The Emergence and Growth of International Business Thought as an Evolutionary Process

International Business (IB) scholars have made efforts to document IB scholarship history and deepened our understanding of the evolution of IB thought over time. Several evolutionary questions remain in debate, including the origin and independence of the field, as well as its current developmental phase. This study intends to explore these unresolved and sometimes ambiguous questions with qualitative and quantitative evidence from the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS), the field's most prestigious journal, and the interpretation of this evidence by its leading scholars. We seek to explore a metaphor of the emergence of IB disciplinary knowledge from relevant disciplines being the formation of a new scholarship species, and the growth of IB scholarship being the thriving of the new species. This chapter examines whether the emergence and growth of IB scholarship follow a trajectory that can be explained by variation, competition, inheritance, etc., i.e., an evolutionary process of conceptual lineages. Leveraging the evolutionary approach, we argue that the field of IB is in its adolescence phase, becoming increasingly multidisciplinary and evolving in parallel with developments in the global environment.