Abstract: How does history matter? This article addresses this question by focusing on the crucial debate over intellectual property rights (IPR) between the United States and China, which has engendered much frustration. Ironically, during the nineteenth century the United States itself was not a leading IPR advocate but a leading IPR violator. Extending the institution-based view, we argue that both the U.S. refusal to protect foreign IPR in the nineteenth century and the current Chinese lack of enthusiasm to meet U.S. IPR demands represent similar and rational responses to their contemporaneous environments. We also predict that to the same extent that the United States voluntarily agreed to strengthen IPR protection when its economy became sufficiently innovation-driven, China may be expected to similarly enhance its IPR protection. China has recently announced national innovation strategies and has become the world’s most litigious country with regard to IPR cases. Overall, this article contributes to management and organizational research (1) by drawing lessons from history to overcome the frustrations associated with a crucial contemporary debate and to inform its future development, and (2) by leveraging history to broaden the institution-based view.

Mike W. Peng is the Jindal Chair of Global Strategy at the Jindal School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas; a National Science Foundation CAREER Award winner; and a Fellow of the Academy of International Business (AIB). He received his PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle. With close to 14,000 Google citations and an H-index of 49, he is widely regarded as one of the most prolific and most influential scholars in global strategy. His textbooks–Global Strategy, Global Business, and GLOBAL–are used in over 30 countries (in Chinese, English, Portuguese, and Spanish). He was Editor-in-Chief of the Asia Pacific Journal of Management, and is currently Senior Editor at the Journal of World Business. He has consulted extensively for multinationals (such as Texas Instruments) and governments (such as the UK Government Office for Science). In Canada, Professor Peng reviewed for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. At SFU, he gave a seminar in 2008; delivered a Pacific Forum lecture, co-chaired a research conference, and joined the festivities that inaugurated the Jack Austin Centre as a panelist in a televised discussion in 2009; published research coauthored with Dean Daniel Shapiro in 2011; participated in another research conference in 2012; and presented a lecture to the Austin Centre and another seminar to PhD students in 2013.