This volume draws together researchers working in a variety of disciplines in order to explore the many ways that locations matter for firms. The authors draw on newly available data, recently developed theory, and diverse methodology to understand the relationships between firm boundaries, firm activities, and geographic borders.

As we move into the 21st century, the world seems a smaller place - transportation costs continue to fall, fiber optic networks speed information around the planet, and corporations operate on a global scale. One might reasonably ask whether location really matters anymore. Despite these trends - perhaps because of them - the last few years have witnessed a rapid rise in interest in place and space across the social sciences. While the importance of distance declines, strategic interest in location appears greater than ever. This volume draws together researchers from a variety of disciplines - economics, geography, marketing, organizational behavior, sociology, and urban planning - working at the forefront of this wave to explore some of the important ways in which location matters for firms in the 21st century.

Geopolitical conditions influence all strategic behaviour - even when cooperation among different kinds of military power is expected as the norm, action has to be planned and executed in specific physical environments. The geographical world cannot be avoided, and it happens to be 'organized' into land, sea, air and space - and possibly the electromagnetic spectrum including 'cyberspace'. Although the meaning of geography for strategy is a perpetual historical theme, explicit theory on the subject is only one hundred years old. Ideas about the implication of geographical, especially spatial, relationships for political power - which is to say 'geopolitics'- flourished early in the twentieth century. Divided into theory and practice sections, this volume covers the big names such as Mackinder, Mahan and Haushofer, as well as looking back at the vital influence of weather and geography on naval power in the long age of sail (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries). It also looks forward to the consequences of the revival of geopolitics in post-Soviet Russia and the new space-based field of "astropolitics".

In recent years an extensive range of new research has been revisiting the topic of the location of international business activities, from a variety of different perspectives and background interests. This work has been inspired in part by two apparently quite different but actually related contemporary trends: on the one hand, an emergence or revitalization of clusters of activities co-located in or around selected global city regions or fast growing metropolitan areas; and on the other hand, an increased global dispersion of activities conducted within the value chains managed or coordinated by many large multinational enterprises and their business partners. The former trend has given rise to discussions of how the elite of the cultural-cognitive economy of the 21st century (in Allen Scott's terminology) or the creative class (Richard Florida's term) are now being drawn or brought back to major urban centers; while the latter trend is associated with debates over outsourcing, and the economic and social consequences of shifts in the ownership and location of distinct nodes of value chains once production systems become more fragmented and the component parts of such systems become more geographically dispersed. An increased interest in the subject of international business location has been shown by scholars in Strategic Management, in Economic Geography, and in Regional Science, as well as in our own interdisciplinary field of International Business Studies. However, as is often the case in academic research communities, these bodies of scholarship have tended to develop at something of a distance from one another, each conversing internally more than they have with one another. Location of International Business Activities aims to promote a greater conversation between those interested in the topic of Location from various different backgrounds or starting points. The articles are taken from a special issue on the theme of the Multinational in Geographic Space which was published by The Journal of International Business Studies in 2013.

A volume devoted to understanding the competitive and collaborative challenges that firms face when interacting with different actors in dynamic environments increasingly referred to as business or innovation 'ecosystems'. New findings in 'ecosystem analysis' are discussed and the unique roles of individual actors within this system explained.

This work explains the course of international politics from the rebirth of the German Empire to the rise of China, with particular, though not exclusive, reference to spatial relationships.