A Longitudinal Perspective of the Determinants of B2B Service Firms’ Internationalisation Performance: Determinants of B2B Service Firms’ Internationalisation Performance

Institutional theory suggests that organisational legitimacy comes from complying with the normative, and even possibly coercive, pressure in politically distance environment. It also takes the view that organisations may face mimetic pressure to adopt the expansion scope of other successful firms. However, it remains unclear regarding how the long-term growth of B2B service firms may be explained by these two macro-level variables (political distance and scope of internationlisation), as well as their interactions with firm size. Drawing on institutional theory, we analysed extensive secondary data across a total of 589 B2B service firms in 45 countries over a period of 21 years (2001 to 2021). Our findings show that, compared to small firms, increasing the scope of internationalisation brings more revenue growth to large firms. While firms of all sizes would benefit by deriving more revenue share from countries with small political distance, large firms are more susceptible than small firms in countries wit