Abstract
International joint ventures (IJV) are important organizational modes for expanding and sustaining global businesses and have been of special relevance for capturing emerging markets such as the Chinese one for decades. While IJVs offer specific economic advantages such as risk sharing and knowledge pooling, they also present serious management problems that lead to a high failure rate, especially in developing countries. Because of the strategic relevance of IJVs and the corresponding management challenges research on success factors for managing IJVs especially in China has received broad attention, resulting in a variety of studies. However, there are no conceptual syntheses of the present literature. Therefore, attempts to further develop the field and to propose viable avenues for future research are hampered by an apparent lack of consolidations of what is actually known. In this paper we address this gap and comprehensively depict the state-of-the-art of high quality research on success factors for managing IJVs in China. We frame the insights from previous research by building on existing concepts in the field, by developing them further, and by synthesizing them into an integrative, theory-based framework of IJV success factors. We use this framework to systematically depict the results of empirical studies related to both Sino-foreign IJVs and IJVs in general (i.e., elsewhere). Finally, we draw important implications from the research and propose potential paths for future study.