This study examines how firms with scarce market and non-market resources can succeed in internationalizing, even in a host country that lacks trade and diplomatic relationships with the firms’ home country. With a hand-collected, historical database of the Spanish publishing industry’s investments in Mexico over the 20th century, we find that in a context of suspension of bilateral trade agreements and diplomatic relationships between Spain and Mexico, Spanish publishing firms leveraged Spanish emigrants to internationalize in the Mexican market, initially through exports, then through distribution and local commercial subsidiaries, and finally through local production. Spanish publishers progressively used emigrants to develop social and cultural support, to help establish formal and informal rules, procedures, and norms of institutions and to lobby in Mexico. Combining historical and inductive analyses, we offer a novel perspective on firms’ internationalization through a changing use of emigrants to endogenize the cultural, trade, and political distance between the home and the host country, and we develop new theoretical insights on the social, cultural, and political embeddedness of firms.

本研究探讨了拥有稀缺市场和非市场资源的公司如何能够成功实现国际化，即使是在与公司母国缺乏贸易和外交关系的东道国。通过手工收集的 20 世纪西班牙出版业在墨西哥投资的历史数据库，我们发现在双边贸易协定和西班牙与墨西哥之间的外交关系暂停的背景下，西班牙出版公司利用西班牙移民在墨西哥市场，最初通过出口，然后通过分销和当地商业子公司，最后通过当地生产。西班牙出版商逐渐利用移民来发展社会和文化支持，帮助建立正式和非正式的规则、程序、和机构规范，并在墨西哥游说。结合历史和归纳分析，我们通过改变对移民的使用来内生化母国和东道国之间的文化、贸易和政治距离，为公司的国际化提供了一个新的视角，并发展了关于社会、文化的新理论见解。 ，以及企业的政治嵌入。