Encarnación Ramos Hidalgo

The defence industry plays a crucial role in ensuring national security and driving technological and economic development. This article systematically examines its intellectual capital through a structured literature review and bibliometric analysis of publications indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection. Using the SPAR-4-SLR protocol and Bibliometrix software, the study identifies leading authors, institutions, countries, and thematic clusters shaping the field. Results reveal a growing but fragmented research landscape, centred on defence policy, innovation, strategic management, and applied defence economics. By mapping the intellectual structure and trends of this domain, the paper contributes to defining its theoretical foundations and guiding future research on industrial collaboration and strategic development in defence sectors.

Time is often neglected as a factor in international business research. In this paper, objective and subjective perspectives of time are incorporated into the study of speed of a firm's internationalisation process. The concept of speed is defined as the relationship between distance and time, and therefore we propose a theoretical framework that applies these two perspectives of time both to distance and to time, and differentiate between three levels of analysis: individual, organisational, and environmental. Our framework also incorporates two mediating constructs: learning speed and risk perception. Ten hypotheses are proposed that contribute towards a better understanding of the temporal dimension of the internationalisation process.

O objectivo deste trabalho é averiguar se as familias são consistentes no seu comportamento de escolha de marca independentemente da categoria de produto que adquirem. Para tal, analisamos o efeito que produzem, sobre o comportamento de compra de duas categorias de produto, variáveis como as preferências - intrínsecas pelas marcas, o preço e a dependência do estado inicial. Ao mesmo tempo, enunciamos as diferenças na forma como influenciam distintos segmentos de consumidores. Em concreto, procuramos saber se a sensibilidade ao preço é independente do produto que se adquire. Para alcançar os objectivos deste trabalho, e no âmbito dos modelos de escolha discreta de utilidade aleatória, optamos por um modelo de mistura finita ou de classes latentes.

The efficiency associated with innovation has been a frequently considered element in the literature. However, the conceptualization of this efficiency and its management is an underexplored factor. We study the way in which the different elements that conform to this efficiency are managed over time. From a dynamic efficiency analysis using data envelope analysis (DEA) and the Malmquist productivity index, we evaluate changes in efficiency and if there are differences according to firm size. Our results confirm the relevance of size in the way that firms manage their innovation efficiency and how small firms differ from larger ones in terms of efficiency management.

Corporate Social Responsibility and Ethics have been studied in a wide variety of business contexts, but the field of family business has mainly devoted attention to Corporate Social Responsibility, with less attention paid to the field of ethics. Being two closely related fields, they should be analyzed jointly in order to study the evolution of the field. To achieve this objective, we use two different bibliometric techniques, a co-word and a document coupling, as they are complementary and allow us to identify research topics and, therefore, to establish future research lines. Results show that the differences that exist between CSR in family businesses and CSR in non-family businesses continue to be a central focus, and that ethics should be found in the roots of that question. However, the underpinning factors and the linkage of the different CSR policies and ethical values to performance still require more attention. To be more precise, topics such as socio-emotional wealth, financial performance, ethics, firm, and management remain at the core of the field.

Research to date has shown that companies can accumulate resources over those strictly needed in order to overcome the uncertainty associated to a crisis. But the usage, redeployment, or consumption of this excess of resources when facing an adverse environment is yet underexplored. As suggested by the literature, the condition of family business can exert an important effect in such behaviour. This paper proposes a theoretical framework, focused on family business, about how firms manage the different slack resources when facing a general crisis. We make a call on family business scholars to leverage our propositions and the existing literature on slack resources to develop a guidance for family owners when facing an economic downturn.

The international business literature recognizes the central role of knowledge and learning as key determinants of the internationalization of firms. While the stages model underlined the influence of experiential learning, new research has shown that there are also other relevant types of knowledge acquisition, which can be structured following Huber's model (1991) as congenital, grafted, vicarious, and search knowledge acquisition. However, knowledge acquisition constitutes only a first step for learning. In this respect, absorptive capacity appears as a useful construct since it integrates knowledge acquisition, assimilation, transformation, and exploitation capacity. This paper analyzes the influence of the types of knowledge acquisition on international performance and considers absorptive capacity dimensions as moderator variables based on a sample of 200 Spanish SME exporters.