TY  - SER
AU  - Kauppinen, Antti
TI  - Internationalisation of SMEs from the perspective of social theory
PY  - 2012///
KW  - Social Learning
KW  - Shared Object
KW  - International Entrepreneurship
N2  - Internationalisation is seen as an important issue for the globalised economy. Therefore, it has been widely investigated among multinational enterprises and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Even though earlier work acknowledges that internationalisation consists of entrepreneurial  actions (e.g. discovery and exploitation of an international business opportunity) and learning from the market, detailed understanding of the process of social learning in internationalisation is still lacking. In this study, we use the cycle of expansive learning as a conceptual framework. It shows that entrepreneurial actions between SMEs construct international business opportunities. More specifically, entrepreneurial actions are about learning that constructs and co creates knowledge. The cycle of expansive learning assumes that such knowledge is social in nature making the very nature of knowledge the basis of claims to explicate what  the process of social learning entails. In the context of international entrepreneurship, there is also a by-product of that type of cocreated and object-oriented action: the internationalisation of SMEs. The purpose of this study is to explore the
ER  -