Facing Foreign Market Turbulence: Three Swedish Multinationals in Iran

While foreign market entry and expansion has attracted much international business research, few have studied the contraction of foreign market operations and exit from foreign markets when MNCs face market turbulence and decline. This article uses a process perspective to examine the responses of three Swedish MNCs to the dramatic changes in the Iranian market during the turbulent period 1975 - 1992. It bases a view of foreign market contraction and exit on the theory of the internationalization process of the firm, and asks whether this can help us understand the firm's behavior in the face of a turbulent foreign market environment.