The Influencing Mechanism Of Home Country Network On The Internationalization Degree Of Chinese Enterprises

As Chinese enterprises continue to emerge in the international arena, the acceleration of Chinese enterprise internationalization attracted academic attention. The literature of International business has pointed out that the internationalization of Chinese enterprises is largely influenced by the home country environment. One important component of home country environment is the local enterprise networks. The rapid development of China’s economy has brought prosperity of the local networks, while industry cluster could also provide more external resources for Chinese enterprises. However, regarding how local enterprise networks as an important home country environment factor, especially the home country network position, help enterprises get the required resources and influence the internationalization process has not been sufficiently discussed. Besides, the booming Chinese market has also attracted a lot of foreign investment. Through the partnership with foreign multinational enterprises, Chinese enterprises not only achieve great growth in local market, but also influence their international development. Furthermore, along with recent turbulent change of world economy, as well as the closer access to foreign market by Chinese enterprises, external market dynamic also begins to influence the international development of Chinese enterprises. In these two contexts, how the influence of home country network positions will change has also barely involved in existing literatures.Based on this background, this study focuses on the influencing mechanism of home country network on the internationalization degree of local enterprises, and goes a further step to explore the moderation effect of the relational embeddedness between local enterprises and foreign-invested enterprises and market environmental dynamics. This study collects questionnaire date from194enterprises, and makes empirical studies, reaching the following conclusions:(1) Due to different mechanisms of access to network resources and different transferrabilities of network advantages, the central position in network has a positive effect on the degree of internationalization, while the brokerage position in network has a negative impact on the degree of internationalization. With higher social status and reputation, the enterprise in the central position has its advantage from access to key information and are more likely to be trusted when entering foreign markets. The brokerage advantages owned by enterprise in intermediary position is a kind of local advantage, which is more difficult to be transferred to overseas markets, making the enterprise with brokerage position not suitable for internationalization.(2) Foreign relational embeddedness has a direct positive impact on the degree of internationalization, and also enhanced the positive effect of central position on the degree of internationalization.(3) Dynamic market environment weakened the negative effect of intermediary position on the degree of internationalization, but not significantly change the positive influence of central position on the degree of internationalization. The conclusions of this study enrich the theory of the impact of home country network on enterprise internationalization, describe the different mechanisms of two kinds of network positions influencing the degree of internationalization, and further indicate how the influence of network position will change in two kinds of concrete contexts when embedding in foreign investment network and facing market environmental dynamics. Finally, based on the theoretical findings, this study also putforwards relevant practical implications.