Export Information Use

The importance of information as a key factor influencing a firm’s export behavior has long been acknowledged in the international marketing literature. Indeed, a common feature of empirical studies on such diverse issues as export initiation and expansion, export barriers, export market orientation, utilization of export assistance, and market/country selection and assessment is that they have all highlighted the critical role of information in export decision making (see, for example, Johanson and Vahlne, 1977; Leonidou, 1995; Cadogan et al., 1999; Seringhaus, 1987; Reid, 1984). Despite such interest, however, until relatively recently, the focus of most contributions on the subject has been on issues associated with the acquisition of export information, emphasizing such topics as information availability, awareness of information sources, consultation of different types of information, and problems associated with information quality and quantity (for a review see Souchon and Diamantopoulos (1996). Information utilization, that is the extent and ways in which acquired information is actually used in the export decision-making process by managers, had received much less attention; this is surprising, given the emphasis on information utilization issues in the management literature in general (Beyer and Trice, 1982) and the marketing literature in particular (Menon and Varadarajan, 1992). Moreover, studies seeking to address information use issues within an exporting context have largely focused on information from specific sources such as export marketing research (e.g. Diamantopoulos and Horncastle, 1997) or export assistance (e.g. Singer and Czinkota, 1994), thus failing to consider the fact that firms typically employ multiple modes of export information acquisition and base their decision making on a combination of formal and informal information sources (Souchon and Diamantopoulos, 1999). Perhaps more significantly, there has been an implicit assumption in the literature that all information that is acquired by a firm is actually put to “good” use despite the fact that the knowledge utilization literature has long highlighted potentially dysfunctional uses of information (e.g. O’Reilly, 1978); this has also been identified as a problem in the marketing literature as well (e.g. Piercy, 1983). Finally, an operational obstacle to the advancement of the study of export information use has been the lack of psychometrically-sound measures to capture different types of use associated with different export information acquisition modes; it was only very recently that such a set of measures became available (Diamantopoulos and Souchon, 1999). Against this background, this Special Issue is a culmination of collaborative efforts by several authors and reviewers on the topic of export information use. All papers included in the Special Issue have undergone a rigorous review process by distinguished experts in the field and were