Jindal School Professor’s Published Research Receives Decade Award

A paper co-authored by Dr. Mike Peng of UT Dallas has been honored as the most influential research published in the last 10 years in the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS). 

Peng, the O.P. Jindal Chair of Management in the Naveen Jindal School of Management, received the 2015 JIBS Decade Award, one of the most prestigious honors conferred by the Academy of International Business (AIB), with his co-author Dr. Klaus Meyer, a China Europe International Business School professor of strategy and international business.

The paper, originally published in 2005, is titled "Probing Theoretically into Central and Eastern Europe: Transactions, Resources and Institutions."

Sponsored by Palgrave Macmillan, JIBS’ publisher, the award will be presented to Peng at the annual AIB conference, which will be held in June in Bengaluru, India. The award-winning paper will be the subject of a special session at the conference, and the academy will host a reception to honor the paper and its authors. 

Peng, who joined UT Dallas in 2005, said he is planning to donate the $1,000 prize money that comes with the award to the Jindal School because that is where he produced the majority of his research and he is thankful for his “stimulating, collegiate and productive academic home.” 

In a letter announcing the award recipients, the selection committee commended Peng and Meyer for their exceptional work examining transition and emerging economies with a focus on those in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).   

“In the hands of two major international business scholars, it is an elegantly designed paper put across as a series of challenges that the changes in these economic areas pose for extant theory,” the letter said. “The fact that this paper retains its currency and relevance a decade after its publication makes it a worthy winner of this award.” 

Peng said the paper was the culmination of more than a decade of research, in which he and Meyer tried to push CEE research to new heights by identifying major gaps in previous research and developing new theoretical insights. 

Peng believes the reason the paper has been widely cited is because it addresses a central challenge not only in international business research, but also in all management research: how theories developed in one environment, such as the West, perform in a new one, such as CEE. 

“As more regions such as CEE open up, scholars constantly face these research challenges. As a result, not only scholars interested in CEE have energetically cited this paper, a lot of colleagues not interested in CEE per se, such as those interested in Asia, Africa, Latin America or emerging economies in general, have enthusiastically cited and extended this paper,” Peng said. 

To be considered for the award, a paper must be one of the five most-cited articles published more than a decade ago, so that it can stand the test of time, Peng said.

“Like any industry, academia has fads, which come and go. This year’s most cited paper may be forgotten 10 years down the road, which is why JIBS set up the Decade Award,” he said.

To measure articles’ scholarly influence during the last decade, the selection committee determined the top five most cited articles, then reviewed and voted on the winning paper. 

This award is the latest in a list of significant achievements for Peng in past decade.

He recently received a Highly Cited Researcher Award from Thomson Reuters, a multinational mass media and information company. Thomson Reuters runs the Web of Science, a comprehensive online research platform that named Peng one of the 95 most-cited researchers in the field of economics and business. That puts him in the top 1 percent of researchers in that field. 

With more than 120 articles and five books, Peng is best known for his development of the institution-based view of strategy and his insights about the rise of emerging economies such as China in global business. 

At the Jindal School, he teaches in the full-time and professional MBA programs and the EMBA and Global Leadership Executive MBA programs.