputs the most popular keywords. We employ social network analysis to identify the disconnections among the keywords, and provide future research opportunities based on these disconnections. Altogether, this paper provides an integrative view of IJV research and advances the domain.