In Memoriam, Alan M. Rugman

• Published date: 01 September 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/cjas.1292
• Author: Chang Hoon Oh
• Date: 01 September 2014

In Memoriam, Alan M. Rugman

Chang Hoon Oh

Simon Fraser University

Alan Rugman used to call John Dunning the father of

the f‌ield of international business. I have no doubt that we

can call Alan Rugman the father of the modern f‌ield of in-

ternational business. In Canada, we may even call him the

father of Canadian international business. He authored or

coauthored more than 400 publications, including journal

articles, book chapters, policy papers, and books. He also

served many journals in a variety of capacities, including

editor, special issue editor, and editorial board member.

Indeed, he served on the CJAS editorial board for a great

number of years as both board member and associate

editor. In addition to his extensive intellectual activities,

he was a true educator and a warm individual.

After receiving his Ph.D. in economics from Simon Fraser

University, Alan Rugman began and developed his career in

Canada and overseas between 1970 and 1998. During this

period, he was a faculty member at the University of

Winnipeg (1970-1979), Concordia University (1979-1980),

Dalhousie University (1980-1987), and the University of

Toronto (1987-1998). During this period, he helped develop

the Canadian regional meeting of the Academy of International

Business (AIB) as well as the International Business (IB) divi-

sion of the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada

(ASAC). In the early 1980s, he organized and managed several

meetings of these groups in Canada (Rugman, 2008). In

addition to his well-known internationalization and regional

MNE theories, many popular research topics, such as

multinationality and performance, entry mode choice, transfer

pricing, environmental policy, network organization, subsidiary

capability, and international entrepreneurship, were initiated

and studied by Alan Rugman during his early career in Canada.

In 1976-1977, he was a visiting professor at the Univer-

sity of Reading, where he interacted with John Dunning and

Mark Casson, leading him to become an advocate for the in-

ternalization theory, which he applied in the North American

context (Rugman, 2001a). In 1979, he wrote his f‌irst book

titled, International Diversif‌ication and the Multinational

Enterprise (Rugman, 1979), based on his dissertat ion and

two of his articles (Rugman, 1975; Rugman, 1976). His

1979 book was one of the f‌irst studies to evaluate the re-

lationship between international diversif‌ication and

performance, which has since been one of the key re-

search topics in the international business discipline. His

1976 article, “Risk Reduction by International Diversif‌i-

cation,”was awarded a decade award by the Journal of

International Business Studies.HealsowroteMultina-

tionals in Canada (Rugman, 1980) in which he showed

a dynamic model of MNE’s entry mode choice. Research

in entry mode choice was popularized in the 1980s and

1990s. In 1981, he restated his internalization theory in

Inside the Multinationals (Rugman, 1981). The last chapter

of his 1981 book provided the famous f‌irm-specif‌icadvantage

(FSA) and country-specif‌ic advantage (CSA) framework (see

also Rugman & McIlveen, 1985 for the empirical application

of the FSA-CSA framework for Canadian-owned f‌irms

through extensive f‌ield work). Among many other important

books during this period, he published Multinationals and

Transfer Pricing (Rugman & Eden, 1985), which was one

of the f‌irst books to examine transfer pricing.

Between 1986 and 1993 he served as an outside advisor

of free trade, foreign direct investment (FDI), and interna-

tional competitiveness to two Canadian Prime Ministers.

Through his involvement and research in economic policy,

he developed the double diamond framework (Rugman &

D’Cruz, 1993), which completely reformatted US centric

views of strategic management to a generalized view of stra-

tegic management that could then be applied to most coun-

tries, including Canada. This work was linked to a network

thinking of MNEs (Rugman & D’Cruz, 2000). In the

1990s, he advanced his “old”internalization theory with

Alain Verbeke (Rugman & Verbeke, 1992, 2003). He also

linked the internalization theory to subsidiary-specif‌ic ad-

vantage (Rugman & Verbeke, 2001). Later, he called these

advancements the “new”internalization theory (Rugman &

Verbeke, 2008). It has been shown that the new internaliza-

tion theory is very consistent with David Teece’s dynamic

capability theory (Rugman, 2013; Teece, 2014). He also

made several important contributions to trade and FDI pol-

icy (Rugman & Anderson, 1987), environmental policy

(Rugman, Kirton, & Soloway, 1999), and the internationali-

zation of small business (Rugman, 1990).

In 1998, he formally and permanently internationalized his

career outside of Canada, although he often spoke fondly of his

days in Canada. He worked for Templeton College at the

University of Oxford as a Thames Water Fellow (1998-2001),

the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University as the

Please address correspondence to: Chang Hoon Oh, Beedie School of

Business, Simon Fraser University, Canada. E-mail: coh@sfu.ca

Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences

Revue canadienne des sciences de l’administration

31: 216–218 (2014)

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/CJAS.1292

Can J Adm Sci

31(3), 216–218 (2014)Copyright © 2014 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 216