Foreignness has long been a central construct in international business research, with research streams examining its conceptualizations, manifestations, and consequences. Researchers started by taking foreignness to be a liability, then later considered the possibility of its being an asset. A still more recent view is that foreignness is an organizational identity that a firm can purposefully manage. Broadly conceived, foreignness is an umbrella construct that directly or tangentially covers research on country of origin, institutional distance, firm-specific advantages, and the ownership–location–internalization eclectic paradigm. We review the body of research on foreignness and track the evolution of its four streams, liability of foreignness, asset of foreignness, drivers of foreignness, and firm responses to foreignness. We call for a clearer conceptualization and a sounder theoretical grounding of the foreignness construct, more integration of the liability of foreignness and the asset of foreignness research streams, greater attention to the multiple strategies firms use to manage foreignness, and the extension of the field to less-explored contexts such as emerging economies, digitalization, and de-globalization.

外国性长期以来一直是国际商业研究的核心结构，研究流检查其概念化、表现形式和后果。研究人员开始将外国人视为负债，然后考虑将其作为资产的可能性。最近的一种观点认为，外来性是一种公司可以有目的地管理的组织身份。从广义上讲，外国性是一个伞状结构，直接或切合地涵盖对原籍国、制度距离、公司特定优势和所有权-位置-内部化折衷范式的研究。我们回顾了关于外国人的研究主体，并跟踪其四个流派的演变，即外国人的责任、外国人的资产、外国人的驱动因素和对外国人的企业反应。