Time: Three Temporal Lenses on International Business Research

In this paper, we address the importance of giving a more explicit focus to time in studying international business (IB) phenomena. We develop three distinct time lenses: Time-as-measure, time-as-evolution and time-as-emergence, which differ not only ontologically, but also in terms of the features of IB and multinationals that they shed light on. We apply these lenses to two substantive IB phenomena, subsidiary initiative taking and global value chains. We finally discuss how the three lenses best can advance the incorporation of time into future IB research, and provide implications for IB theories, methods, and research questions.